All your WordPress frustrations, solved
WordPress runs a huge part of the web, and for good reason: it is free, flexible and everybody knows it. But ask the people who maintain WordPress websites what they think of it, and you hear the same complaints over and over. Even WordPress’s own annual survey shows it: the share of users who named ease of use as one of the best things about WordPress dropped from 32% to 21.7% in a single year. And browse the WordPress support forum on any given day and you find the same titles: ‘Critical error’, ‘Problems after update’, ‘Cannot Access Account’. Here are the eight frustrations we hear most, and how Usecue CMS deals with them.
1. Twenty plugins and counting
A fresh WordPress install does not do much. Want a contact form, a spam filter, statistics, translations or a backup? Each of those is a plugin, often from a different company, with its own settings page, its own update schedule and often a paid ‘pro’ version. A typical business website ends up with twenty or thirty of them. All those licences add up, easily to several hundred euros a year, and all those pieces have to work together. Your website becomes expensive and complex.
Usecue CMS is one product, made in one piece, for one price, batteries included. Form handling, a spam filter, server-side statistics, one-click translations and backups are part of it. There is no plugin directory, because there is nothing to add. See the full list of features.
2. An editor that overwhelms everyone
Since 2018, WordPress pages are built from blocks in the block editor (Gutenberg). Developers like its flexibility, but the people who have to use it every day often do not. Its one-star reviews say it all: ‘ 5+ years and still terrible’, ‘ why is this sooo unfriendly?’ and ‘ We do not want to be beta tester anymore’. One reviewer sums it up: ‘They all knew how to use the previous editor, but this one overwhelms absolutely everyone.’ Meanwhile the Classic Editor plugin, which does nothing but bring back the old editor, collects reviews like ‘Saved My Sanity’. And the blocks are fragile: an editor drags a column, pastes some text, and the layout falls apart. Or they open a page and are greeted by ‘This block contains unexpected or invalid content’.
In Usecue CMS your editors fill in a form, not a page builder. Every page shows exactly the fields it has, such as a title, an image, a date or a list of team members, each with the right input. The text itself is plain markdown, with buttons to help you. The design lives in the templates, where nobody can accidentally drag it apart. And with instant publishing you see the live website right next to the editor, and you drag the split to check how your page looks on a phone.
3. Backups you cannot trust
WordPress keeps your website in two places: files on the server and content in a database. A good backup needs both, taken at the same moment. That is yet another plugin, often a paid one, running once a day or once a week, so whatever changed in between is not in it. You are left with an uneasy feeling: is my backup complete, and will it actually work when I need it?
With Usecue CMS nothing gets lost. Your website lives in one Git repository: every page, data file, image, template and setting. Every change is a commit, so every version of every file is kept, with the name of the person who made it. Made a mistake last Tuesday? It can be undone. And with the daily sync to GitHub, there is a full copy outside our servers too.
4. An open door for hackers
WordPress and its plugins are open source: anyone can read the code, including the people looking for a way in. Meanwhile, hardly anybody checks the code of the plugins you install, let alone every update. In 2025 alone, Patchstack counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem, 42% more than the year before, and about 91% of them in plugins. Not updating is not an option, so you update blind, and any update can bring in a new hole. And then there is the login page, which every WordPress website has at the same address. The support forum is full of ‘Cannot Access Account’, ‘Unwanted reset password messages’ and ‘Multiple Login Attempts’: bots trying passwords, day and night. Even if you do everything right, you are knowingly taking a big risk.
A Usecue CMS website has nothing to break into. Hugo turns it into static files: there is no PHP, no database and no login page behind your pages, and your visitors only ever get HTML, CSS and images. The CMS lives at its own address, is closed source and is protected with two-step verification, so even a leaked password is not enough to get in.
5. Heavy and slow
Every page view of a WordPress website runs PHP and queries a database, and every plugin adds its own scripts and styles on top. Only about half of all WordPress websites pass Google’s Core Web Vitals on mobile. The usual fix is a caching plugin: yet another layer of complexity to set up, debug and keep working.
A Usecue CMS website is fast without trying. Hugo builds your pages once, when you publish, so a visitor gets a ready-made page straight away. Images are resized and cached to exactly the size they are shown at, without a single extra plugin. And because static files are cheap to serve, a sudden rush of visitors is no problem: one of our customers stayed online all day while the company was on national television.
6. Endless maintenance
WordPress core, every plugin, every theme and the PHP version underneath all need updates, and they do not always agree with each other. Nobody is responsible for the whole: each plugin maker only looks after their own piece. One user on the support forum found that a feature stopped working after an update. The answer: that is ’not part of WordPress Core’, ask the plugin maker. So you press ‘update all’, cross your fingers and hope your website still works afterwards. Keeping it all running is your problem, while you have better things to do.
With Usecue CMS it is our problem. We offer a service, not a pile of software you have to keep alive yourself. We maintain the CMS, the hosting and Hugo for every website, and we take responsibility for the whole. When we moved to Hugo v0.167.0, we first tested every website we host on the new version and fixed what needed fixing, before anybody noticed. You keep editing; we keep it running.
7. Content lock-in
The block editor and page builders store your content in a database, mixed with HTML, block markup and shortcodes of the page builder you happened to pick. Want to move to something else? Then you are looking at a migration that takes weeks, and a pile of content that only looks right in the software it came from. Even moving within WordPress is hard: someone who switched from Elementor to the block editor was told that ‘Elementor pages won’t automatically become blocks, so you’ll need to rebuild key layouts’. On paper your content is yours; in practice it is locked in.
With Usecue CMS you can walk away any day. Your content is plain markdown and your website is a regular Hugo website. There are no CMS-specific schema files: the CMS reads your content as it is. Developers can work in their own editor, the website builds with standard Hugo, and it runs anywhere Hugo does. We would love you to stay, but you never have to.
8. Not ready for AI
AI tools are changing how websites are made and maintained, but WordPress keeps your content in a database, wrapped in block markup and page builder code. To let an AI read or change it, you need yet another plugin or an API connection, and the result still has to fit into the builder’s format. Your content simply does not speak the language of AI.
With Usecue CMS it does, because markdown is the language of AI. Language models read it and write it natively; it is what they answer in. Your whole website is markdown and plain text files in Git, so any AI tool can read it, understand it and help you change it, without a plugin in between. Inside the CMS, AI already checks your spelling and grammar and translates whole pages with one click.
Time to switch?
WordPress can be anything, from a webshop to a social network, and its huge ecosystem is also its strength. But the downsides are obvious. Usecue CMS is perfect for content websites: company websites, blogs, documentation, portfolios. For those, you do not need thousands of plugins. You need a fast, safe website and an editor that is a pleasure to use. Curious? Sign up or contact us.
Happy editing!
