WordPress

WordPress is a highly popular and versatile CMS that enables users to create and manage websites. Available both as a self-hosted open-source platform and a hosted service, it offers extensive customization through themes and plugins.

WordPress is the CMS behind a large share of the web: a PHP and MySQL core, a plugin architecture with tens of thousands of extensions, a theme system, and an editing layer that has grown from blog posts to full site editing. For content businesses, it remains the default economics.

Why founders use it: the ecosystem is the product. A publisher can stand up editorial workflows, SEO tooling, membership and payments with plugins and a fraction of custom development, and the hiring pool for WordPress work is the largest in the industry. Headless deployments, WordPress as the admin with a modern frontend via its REST or GraphQL APIs, keep it relevant where the frontend matters.

A realistic setup: managed hosting tuned for WordPress, a small curated plugin list, a custom or heavily configured theme, and a staging environment for updates. The attack surface argues for automatic updates, a WAF and a backups policy you have tested.

Trade-offs: plugin quality varies wildly and the stack's performance wants host-level caching. Compare with Ghost for pure publishing, Statamic for a Laravel-native CMS, and the headless CMS blocks here when the frontend is custom.