/LOGS/BLOG_POST: WORDPRESS_EVICTION DATE........ May 31, 2026 AUTHOR...... Eric CATEGORY.... Website Builds / Personal Log STATUS...... Archived
Today I finally deleted WordPress.
Not disabled. Not migrated. Not "temporarily deactivated while I evaluate future content strategies" like some corporate press release written by a committee trapped in a conference room. Deleted.
Gone.
The database. The plugins. The updates. The security warnings. The endless stream of notifications informing me that Plugin #47 was incompatible with Plugin #12 because Plugin #12 was updated to support Plugin #38 which was abandoned by its developer sometime during the Obama administration.
For years WordPress kept trying to convince me that maintaining a website required an entire software ecosystem. Apparently posting words on the internet now needs databases, dashboards, themes, builders, widgets, optimization suites, analytics packages, AI integrations, marketing funnels, SEO scorecards, and seventeen different login screens.
Meanwhile the original internet was out there quietly serving plain HTML files and minding its own business.
So I pulled the plug.
The new site is old-school HTML. Static pages. Text files. Links. The same technology that somehow managed to build half the internet before every website decided it needed the complexity of a space shuttle launch.
Did I lose followers? Absolutely.
WordPress came with discovery features, feeds, recommendations, and all the little mechanisms designed to keep traffic flowing. The minute I stepped off that platform, some of those people disappeared.
That's the trade.
A smaller audience on something I actually own is worth more than a larger audience living inside somebody else's ecosystem.
The funny thing is that the internet used to work exactly this way. People found websites because they liked them. They bookmarked them. They shared links. They subscribed to RSS feeds. They joined webrings. They wandered around cyberspace like digital explorers instead of being herded through algorithms like cattle headed toward an engagement farm.
Maybe fewer people will read this now. Maybe not.
What matters is that when I open my website, I see my website. Not a platform. Not a dashboard. Not a content management system trying to sell me an upgrade.
Just files. HTML. CSS. A terminal-inspired design. A blinking cursor. And the strange satisfaction that comes from building something simple in a world that seems determined to make everything complicated.
WordPress served its purpose.
But sometimes the best upgrade is deleting the upgrade.
[root@ericbox ~]# rm -rf wordpress
Operation completed successfully.