I've built a couple of WordPress websites (under protest). My general approach is to use "Advanced Custom Fields" and a relatively barebones installation with

I've built a couple of WordPress websites (under protest). My general approach is to use "Advanced Custom Fields" and a relatively barebones installation with a custom theme built from scratch. It turns into something of a simple CRUD web application thereafter which covers the vast majority of simple websites. For eCommerce, I install WooCommerce. Here is why it happened: 1) (~2014) Company A is a Fortune 500 company with a large presence in my country. We designed some concepts for their product websites, which they really liked. When it came to implementation, they gave us a list of acceptable CMS technology. They'd be deploying to some kind of Plesk infrastructure and they were only allowed to use a handful of the frameworks supported by Plesk. Of the ones included, WordPress was probably one of the better choices. I tried to convince them to let us go with something simple instead of a full-fledged WordPress installation. They said their internal security policy prevented them from allowing this, and that their team was only familiar with doing pentesting, audits, etc. for known entities like WordPress. So we built the website and handed it over to their security team. We got paid and they deployed the website and I forgot all about it. Funnily enough, their server was breached a few years later. When they were doing an investigation they contacted me, and I shared the emails about pentesting, audits, security, etc. They were a little embarassed. Nonetheless, they're still frequent customers. Unfortunately they still insist on WordPress. We built maybe 6 product websites for them. 2) (~2015) Company B is a small brick and mortar business. Their developer built them a WordPress website but disappeared on them. I ended up deleting a large amount of bloat and plugins and writing them via simpler controller actions via a theme building framework. 3) (~2019) Company C is a ~$5bn private company with a global presence. Similar situation as Company A. The internal team insisted on either Wix or WordPress. The Ops/Marketing guys say nobody understands technology so they have to do what the IT folks say. I've also spoken to at least 100 potential customers who all had the same story (similar to #2). They were non-technical people who wanted to build a website for their product/service. Their budget wasn't great. They gave all their money to a freelance developer. Developer wasn't really a developer - he just knew how to install a specific combination of WordPress plugins and set them up to get the outcome that they wanted. They wanted to customize it beyond what the plugin allowed, the developer said it wasn't possible and started asking for their money. Relationship soured and they parted ways. In all of those cases they spoke to me and ended up going to market with what they have. Maybe 1 or 2 of them ended up with a successful product/service and came back someday for a rebuild. WordPress is absolutely terrible but sadly it is not going anywhere.