When I made the post about "this is why you shouldn't use WordPress anymore," I knew it would get attention. I didn't expect it to hit quite the nerve it did. Across multiple platforms, it pulled in a lot of comments, and almost all of them said the same thing in one form or another. WordPress sites can perform well.
So instead of going back and forth arguing opinions, I asked a simple question. Show me. Drop a link. Let's see what "performing well" actually looks like.
Most people didn't respond after that, which honestly tells you something by itself. But a few did. A few people dropped links to sites they had built or were proud of. So I did what I've been doing this entire time. I ran them through the scanner and looked at the actual data.
And the pattern didn't change.
Most of these sites looked fine on the surface. Decent PageSpeed scores, nothing obviously broken. But once you moved past that and looked at the full picture, structure, SEO signals, accessibility, crawlability, and everything else Google actually evaluates, the cracks started showing up quickly. Good surface-level performance, but a lot of problems underneath.
Then one site came through that was different.
The site built by Samvel Mkrtchyan.
To be fair, there may be more like it out there, but this is the first one I've personally seen that actually held up under a full audit. It scored an 87.
That doesn't sound crazy until you understand what that number represents. This isn't just a speed test. The scanner is checking roughly 155 different factors. Not just load times, but structure, metadata, schema, accessibility, security headers, crawlability, all the things Google has publicly said it cares about. And this site handled most of it really well.
There were still a few things missing. Nothing is perfect. But some of the areas that are genuinely difficult to get right inside WordPress were done correctly here, and that's not easy.
I don't know how much time went into building that site, but I can tell you it wasn't a default setup. That's not someone installing a theme and calling it done. There's real effort behind it, and it shows. An 87 is a strong score. That's a site that's going to perform well, rank well, and do exactly what it's supposed to do. There's nothing wrong with that result.
But here's the part that doesn't change.
That site is the exception, not the rule.
I've looked at a lot of these now, and this is the first one that actually pushed into that range. The first one that made me stop and say, alright, that's legit. And even then, it's still not where we aim. We're typically targeting mid 90s. If something comes in under 94, I'm already looking at what needs to be tightened up.
So yeah, I'll say it. I was wrong to frame it like it was impossible. It's not. But it's rare, and it takes a level of effort and execution that most people simply aren't putting in.
And I'll also say this. Samvel Mkrtchyan is a far better WordPress developer than I ever was when I was working in WordPress. I never got there. I tried, a lot, but I never pushed something to that level.
So credit where it's due. It can be done. Just don't confuse that with it being common.