Should You Still Use a Blogging Engine That's Over 20 Years Old?

By Sogo Kim 2026.10.12 13 min read

blog · web · wordpress

When you set out to build a new blog, WordPress is the first tool people mention, and also the first one they call outdated.

Still the Most Common Tool Around

According to W3Techs‘s October 2026 survey, WordPress runs on about 40% of the websites it tracks. Among sites whose content management system (CMS) can be identified, the share rises to about 59%. For software that launched in 2003 to hold that kind of share twenty years later is remarkable in its own right. Popular tools come with the advantages of being popular, and as a developer I sometimes feel that an ecosystem this large is a feature in itself. When you hit a problem and search for it, someone has usually hit it before you and written up a fix. Nearly every hosting provider supports installing it. Plenty of people build themes and plugins, so you can pull in the functionality you need instead of building it from scratch. Those things add up and shape how usable a tool really is.

Of course, popularity isn’t proof of quality, and being widely used doesn’t automatically make a tool good. So I’m going to narrow the scope to a single use case, blogging, and look at what WordPress offers compared with other blogging platforms and website-building frameworks. (Online stores and large media sites can wait for another day.)

Born as a Blogging Tool

WordPress began in 2003 as a fork of b2/cafelog, an existing blogging program, created by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little. The fact that it was built for blogging from day one is a useful clue to how it works today. Posts and pages are separate things. Posts carry categories and tags. The newest entries stack at the top by default, every post gets its own permanent URL (a permalink), and RSS feeds and comments are built in. (Comments can be switched on or off in the settings.) A general-purpose site builder with a blog menu bolted on and a tool designed around writing from the start can share the same feature list and still feel completely different to use. As your archive grows to dozens or hundreds of posts, the value of that basic structure only becomes clearer. WordPress is used for plenty of non-blog projects now, but at its core it is still built around the post.

In December 2018, WordPress 5.0 made Gutenberg, a block editor, the default. Paragraphs, headings, images, quotes, code, tables, and embeds are each a block; you can drag blocks to reorder them and save layouts you use often as patterns. Gutenberg drew plenty of complaints when it first arrived, but after several rounds of improvement, writing and laying out a post feels much more natural today. It still isn’t the simplest editor for everyone. If you’re used to writing in Markdown, a block editor can feel clunky. WordPress’s real strength isn’t the editor alone. It’s that writing, placing images and tables, polishing a draft, and scheduling it for publication all happen in one environment. A blog doesn’t need one pair of hands for writing and another for running the site, and I think that matters more than it sounds.

Auto-save, revision history, and automatic image resizing come built in too. Depending on your server and network, not every piece of work is guaranteed to be preserved, but these features take a lot of everyday worry out of writing. Block editing and scheduled publishing aren’t unique to WordPress, and plenty of other tools can do them just as well. What matters is that you don’t have to build any of it yourself: it works from the moment you install it. Put simply, it’s closer to installing a tool so you can write than to starting a development project so you can have a blog.

You Decide Where Your Writing Lives

WordPress is open-source software released under the GPL. WordPress.org is the project site where you download it, and installing and running it yourself is what people call self-hosting. The same software, run for you by Automattic, is offered under a separate name, WordPress.com. (The official Learn WordPress lesson explains the difference.) When you self-host, you choose the hosting provider, the domain, and how your data is managed, and you can access, back up, and export your posts, images, and database directly. That is what I mean by deciding where your writing lives. Platform-run services like Tistory and Naver Blog, the two big blogging platforms in Korea, have a real advantage in convenience: you don’t need any development knowledge to use them. But when policies change or the service starts to wobble, the home of your writing can wobble with it. If you plan to keep a blog going for years, this is the difference that weighs the most.

Services do shut down, and it has happened in Korea too. Egloos, a blogging service that launched in 2003, closed on June 16, 2023. Its users had to back up their posts and data and find a new home within a set period; as far as I can tell, they were given roughly six months of backup access after the closure. A WordPress site on your own domain can keep its existing post URLs even if you change hosting providers. If you manage your URL structure and search-engine settings carefully during the move, links from other sites keep working. (That said, search rankings aren’t guaranteed. Response time, crawl settings, canonical URLs, and internal links can all change during a server move, and your search results can shift with them.) Since services like Tistory let you connect a custom domain too, the point isn’t simply whether you can use your own domain. It’s whether you can decide what software runs at that address and how your data is managed. If you want your posts to open at the same address ten years from now, who owns that address matters more than you might think.

Of course, having direct control of your data doesn’t mean you can move it to another system whenever you like. Control, meaning the ability to access, back up, and edit your data, and portability, meaning how easily you can actually move when you want to switch tools, are separate matters. If a plugin stores its data in its own database tables, or a page builder saves content in a proprietary format, you can end up locked in even within WordPress. WordPress is strong on the first; the second depends on which themes and plugins you choose. Still, the fact that the site owner has the power to back up and attempt a migration is an important difference.

Naver Blog does have things WordPress can’t match. Readers find you through Naver’s neighbor connections and search, you don’t have to think about servers or security, and you can sign up and start writing right away. But that convenience comes at the price of some autonomy over your address and your data. If you plan to run a blog for a long time, and especially if you want to build a personal brand or expertise on the writing you accumulate, I think that tradeoff deserves serious weight.

Growing Only as Much as You Need

The official plugin directory alone lists tens of thousands of plugins. There’s Yoast SEO and Rank Math for search optimization, caching plugins for speed, and plugins for backups, security, image compression, multilingual sites, and newsletter integration. Most of the features you’d want have already been built by someone. When you switch themes, your posts and pages stay in place, so design and content are fairly independent of each other. Of course, menu positions, widgets, templates, theme-specific shortcodes, and anything built with a page builder don’t carry over automatically, so the longer you’ve customized a site, the more a theme change costs. Since WordPress 5.9 in 2022, if you use a block theme, the Site Editor lets you change headers, footers, and page templates without writing any code. Developers can extend things with child themes and hooks while still building on the existing structure. The middle ground between tools where you build everything yourself and tools where you stay inside a fixed template is, to me, the most practical thing about WordPress.

RSS feeds come built in, so readers can subscribe with a feed reader, and you can change the permalink structure to put a readable slug in your post URLs. Since WordPress 5.5, XML sitemaps are provided by core, so you don’t strictly need an SEO plugin to generate one. Plugins like Yoast SEO and Rank Math come in when you want to set a meta description for each post and manage what you tell search engines in finer detail. None of this guarantees search traffic, of course. A rich set of SEO features isn’t the same as a site that is well optimized by default, either: a badly built theme, an overgrown set of category and tag pages, duplicate content, and slow plugins can all hurt your visibility. Still, there are plenty of themes and tools that output HTML search engines can read easily, and that’s a real advantage. Social platforms change their algorithms and reach swings up and down with them. Against that backdrop, I expect it to matter more and more to have a built-in subscription channel like RSS that doesn’t depend on any platform’s recommendation algorithm, and a structure you can extend with an email newsletter when you need one.

Other platforms handle extensibility differently. As far as I know, Tistory lets you edit a skin’s HTML and CSS, which is quite flexible, but you can’t touch server-side code or the database, and Naver Blog restricts external scripts and keeps ad revenue inside Naver’s own ad service. Because you choose the server environment with WordPress, you can add a newsletter signup form, members-only posts, custom post types that group different kinds of content such as serials or book reviews, structured data for search engines, and 301 redirects that point old URLs to new ones, all through plugins or code. Whether to run ads, charge for subscriptions, or leave the page clean is also up to the person running the blog.

When a Blog Becomes More Than a Blog

You don’t need many of these features to start a blog. Most of what I’ve described above becomes necessary only once the blog grows, for instance when a personal blog turns into a publication or content service that several people write for. WordPress ships with five user roles (Administrator, Editor, Author, Contributor, and Subscriber), so a workflow in which a contributor writes a post and an editor reviews it before publishing works with the default permissions alone. A full editorial workflow, with review requests, stage-by-stage notifications, and an approval history, doesn’t come built in, though, and needs a plugin or a separate tool. The REST API got its foundation in version 4.4, and version 4.7 brought content endpoints for posts, comments, and users into core. That makes a headless setup possible: WordPress as the back end for managing posts, with a front end built in a framework like Next.js.

What Does “Old” Really Mean?

There are reasons people call WordPress outdated. It has an old architecture built around PHP and a relational database. Its ecosystem is one in which countless plugins each extend functionality in their own way. The admin screen carries traces of different eras, and settings look different from one plugin to the next. Next to tools designed from the start for a modern development environment, parts of WordPress do feel clunky.

“Old” describes time; “outdated” is a judgment about present usefulness. The two don’t have to mean the same thing. Using PHP or a relational database is not, in itself, evidence of obsolete technology. The real question is when an old structure becomes technical debt and when it’s a stable asset. Thanks to long-maintained backward compatibility, posts written years ago still open today, and you can still search up solutions that have piled up over the years. The age of old software is both technical debt and an asset.

The flip side of being usable for a long time is having to keep managing old decisions. A plugin you installed years ago stops getting updates. Past customizations keep you from upgrading PHP. You want to replace a plugin, but your existing posts are tied to its format and can’t easily be cleaned up. Using old software means getting backward compatibility as an asset while also accepting responsibility for maintaining it. Whether that asset is worth the present inconvenience depends, I think, on how you run your blog.

Maintenance Comes With the Territory

Of course, a self-hosted WordPress site comes with maintenance. If you put off updates to core, themes, and plugins, vulnerabilities open up, and plugin vulnerabilities are often cited as a major route for security breaches. You also have to deal with backups, caching, HTTPS, and hosting costs, and as you add plugins one by one, the site can get heavier or start to conflict with itself. That WordPress is free software doesn’t mean running a blog is free. Count the domain and hosting fees, the subscriptions for paid themes and plugins, the time you spend on updates and backups, and the responsibility for fixing problems yourself, and the real cost ends up well above the monthly hosting bill. Choosing managed hosting or keeping only the plugins you truly need eases the burden considerably, but the time that choice takes is also part of what it costs to use WordPress, and the responsibility that comes with it falls on the site’s owner.

If you publish only occasionally and don’t need an admin screen, building a static site with something like Hugo, Jekyll, or Astro can reduce your operating burden, since serving only static files leaves less dynamic runtime to manage on a public server. That doesn’t make security concerns disappear, though. Build tool dependencies, deployment accounts, external services, and automated deployment pipelines still need protecting.

So Who Is WordPress Right For?

In the end, what most people want to know is less whether WordPress is a good tool than whether it suits their situation. If you want to connect with Korean readers without fiddling with settings, Naver Blog is the quickest route. If you want to publish easily without running a server, a hosted service like Tistory is comfortable. If you want to run a blog for the long haul with your own domain and content structure, self-hosted WordPress fits. If you’re comfortable with development and want a fast, simple, writing-focused site, a static site generator such as Hugo or Astro is the better match. And if you plan to grow from writing into a membership site or a broader content service, WordPress or another extensible CMS is a candidate. Whichever you choose, I think the deciding factor isn’t what’s fashionable but how long you’ll run this blog and how far you intend to grow it. WordPress remains a reasonable choice when the blog is one you’ll keep running for years, under your own address, and grow as you need.

The Best Tools Stay Behind the Writing

The reason WordPress is still worth recommending isn’t that it’s old yet somehow still good. It’s that what has accumulated over its long life is still useful. An old structure becomes a burden when you have to respond to new requirements or untangle past dependencies, but it becomes an asset when you keep drawing on the posts you’ve accumulated, the working habits you know, and a rich set of extensions.

Static sites, platform blogs, and headless setups each have their place. Among them, WordPress remains an option you can start as a blog, expand when you need to, and keep running for a long time.

What matters in the end is less which tool is newest and most convenient right now than which structure you entrust the coming years of accumulating posts to. For a tool meant for blogging, I think the most important quality is that it can endure that time.

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Tags #blog #web #wordpress