I thought I could sell development to agencies
My pocket was empty, I had to do something. The idea was simple.
I had a hunch small-mid local agencies would struggle with dev and would need someone reliable. So I reached out to a few agencies with pitches along the lines of:
You handle clients and marketing. I’ll handle development.
Made sense in my head. Then I started checking their work and portfolios.
Every. Single. Site. Was WordPress.
Not some. Not most. All of them.
Their site.
Their clients’ sites.
Every portfolio piece.
WordPress.
Huh? Wordpress?
This makes no sense. Technically speaking, it’s a mess. Imagine running PHP, MySQL, and dynamic rendering for a 5-page brochure site. And then stacking 15–20 plugins, bloated themes, and random scripts. It’s overkill seriously. You can literally get near perfect performance, free deployment and have full control with something like vanilla html/css/js or Next.js So why isn’t everyone doing that?
The Client POV
Everything clicked when I started looking from the client’s POV. At the end of the day, all that matters is if it ships faster and makes money. Not if the tech stack is cool.
It’s not an accident that around 40%+ of the internet runs on WordPress. It’s utter Market Dominance.
But why does it dominate? Various reasons actually.
- No dev required. An agency can hire non-technical people, train them in days and start delivering websites immediately.
- Delivery speed is insane. Pick a theme → install plugins → done. It’s just assembling in a beautiful Web UI. Not coding.
- Clients can edit content themselves. This is huge. Clients don’t want to depend on a developer or pay for every small change. WordPress gives them control. That alone closes deals.
- Plugins solve everything (especially ecommerce). Tools like WooCommerce make it ridiculous. Payments, products, dashboards—all done. No need to reinvent anything.
Closure
I thought better tech means better outcome. That’s just false in this context. Because clients don’t know this language of clean architecture or modern stacks. All they care is Speed, Results, Control and Cost Efficiency.
It doesn’t mean WordPress is perfect. It breaks when performance actually matters, design needs to stand out, product complexity increases or scale becomes real. That’s where custom dev wins. But that’s not where most agencies operate.
WordPress isn’t winning because it’s beautiful. It’s winning because it’s practical for small scale.
