10 Challenges Working With WordPress As A Content Management Platform in 2025

I’ve been working and developing with WordPress since its inception. The content management system’s (CMS) simplicity is phenomenal, and its mass adoption is no surprise. There are haters out there, but I often remind people that most of the issues with WordPress are usually centered around the themes and plugins implemented, not the core platform.

The analogy I often use with people is aftermarket automotive parts… some are incredible, and some can destroy your car. WordPress is no different. A case in point that I wish to share is this site, Martech Zone. A few years ago, I found a fantastic theme with all the features and functionality I wanted to share my content in a usable, beautiful, and elegant user interface. Over the years, I continued to enhance a child theme that I built and was happy the developers of the original parent theme continued to support each version of WordPress.

Until recently.

I had an issue on the site and couldn’t find how the code was developed, so I went to the developer’s forum… and their site was down. So, I went to where I purchased the theme… and it was gone. I then looked for the theme developers… and they were gone.

I was on my own!

Decades ago, when you bought a product, you expected to use it for life. In today’s fast-paced, low-cost technology world, we’ve grown accustomed to tossing our technology when it breaks or becomes obsolete. That’s fine… I don’t mind buying a new toaster. But when it’s the software running your website, it’s quite the headache. To return to my analogy, it’s less like an aftermarket set of rims and more like your transmission breaking. It’s a significant expense and a huge challenge in the WordPress ecosystem.

WordPress Legal Disputes

Add to this instability is the drama that unfolded in 2024 via WordPress and WP Engine’s legal dispute. I’m honestly not a fan of the public dispute… it’s not good for the community at all. When WP Engine launched, it was a game-changer for WordPress hosting. Inherent to WordPress are severe performance issues that only get worse without a ton of optimization that needs to be done. WP Engine revolutionized and, dare I say, invented the concept of WordPress Managed Hosting.

With bundled caching, security, automated backups, and great support, WordPress became much easier to deploy for businesses. It’s disappointing that Automattic doesn’t recognize that this advancement helped WordPress gain significant market share… especially with agencies looking to manage their clients effectively. That they disconnected every WordPress site hosted on WP Engine was unconscionable… hurting customers of WordPress who played no role in WP Engine’s business practices.

Automattic also assumed control of Advanced Custom Fields, a plugin purchased by WP Engine. This alleged theft of an open-source project has left developers like me to abandon pushing my code to the Plugin Repository, which is the ownership of the founder of Automattic and not the community. I don’t state theft lightly. Had Automattic branched the code and produced their own plugin, it would have been one thing. However, they assumed ownership of the repository and reviews for ACF along with the code, which I believe was a violation of their own terms of service.

Uncertainty is detrimental to business because it disrupts decision-making, investment planning, and customer confidence. Businesses thrive on stability and predictable conditions that allow them to strategize effectively, allocate resources efficiently, and build trust with stakeholders. When markets or environments are volatile, companies face increased risks, higher costs, and hesitation from customers and partners, all hindering growth. I fear this is where WordPress is heading.

WordPress Is Still Great

My goal with this article isn’t to complain about WordPress; it’s a flexible platform that can be updated, transitioned, or customized with little effort. The ecosystem of developers, themes, and plugins is beyond the imagination. I’ve helped companies do incredibly innovative integrations and automation with the WordPress API, and I remain optimistic about its future.

My goal with this article is to share what I believe are some significant shortcomings of the platform so that people are aware of some of the core platform’s inherent challenges. Notice I said core… I realize that there are themes, plugins, and headless architectures that can overcome these. I’d like WordPress architects to innovate on some of these shortcomings.

Specific to Martech Zone

When the support for my theme failed, I didn’t have time to develop for a month, so I had to transition the site to a new theme and then iron out the issues.

• Apps: Building apps for my site was quite an undertaking. Each app has its own styling, server-side code, and client-side code, so I had to build a framework for integrating the customizations into my theme.
• Shortcodes: I have custom shortcodes throughout my content. It’s not well-known, but shortcodes don’t automatically extend themselves beyond a theme into tools like AMP. As a result, I had to build a custom plugin for my site that incorporates all of my shortcodes and extends their functionality. Making it a plugin also means that I can update my theme and not break my content.
• Author Archive: As a site with hundreds of authors, I had to develop an author archive that was quite complex, promoting authors by popularity and recency.
• Custom Post Type: I built a collection of popular acronyms for the site. I even included the latest posts using the acronym on each of the acronym pages. To do this, I had to build a custom archive, taxonomy archive, and single post template for the custom post type to display it properly.
• Comments: To simply remove comments from my site, feed, sitemap, etc. I had to write code.

This isn’t it… I have custom code for my admin, AMP, ad placement, apps, authors, comments, feed, multi-language translations, SEO, widgets, and quite a bit for performance enhancements. At some point, it may have been worthwhile just to build out a custom theme from the ground up and then make all the necessary modifications for this site.

Ten Common WordPress Challenges

Here are some other issues I’ve encountered that continue to challenge and cost time and resources with both my site and those of my company and previous clients. I’m going to put them in order of importance.

1. Performance: WordPress is awful in terms of performance, especially as you continue to customize it with additional plugins and theme features. The most complex issue we tackle is site speed. Database performance, query caching, object caching, code minification, page caching, lazy loading, image sizing, and file compression are all woefully inadequate and require much work. This is even before you integrate a CDN.
2. Search Engine Optimization: If you publish content for acquisition efforts for your brand, product, or service, organic search optimization isn’t an option – it’s a must. Along with the performance issues above, the technical SEO options native to WordPress are inadequate… even if you’re paying for Jetpack for your site. Tag optimization, rich snippets, sitemaps, and other features are critical to optimizing your site for search engine users. It’s why we won’t implement a site without Rankmath.
3. AMP: While it’s not WordPress’ fault, AMP support is awful. Jetpack has AMP capabilities, but inexplicably, they disable shortcode support from your parent theme to your AMP display. Just as a child theme assumes features and functionality from a parent theme, it seems that AMP should be a child-type theme. One of the reasons that I selected the new theme was inherent AMP support.
4. WooCommerce: WooCommerce was initially developed to utilize the WordPress API, so it uses the core posts table to store product information and treats the products and categories like a custom post type. Orders and products aren’t posts or pages, though. Sharing native database identifiers for products (instead of a SKU in a relational table) and an order number separate from the wp_posts ID is a huge oversight.
5. Forms and Data: It takes a form plugin or integrated third-party platform to manage forms and data on your site. I’m surprised WordPress hasn’t incorporated forms and data as a core feature – mainly since WooCommerce utilizes both. Formidable does a fantastic job and even has webhook capabilities that make it simple to integrate.
6. Spam: I was paying for Akismet, but it was useless against form spam and hasn’t evolved over the years. I still received tons of spam, primarily through forms on my site. The WordPress team should kill it and buy and integrate CleanTalk, a superior, expanded solution with native form plugin integrations.
7. Staging: Every managed WordPress hosting now has staging versus production environments where you can develop and test, then push your changes to production. Staging to production pushes have awful limitations because of the architecture of WordPress. As we develop on staging, our clients are typically still producing content in production. Theme development often results in database edits. As a result, we can’t just push staging to production… we have to manually push changes to production. If WordPress did a better job of isolating theme and plugin settings from content, orders, and products, it would be simple to synchronize the two.
8. Workflows: Most companies require the ability to have content workflows with people who write, edit, and then approve content before it’s scheduled to go live. While WordPress has great roles built-in, there’s no workflow management to assign and notify those roles. As a result, companies look externally to develop, edit, and approve the content and then only use WordPress to publish it.
9. Content Journeys: Content experience platforms entering the market have dynamic capabilities with rules-based or intelligence-based flows that walk visitors through an experience. That’s a dramatic change and something that WordPress may never be able to accommodate.
10. WordPress Widgets: I enjoy the Gutenberg editor and appreciate its flexibility while supporting previous content architectures. However, when WordPress decided to try and adapt the user interface for widgets to look and act like Gutenberg, it was a disaster. The user interface is awful… and if you have a ton of widgets, it’s slow. One of the features of my new theme was an option to disable this interface, and I was ecstatic. If you want to disable the block editor for widgets, there’s code you can add to your child theme or an official plugin you can install.

I know I will get a ton of pushback on third-party applications, integrations, plugins, and themes. We continue to maintain and promote our list of recommended plugins for WordPress. Again, my point is that the features above are becoming core to a content strategy, not a feature or functionality outside of them.