I recently built an e-commerce site for a clothing business using WordPress, and the experience left me genuinely impressed by what this platform offers out of the box. As developers, we sometimes get caught up in the latest frameworks and technologies, but this project reminded me why WordPress still powers 43% of all websites on the internet.
A Feature List That Just Keeps Going
What struck me most was the sheer breadth of production ready functionality available without writing a single line of custom code:
- Drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor
- Prebuilt, customizable themes
- User dashboard for managing products, posts, and accounts
- Flexible user roles and permissions
- REST and GraphQL APIs for developers
- Integrations with Facebook, Instagram, and almost any other platform
- SEO stuff, static pages and analytics
- Support for customer reviews
- Full e-commerce setup in just a few clicks
- Compatibility with nearly all payment gateways
- Mobile apps for managing stock, taxes, shipping, coupons, and sales
- Low cost hosting
Building even half of these features from scratch would have taken months. WordPress delivered them instantly.
The Reality Gap: Developers vs. Business Owners
Working on this project highlighted something crucial that we developers often overlook: the enormous technical knowledge gap between us developers, business owners, and end customers.
I could have built a React or Next.js application with all the latest bells and whistles. But imagine asking a clothing business owner to update their product catalog by editing markdown files and pushing to a Git repository. It’s not happening. And I can’t imagine spending months building a dashboard to solve this problem, when an open-source production ready one already exists in WordPress.
And I did do exactly this once before, using Next.js to build an e-commerce site, for another business. It was alright, I spent a month on it, but I’d pick this over Next.js, and I’ve built this in what feels like 4 hours.
The technology has to work for the actual users, not just impress other developers. WordPress gets this right by prioritizing usability over technical sophistication.
A Humbling Experience
Here’s what really got to me: I later created a blog using WordPress as a headless CMS, feeding content to my custom-built site. The WordPress admin interface – which I was only using as a backend – had a better-looking UI than my own frontend. That annoyed me a bit, but it was also enlightening.
The Bottom Line
WordPress succeeds because it solves real problems for real people. While we chase the latest JavaScript frameworks and architectural patterns, WordPress focuses on making website management accessible to everyone. There’s wisdom in that approach.
For many use cases, especially content-heavy sites and e-commerce stores, WordPress remains the pragmatic choice. It’s not always the most exciting option, but it’s often the right one.
Want to experiment with WordPress hosting? I have excess server capacity available. Feel free to reach out if you’d like to try it out for free.