When a business chooses a technology stack, plenty of aspects are at stake. WordPress has been the first choice repeatedly thanks not only to its built-in features, but to the adjacent benefits such as the vast community of developers, multiple plugin options, and its open source nature.
After a well-managed and developed project goes live, the proper roles start operating the system through the available dashboards, setting things up, and creating content when needed. Naturally, these dashboards are, in a vast part, tweaked (or even created) by different, uncoordinated third-party authors through plugins. The potential for unexpected malfunctions is now in place and can only be minimized by following certain (good) practices for exercising extreme caution.
A fair trade-off
While this is a fair trade-off, a very interesting dynamic occurs when these practices are not enough. For teams that outsource the development/maintenance, whether it is a big company or not, when they have to address issues related to third-party systems, they are forced to reassign resources away from their true work. The more complex the project is, the more that happens.
As mentioned, this has been accepted as a fair trade-off considering all aspects that can benefit the project. However, this perception is rapidly changing thanks to the role AI is taking in collapsing development costs.
Collapsing costs of development is probably a topic that will be widely discussed, since conquering something that used to be aspirational is unknown territory, and it is very difficult to predict the outcome of this new reality.
Ironically, this doesn’t necessarily improve the nature of software. We might be able to create much more in less time, but stability, security, and coordination remain as challenging as ever, especially when including third-party themes and plugins.
Facing resources limitations
That being said, reassigning business resources to address unexpected behaviors and malfunctions can be a deal-breaker when the market is not stable (for both industry and external reasons). When this happens, businesses need as much availability of resources as possible to both survive and pivot/adapt.
In most cases, WordPress is the appropriate tool for unleashing value creation, but when limits are met, priorities change, and closed solutions that offer companies the opportunity to be abstracted from dealing with malfunctions start gaining market, as discussed in previous publications.
For that matter, in my professional experience, WordPress solutions (themes and plugins, and projects too) need to start being planned and created with the premise that eventually, its maintainability and scalability will come down to how many resources the business can afford to allocate — and that number will, at some point, run low.
Historically, this has been addressed by optimizing memory, functions, dependencies, and static resources. While this is more important than ever, it is no longer enough. WordPress needs to go deeper.