Is your WordPress site in trouble? What the founder’s rant means for your business

What’s happened

On 15 April, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg spent several hours venting in a public WordPress Slack channel. He called the project’s output “boring or mediocre crap”, said “the wheels have fallen off”, and admitted WordPress has “spent years doing damage to itself”.

That’s the co-founder. About his own platform. In public.

You might have seen the coverage on LinkedIn or in the tech press. A few commenters underneath the article said they’d already moved their sites off WordPress and wouldn’t be going back.

If you run a small business on a WordPress site, this probably raised an eyebrow. So let’s cut through the noise and talk about what it means for you.

First, the reassuring bit

WordPress still powers roughly 40% of the web. It isn’t going anywhere. Your site isn’t about to break because the founder had a bad weekend.

The platform itself is stable. Millions of businesses run on it every day. The drama Mullenweg is describing is about governance, internal politics, and how slowly new features get shipped. None of that affects whether your existing site loads tomorrow morning.

So nobody needs to panic.

Now, the uncomfortable bit

Mullenweg’s complaint was really about one thing: WordPress core has become bloated and slow to improve. The ecosystem around it, the plugins, themes, and templates most agencies bolt together to build client sites, has the same problem.

Most small business WordPress sites in London look something like this:

• A pre-built theme bought from ThemeForest or similar
• Between 20 and 50 plugins doing various jobs
• A page builder like Elementor or Divi sitting on top
• Hosting on whatever was cheapest at the time

That combination works, right up until it doesn’t. And when it stops working, it usually stops in one of three ways:

1. It gets slow. Page loads creep up from 2 seconds to 6. Your bounce rate climbs. Google quietly drops you down the rankings.
2. It breaks. A plugin update clashes with another plugin. Something goes white. Your agency charges £500 to fix it.
3. It gets hacked. Every plugin is a potential door. The more doors, the more chances one is left unlocked.

We rescued one client, a 56-salon hair chain, from a site running 40+ plugins. Load times dropped by 60% once we rebuilt it lean. Their site now supports £6.7m of annual turnover across those locations. But before the rebuild, it was barely functional.

That’s what Mullenweg is on about. Not WordPress the platform. The way most people use it.

How to tell if your site is in the danger zone

You don’t need a technical audit to answer this. Three quick checks will tell you most of what you need to know.

1. How fast does your homepage load?

Go to pagespeed.web.dev and paste in your homepage URL. If your mobile score is below 50, you’ve got a problem. If it’s below 30, you’ve got a serious problem.

2. How many plugins are active?

Ask your agency or log into your WordPress dashboard and count them. Under 15 is healthy. 15 to 25 is workable if they’re well-chosen. Over 25 and you’re carrying weight you probably don’t need.

3. When was your theme last updated?

If your site uses a theme from ThemeForest or a similar marketplace and it hasn’t had an update in the last 12 months, you’re running on unmaintained code. That’s a security risk and a performance drag.

If you scored badly on two or three of these, your site isn’t dangerous, but it’s working against you every day.

What this doesn’t mean

It doesn’t mean you should panic-migrate to Webflow, Framer, or Shopify.Those platforms have their own problems, different ones, but problems nonetheless. Migrating without a plan usually costs more and delivers less than fixing what you’ve got.

It also doesn’t mean WordPress is the wrong answer. For most small businesses, it’s still the best combination of flexibility, cost, and available talent on the market. The question is how you use it, not whether you use it.

What to do this week

If you’re worried, do three things:

1. Run the speed test above and save the result. Even if you don’t act on it immediately, you now have a baseline.
2. Ask your current agency or developer how many plugins your site uses and whether any of them could be removed without losing functionality.
3. Check who owns your hosting account. If it’s in your agency’s name rather than yours, fix that now, regardless of anything else. You should own your domain, your hosting, and your WordPress login. Always.

That’s it. No panic, no migration, no drama.

The bigger picture

What Mullenweg said in public, most of us in the industry have been saying quietly for years. WordPress built on cheap themes and stacks of plugins is fragile. WordPress built lean, with custom code where it matters and minimal dependencies, is rock solid.

The difference usually comes down to who built it, and why. A £2k template build has to use plugins to hit the brief, because there’s no budget for custom work. A properly scoped site starts with the business goal and only adds the bits that serve it.

If you’re thinking about a rebuild, or if the checks above flagged something, that’s the real conversation worth having. Not “should I stay on WordPress”, but “is my site actually built for the job I need it to do”.

Want a straight answer on whether your WordPress site is helping or hurting you? Send us your URL and we’ll run a free 15-minute diagnostic. No pitch, no pressure, just a clear view of where you stand.

Book a free site check 

London Web Design Agency builds and rescues WordPress sites for small businesses across London and the UK. We specialise in lean, fast, conversion-focused builds that don’t fall over when WordPress has a bad week.