I've used WordPress for 20 years, and I've stopped recommending it

There are all sorts of ways you can improve the management of customer WP sites. You can put each site in its own small VM, with caching, with FrankenPHP, set that up with cloud-init, manage the entire fleet remotely with WP-CLI, etc.

You can have your own themes, lock down your plugin choices, only use your own code in functionality plugins, all that.

But if your customers can administer the sites, something is going to burn you nonetheless, and when it happens nobody is paying.

Part of it is just that WordPress exists in the middle of the continuum between content and functionality, part of it is the odd mix of users: you can have technically unaware users who you inadvertently empower to make bad decisions. It’s not their fault: it’s an over-permissive architecture.

WordPress, in your own careful hands, can run brilliantly for years. In all the time I have run it (18 years now) my own sites have been fast, busy, stable, reliable: I have even run WP brochure sites for finance industry clients, and I have had full confidence in them.

But if you’re not going to be in charge of it, don’t run it. Because really no amount of monitoring and security mechanisms can stop this eventually happening.

Ultimately I have also decided I am not going to roll out any new WP sites that I have to maintain. But then (despite my admiration for Laravel) I am going to get out of using scripting languages for server side code at all. AI is going to make all internet-facing interpreters dangerous. It’s too large a surface and I don’t have the energy for php2shell Groundhog Day.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50256725

In my experience—paying agencies to build and support Wordpress sites for over 15 years—I absolutely get billed for security related work, as well as bug fix work. And I should.

This seems more like a business model issue, or bad customers.

Look at it this way: if your customers had an in-house engineering team building and running their Wordpress sites, do you think they could get away with not paying those people for the time spent installing patches and mitigating side effects? So why should they be able to not pay their agency for that work?

That work is Part Of The Deal with running websites, in general, regardless of the framework or CMS. For sure your hosting providers are making sure their revenue covers those costs across their infrastructure. So why aren’t you?

Bedrock introduces the ability to manage WP core and plugins using PHPs composer package manager meaning that plugins are tracked in git.

Sage is their theme which allows you to develop templates using blade and vite.

They also have radicle/acorn bring pretty much a Laravel setup with WP bolted on.

I will mention them anytime I see WP, the team are doing great work.

That I like about wordpress is that it is free and has no subscription costs. I run it on my cheap host and pay $0/month (patching myself, etc etc).

I don’t think stuff like Wix and SquareSpace are valid competitors as I don’t want to pay a monthly fee.

I still have a WP site that I've used for the last ~7-8 years and I am planning to migrate off it in the near future.

This might be more inconvenient than a feature, since if I deploy websites for customers I'd have to write down what's the equivalent of wp-admin for each website.