I made a post on social media about why people should stop using WordPress.

It wasn't some vague opinion or recycled take. It was a direct comparison. Same site, same design, same layout, rebuilt on a different infrastructure. No redesign, no visual changes, just a different foundation under the hood. And the difference showed up immediately in performance and ranking.

That was the entire point.

You can have a site that looks great and still performs like garbage. Or you can take that exact same design, rebuild it properly, and get dramatically better results without touching the visual layer at all.

After I posted that, someone jumped into the comments and said, "I've designed many WordPress websites using various page builders, and without, that performed well."

Now normally, I would've ignored that.

But I've got AI agents now, and they don't get tired.

So instead of spending 30 or 40 minutes manually digging through someone's portfolio, which I have no time or interest in doing anymore, I pointed an agent at their site, told it to pull their portfolio, run scans across everything, and bring back the data. Took about 45 seconds to initiate, and I came back to a full set of reports.

I'm not using screenshots or anything like that because I'm not interested in dealing with copyright nonsense. But I will include the actual URLs and the actual scan reports below. This is purely technical analysis. No opinions, no spin, just what the sites return.

And this is exactly why I say WordPress fails.

Now to be fair, WordPress itself has limitations. There's a ceiling to what it can do, even when everything is done right. If a fully optimized system is a 10 out of 10, WordPress realistically tops out somewhere lower. That's been my position for years.

But that's not even what's happening here.

The bigger issue is that these sites aren't even approaching that ceiling. They're not even getting the fundamentals right inside WordPress. These are not edge case optimizations or deep technical issues. These are basic, solvable problems that should be handled before a site ever goes live.

Missing meta descriptions. Missing Open Graph data. No schema. No JSON-LD. Multiple H1 tags on the same page. Missing or broken sitemaps. No WebP images anywhere. Mixed content issues. Missing security headers.

That's not "WordPress made me do it." That's just not doing the work.

So when someone says they've built many WordPress sites that perform well, the obvious place to look is their own portfolio. And when you do that, the claim doesn't hold up.

These aren't sites pushing against the limits of the platform and falling short because of WordPress. These are sites with fundamental mistakes that should never have made it out the door in the first place.

And that's where this actually matters.

Because the clients don't know.

They're not developers. They're not SEO experts. They're business owners who paid someone to build them a website. They see something that looks clean, modern, and professional, and to be fair, these sites do look good. Visually, they're solid.

But under the hood, they're a mess.

That's the disconnect. Good design on the surface, broken fundamentals underneath.

And here's the reality. Every single one of these sites could be rebuilt, using the exact same design, and perform significantly better. Faster load times, better rankings, better visibility, more conversions. Not because the design changed, but because the foundation did.

Instead, these businesses were sold something that looks good but doesn't perform the way it should. And they don't know enough to question it.

Below are the actual sites and the actual reports. You can look at them yourself.

If you're running WordPress and had someone build your site, it's probably worth taking a minute to run a scan on it and see what's actually going on behind the scenes.

daintycreativeco (Score: 72%)
No WebP images at all, 43 images using JPG/PNG
32 accessibility issues including missing alt text
View Report

healthinhandsspa (Score: 78%)
No WebP images, 23 images unoptimized
No valid sitemap structure
View Report

ryanlloydfoundation (Score: 59%)
Extremely slow load times, TTI over 11 seconds
No WebP images
View Report

kinexisconsulting (Score: 72%)
No WebP images, 54 images unoptimized
No valid sitemap
View Report

sellbuynoelle (Score: 41%)
Missing meta description and Open Graph data
No structured data or schema
View Report