Death to the CMS. Long Live Raw HTML.

Right now, as you read this, there are bots probing your WordPress site.

/wp-admin. /wp-login.php. /xmlrpc.php. Over and over. Thousands of times a day.

You're paying for server resources to reject attacks on an attack surface that shouldn't exist in the first place.

Meanwhile, this page you're reading? It's an HTML file. It loaded in about 50 milliseconds. There's no database to inject. No admin panel to brute force. No plugins with unpatched vulnerabilities.

Just... a file.

How Did We Get Here?

Content management systems made sense in 2005. Updating a website meant FTP, hand-editing HTML, and praying you didn't break something. Non-technical people needed a way to publish content without calling the IT guy.

So we built WordPress. And Drupal. And Joomla. And a thousand others.

We put a database behind every website. We added admin panels. We installed plugins for everything. We created an entire ecosystem of complexity — all so someone could occasionally update a paragraph of text.

Twenty years later, we're still paying the tax on that decision.

The Real Cost of a CMS

That WordPress site isn't slow because your server is bad. It's slow because every single pageview triggers PHP execution, database queries, plugin hooks, and theme rendering. You're running a software application just to display text that hasn't changed in six months.

"But What About Non-Technical Editors?"

This is the argument that keeps the CMS industry alive. "We need WordPress because marketing needs to update the blog."

Okay. Let's think about this.

How often does marketing actually update the blog? Once a week? Once a month? And for that occasional update, you're running a complex PHP application 24/7, maintaining a database, patching security vulnerabilities, and paying for hosting that can handle the overhead?

Here's what "updating the website" looks like in 2025:

# Edit the HTML file
# Save
# Deploy

git add .
git commit -m "New blog post"
git push

That's it. The site rebuilds in seconds. No database. No cache to clear. No "have you tried turning it off and on again."

"But marketing can't use git!"

Then use a static site generator with a simple markdown workflow. Or a headless CMS that outputs static files. Or — revolutionary idea — have a developer spend 30 seconds deploying the update that marketing sends in an email.

The occasional friction of a simple workflow is nothing compared to the constant friction of maintaining a complex one.

The Security Argument

Let's talk about those bots.

Every WordPress site is a target. Not because hackers care about your content — but because WordPress is everywhere, the exploits are well-known, and most sites are running outdated plugins.

Your server logs are full of requests like:

POST /wp-login.php (1,247 times today)
GET /wp-admin/ (892 times)
POST /xmlrpc.php (2,341 times)
GET /wp-content/plugins/revslider/... (156 times)

That last one? That's a bot looking for a plugin vulnerability from 2014. They're still trying. Because somewhere, someone is still running that plugin.

Static HTML has none of this. There's no login to brute force. No database to inject. No plugins to exploit. The attack surface is essentially zero.

You can't hack a file that just sits there.

The Performance Argument

A WordPress page load:

1. Request hits the server
2. PHP bootstraps
3. WordPress core loads
4. Plugins initialize
5. Theme loads
6. Database query for the content
7. Database queries for menus, widgets, sidebars
8. Plugins add more database queries
9. PHP renders the HTML
10. Response sent

All that to serve text that hasn't changed since you published it.

A static HTML page load:

1. Request hits the server
2. Server sends the file

That's why this page loaded instantly. There's nothing to compute. The work was done once, when the file was created. Every visitor gets the same result without the server breaking a sweat.

When You Actually Need a CMS

I'm not saying CMSes are never appropriate. They make sense when:

• You have non-technical users publishing content multiple times per day
• Content has complex relationships (e-commerce, directories, user-generated content)
• You need real-time dynamic content that can't be pre-rendered

But for a company website? A blog? A portfolio? A marketing site?

You don't need a database. You don't need an admin panel. You don't need 47 plugins.

You need files.

The Best CMS

The best content management system is:

git push origin main

Version controlled. Instant rollback if something breaks. No security patches. No plugin updates. No database backups. No monthly fees for "managed WordPress hosting."

Just files. Deployed. Done.

This blog runs on raw HTML. It loads instantly. It costs almost nothing to host. It will never get hacked because there's nothing to hack.

Sometimes the best architecture is the one you can delete. And sometimes the best CMS is no CMS at all.