Why I Chose WordPress for My Personal Website (Even Though I’m a Full‑Stack Developer)
I spend most of my days architecting cloud solutions, writing C#, and guiding teams through complex code bases. Spinning up a small personal site should be trivial, right? Yet when the time came to launch a place for my own articles, I reached for WordPress instead of a hand‑rolled stack.
Below is the reasoning that led me there—trade‑offs, conscious decisions, and a reminder that “can” and “should” are two different verbs.
Scoping the Real Need
All I needed was:
- A blog section for technical articles
- A static “about/contact” page (with a simple form)
- A clean, professional look
- Room to grow without yak‑shaving
A site that simple should not turn into a side project that competes with client work.
Compare the options
Early in this process the contenders where Carrd.io, a managed WordPress, a custom build, or a custom build on a CMS like Umbraco. Carrd dropped from contention early because it is intended for single page sites and has no support for articles. I use this in other situation but for this its to limited.
Hosting Cost: Tie Game
- Hosting only: €5–10/month for a small hosting plan or Azure App Service
- Hosting + managed WordPress: roughly the same price at most providers but usually has a small price to allow all plugins and templates to be used.
Because the delta is negligible, cost was not the deciding factor. That pushed the choice toward time‑to‑value.
Design: Templates vs Templates
I own a few premium HTML templates that I like, that I could use to get a good design with little effort. WordPress it self has lost of great templates with similar capabilities and since you are working in a visual editor there is no syntax to learn. But as a developer I knew I was bound to run into limits I could fix with a simple CSS attribute but needed to ask AI where to find that setting only to find out I need to use different block.
For a site whose primary job is to stay out of the reader’s way, I can live with this.
Customizability: Freedom vs Focus
Word press has several options with two common ones being:
- Gutenberg: fast, structured, but opinionated
- Elementor: pixel‑level control, but a rabbit hole if you let it
A custom build gives me infinite freedom—but also infinite bikeshedding. WordPress imposes some guardrails that keep the content front and centre.
Publishing Experience
Now any most people looking to create a website would say a WYSIWYG is much easier than HTML. I might be different than most in that I don’t really see the difference between HTML and a blog article in an editor. Most articles are straight forward heading, paragraphs, and the odd image or a code example thrown in the mix. With proper setup, to me, the HTML reads nearly the same as an article.
Setup/Initial Build
Now this is where it gets interesting. Setting up a word press site, configuring it so it looks the way you want it to. With a template it took me about a day to get something I was happy with.
I would like to think I could have built a flat site in about the same time, you need to do the ground work but getting the look right would probably been easier since I had to work within the constraints of WordPress and the components I used.
But then you need dynamic elements to include new articles, a contact form that does some validation.
And then it might be nice to have an article editor so you don’t have to go through FTP. But that will require security, a database and you might open the door to some other nice to haves.
Maintenance & Security
With WordPress my checklist is:
- Glance at the release notes
This is here because this is where I intend to do this. Real world: something went wrong lets check the release notes. - Click Update
That’s it. A bespoke stack would need CI/CD plumbing, dependency scanning, patch releases, and uptime monitoring—work I happily do for clients but not for a site like for myself on a Friday night.
Feature Growth
Need a syntax‑highlighter, SEO tweaks, or a newsletter pop‑up? WordPress → activate plugin.
Custom site → design, implement, test, deploy.
When a Custom Build Does Make Sense
- You need fine‑grained control over performance or brand
- The site is the product (e.g., SaaS dashboard)
- Compliance or security requirements rule out third‑party code
For a personal blog, none of those apply.
Closing Thoughts: Choose the Boring Solution
As developers we gravitate toward green‑field builds—it’s fun. But sometimes the pragmatic choice is the boring, battle‑tested platform that lets you focus on content. WordPress ticks that box for my current needs. When those needs change, I can always refactor—just like code.
And did I write down this list and comparison before I made the choice? Well not completely, with exception of pricing, I have done this exercise plenty of times to know for a site like this the only reason you would build it your self is to show you can.