Website Tips

Why WordPress Is Still Our Platform of Choice in 2026

Posted on by Kate Miller
A white delivery van is illustrated on a dark green background with the text The WordPress Express above it. The WordPress logo is faintly visible in the background.

Building websites is a huge chunk of what we do here at Millworks, and it’s something we’ve been doing for more than 9 years. We wanted to take a little time to unpack the platform we use to build our sites, WordPress, and why we continue to use it year after year… it’s on our minds!

Online, there are a ton of platforms capable of building all sorts of sites for all sorts of purposes. Especially now, with the mainstream use of AI, the market has definitely become a bit flooded. There’s a lot to experiment with! Some platforms are simple, some are more robust, and some are built more for accessibility and ease of use than long-term stability. This makes sense, because each business has different needs, and each builder can or can’t meet those needs in different ways.

As for us, we keep coming back to WordPress. From our perspective, it checks all of the important boxes in the most trustworthy way. It gives our clients the best balance of ownership, flexibility, growth, and long-term control, which are all things we think matter most when building strong, competent websites.

A Website Should Belong to the Business Behind It

A website is one of the most important digital assets a business has. It is often the first place someone goes to understand who you are, what you offer, how you work, and whether they trust you enough to take the next step. It’s your online home, your information and communication central, and represents your business significantly.

Due to that, we care a lot about ownership. 

WordPress is open-source software, which means it is not owned and controlled in the same closed-off way as many website builders. WordPress officially started in 2003, is built on PHP and MariaDB, and is licensed under GPLv2. Translation: WordPress is built with widely used web technology, stores site content in a database, and is licensed in a way that allows developers to access, customize, and extend it instead of being limited to one company’s closed system. And it is not new, and that is another part of why we trust it. W3Techs reported on June 18, 2026, that WordPress is used by 41.5% of all websites and holds 59.3% of the content management system market share. Those are some telling numbers.

All of that does not automatically make it the best choice for every situation, but it does show how much support, documentation, development, and real-world usage sits behind it. It is a platform that gives us more freedom to choose the hosting environment, build around the client’s actual needs, add the right tools over time, and avoid locking the whole site into one company’s limited system. The point is not just technical control for the sake of it. The point is giving a business a stronger foundation for something they truly own and can continue to grow with confidence.

DIY Builders Can Be Useful, But They Have Limits

DIY website builders can be a great fit for a new business, a temporary landing page, a personal project, or someone who needs to get online quickly with a very limited budget. Often, that is exactly what a business needs at the time, and we completely understand that.

The reason we feel that approach has limits from the get-go, however, is because many businesses eventually outgrow that first representation of themselves online. And honestly, rebuilding those types of sites is a huge portion of the work businesses come to us for, which makes sense to us! As a business gets clearer on its branding and image, the website starts needing stronger service pages, better SEO structure, ecommerce, forms, project spotlights, landing pages, or more control over how the site looks and functions. In other words, the website needs to grow with the business, and the original platform or setup may not be able to support that next step well.

Some all-in-one platforms are convenient because everything lives in one place. The tradeoff is that everything often has to stay there. Wix’s support documentation explains that Wix sites must run on Wix servers because Wix is a SaaS platform that uses proprietary technology and does not support external hosting. Squarespace allows some content exporting, but its support documentation notes that users cannot export all images in bulk or uploaded videos, and that some content transfer options are limited. That does not make those platforms bad, but it does illuminate some of the tradeoffs that come with using a closed platform, and again, we believe that ownership is huge for every business. 

Putting the work and resources into the right website from the beginning can help your business avoid a full rebuild later. That is one of the biggest reasons we encourage people to think carefully before starting with a DIY platform. If your business outgrows that original setup, you may end up spending more time and money rebuilding the site than you would have spent choosing a stronger foundation from the start.

WordPress Supports Content and SEO Growth Over Time

A website should not just sit there looking nice. It should help people find you, understand you, and feel confident taking the next step. That need is where SEO enters the conversation. 

In our own words, “your website is the thing you build, and SEO is how that thing gets discovered.” Google’s SEO Starter Guide says that creating content people find compelling and useful will likely influence a website’s presence in search results more than any other suggestion in the guide. That reinforces something we already believe: good content is not just there to fill space. It helps people understand your business, and it helps search engines understand your site. Therefore, it’s pretty critical to utilize a platform that gives you all of the tools you need to add organized, clear content to your website.

Google also notes that links help it find pages and understand what those pages are about, and that good anchor text helps both people and Google understand linked content. In plain English, the way your site is organized matters. WordPress gives us a practical way to structure pages, posts, categories, and internal links so the website can have the best SEO foundation possible – super important! (Learn more from us on SEO here!)

WordPress Gives Businesses Room to Grow

Like we’ve said, one of the things we love most about WordPress is that it gives a website room to grow with the business!

Not every business needs ecommerce, a blog, or advanced forms on day one. But a healthy business changes over time, and its website should be able to change with it without a headache or backend workaround. WordPress gives us a foundation that can support changes without forcing the whole site to start over.

WooCommerce is a great example of that flexibility. With WooCommerce, a WordPress site can grow into online sales without needing to abandon the entire foundation. WooCommerce describes itself as an open-source commerce platform for WordPress that gives businesses control over checkout, data, costs, payments, features, and hosting.

That kind of control is huge for businesses that need more than a simple product page. A store may need shipping tools, custom categories, email integrations, content around the products, or a checkout process that feels trustworthy and clear. For us, this connects back to the bigger reason we use WordPress. It is versatile. A service business can use it. A content-heavy business can use it. An ecommerce business can use it. A business that starts simple can grow into something more involved without starting completely over.

Flexible, Thoughtful, and Built for the Long Game

We’re sure at this point, you understand where we’re coming from. But, we also want to be clear: WordPress is not automatically better just because it’s WordPress.

A poorly built WordPress site can be slow, confusing, hard to edit, or overloaded with unnecessary plugins. The platform gives us a lot of room to work, but that room has to be handled with care and knowledge to turn out well. We totally get that WordPress can feel overwhelming because there is so much it can do. The platform is pretty awesome, but it can be a lot to learn!

In fact, the WordPress plugin ecosystem is huge and active. In 2025, the WordPress Plugins Team reviewed 12,713 plugins, a 40.6% increase compared to 2024. That kind of activity is one of the strengths of WordPress, because it means there’s plenty of tools to do exactly what you need, and a flourishing community behind each one. But more options does not necessarily mean better results.

This is also why hosting and maintenance matter. A site needs updates, backups, monitoring, security, and a stable hosting environment. We do not choose WP because it removes that responsibility. We choose it because it gives us the room to build well, support the site properly, and protect the investment after launch.

At Millworks, we do not think of a website as a one-time object that gets launched and forgotten. We think of it as a living business tool. That is why we ask about business goals, target customers, services, messaging, content, SEO, design direction, technical requirements, future features, and what the website actually needs to do. We want to build sites that feel polished and professional, but not fragile. Custom, but not impossible to manage. Built with care, but still practical for real businesses with real lives.

Final Thoughts

WordPress is not the only way to build a website, and it is not automatically the right fit for every single project. But for the kind of websites we work hard to build, it continues to make the most sense. It gives our clients more ownership, more flexibility, and more room to grow, while supporting the things we care about most. A good website should be something you own, something you are proud of, and something that works well for the people trying to understand your business. And for us, “working well” means more than just looking good on launch day. 

That’s a wrap on why WordPress is still our platform of choice! If you’re interested in working with us to build your site with WordPress, give us a holler! We’d love to help!

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Kate Miller