After training 600 students in WordPress over just twelve months and managing close to 1,000 WordPress sites, I've been reflecting on what drove its success.

Let me be upfront about what puzzles me regarding its widespread adoption:

1. WordPress is resource-heavy software, consuming up to 100MB for a basic, empty installation - no media files included. Yes, you read that correctly: 100 MB. It's excessive.

2. Security concerns keep me on edge. WordPress has earned a reputation as one of the most vulnerable web platforms available. The sites I manage face hundreds of intrusion attempts daily.

3. Performance is a significant problem - WordPress runs sluggishly and demands substantial processing resources and memory. Even modest 10-page WordPress sites require dedicated caching solutions just to function properly. This shouldn't be necessary.

5. The platform isn't user-friendly. Creating attractive websites with WordPress is genuinely challenging. Only a small fraction of my students have managed to impress me with their results. The majority struggle to produce visually appealing sites, wrestling with the platform's maze of confusing panels and settings.

6. WordPress's terminology is needlessly confusing. The way it mixes up website settings, templates, pages, posts, and patterns creates real learning barriers. Understanding how these concepts interconnect within the admin interface takes considerable time.

Given all this, WordPress's dominance is remarkable - it powers over 40% of all websites globally. What's the reason?

I believe there's a single, compelling explanation: WordPress leveraged the ideal technology stack at precisely the right moment: PHP and MySQL. From 2003 through 2015, PHP reigned as the dominant programming language, and developers enthusiastically created countless frameworks and libraries for it. WordPress capitalized on this momentum perfectly. Thousands of developers and businesses contributed to its ecosystem—core development, themes, and plugins - because they were already proficient in the underlying technology.

Since 2015, JavaScript frameworks have taken the lead in web development. Yet this shift hasn't triggered a new content management system battle. The CMS wars seemingly concluded around 2015. WordPress emerged victorious, and no one has mounted a serious challenge since.

Bottom line

WordPress's success story is a fascinating paradox. Despite its technical shortcomings—bloated code, security vulnerabilities, performance issues, and a steep learning curve - it remains the undisputed leader in content management systems. 

This teaches us an important lesson about technology adoption: being in the right place at the right time with the right technology stack can matter more than technical perfection. WordPress didn't win because it was the best - it won because it was accessible to the massive community of PHP developers who were already building the web in the 2000s and early 2010s.

Today, WordPress benefits from powerful network effects. Its enormous ecosystem of themes, plugins, developers, and tutorials creates a self-reinforcing cycle that's nearly impossible for competitors to break. Even with modern JavaScript frameworks offering superior alternatives, the inertia is too strong.

So while I may continue to grapple with WordPress's limitations every day, I can't deny its achievement. Sometimes in technology, timing and community matter more than technical elegance. WordPress proved that - and the web we know today is built on that foundation, for better or worse.