Ah, after ranting heavily about 3 years back why, I had decided to give up on trying to setup simple websites on WordPress, I have decided to switchback. I will keep my reasons succinct as I still believe in the premise of my original post.
I have 4 concrete reasons :
1. Blocksy:
Part of my original apprehension on using WordPress was because of the fact that the Base Themes that WordPress ships with are contextually in-flexibile and aesthetically questionable in terms of design practices. For example, every builtin WordPress theme before Twenty-twenty four was a mess in terms of customising the Header and Footer. Even the basic need of hiding the title of the page was a Google search for a novice user. However, the Twenty-twenty four was a decent theme in my opinion, but only as a landing page for an agency. It is not suitable for a blog nor is it suitable for a Personal website. To my dismay, the Twenty-Twenty five theme reverses course and makes a complete U-turn in terms of design and UX. I especially hated the in-flexible Customizer ” Site Editor under Appearance > Editor “
While I do appreciate the thinking behind this, the lack of ecosystem support from the other parts of the ecosystem was a nightmare.
I have also tried other free 3rd party themes options like Elementor and Astra, however the practice of Free WordPress themes to block easy access to essential features like Hiding a Page Title and replicating color customisation under their own settings is a recipe for disaster for site maintenance.
When I initially came across Ghost of whom I am still a fan of, I admired the relative simplicity and polish of the built in themes, although inflexible but basically sorted and the fluidity of the backend.
Cut to present one of the biggest reasons for me switching back to WordPress was a Free Theme called Blocksy. This is stupidly powerful and fast free theme that has almost 90% of essential options available for a Personal or Small Company Website. Also, the price point at which they are making the pro versions available is also realistic for entities in developing countries to avoid pirating themes and instead go with the official release. This is a theme that shows that, you can still succeed in a opensource ecosystem without screwing over the less equipped masses in a developing society, which I think is an essential discussion to be had in an exceedingly subscription driven society. I am actually planning to subscribe to their paid pro plan soon to support their product.
I learned about this theme from Youtuber Ferdy Korpershoek from his video titled How To Make A WordPress Website 2025, which equally deserves a mention.
2. WP-Multisite
Previously, I was actually hosting my websites on a Mix of Wix and Google Sites. However, Google Sites lacked very essential features to be considered a reasonable alternative to wordpress and I only used it for my personal website and a few not-very-essential websites. My main business website and landing page however was on WIX.
I was okay using the services of Wix for the following reasons:
The Pricing :
The pricing of Wix they offered me when I launched my Website at was around 4500/- INR for the whole year during 2022, which suddenly jumped to INR 12,000/- in March 2025 which suddenly caught me off guard. However, I would have still paid 3x of the original price if not for the next reasons.
Broken Customisation in Wix
While the initial setup on Wix and the Theme selection is good, the maintainability of the customisation is a whole mess. Firstly, the block editors is unpredictable and I struggled creating a Mobile layout that adapted well to different devices, with content hiding and appearing unpredictably. I feel the whole issue is created due to the fact that Wix uses a drag and drop page builder that is WYSWYG with push and pull handles that are easy prone to creating layouts with errors.
The other issue of the editor is the general lag.
And the most glaring issue is the fact that its blogging engine layout in WIX is a complete mess especially with the fonts and typography in the blog section not matching the brand and visual style of the entire website. I still do not understand how Wix could ignore such and important aspect for a paid customer. This completely turned me off from Blogging extensibly on the Website which hindered my SEO but was a blessing in disguise when I decided to switch to WordPress.
SEO and the Marketing + Analytics Backend of Wix
I had to create a new Google Analytics Web Property for the Backend marketing module as the damn thing could not accomodate my existing Google Analytics Web Property. I think this explains the bug I faced. Coupled with issues in CRM integration was a whole bank of issues that I am not going to further explain.
WordPress Multisite: Actually solved all of these issues in a single swipe. I moved all of my exiting websites to a Single AWS Lightsail instance and got access to hosting multiple low traffic websites at an affordable cost that made sense for my current financial circumstances along with the extensibility of the WordPress ecosystem.
3. Amazon Web Services – Lightsail
This VPS service is amazing and I am grateful to Amazon this affordable service.
However, the bigger reason I admire AWS Lightsail is the fact that their WordPress install is absolutely sanitised from backdoor hacks. Earlier, when I used to host WordPress Websites on shared hosts, they inevitably felt prey to DNS redirection and phishing hacks which I think is partly by design on the part of shared web hosts. I haven’t face such issues on hosting via VPS such as Lightsail and Digital Ocean until now which bring me to
4. Cloudflare
The last by not the least, Cloudflare provided the Caching, DNS and Domain infrastructure to tie in the whole system together seamlessly. After, the closure of Google Domains, I was looking for a reliable domain registrar as I had heard a few not no glowing reviews about Squarespace’s DNS, which acquired Google Domains. This made me move the entire DNS and Domain stack to Cloudflare as I felt it was a company I could rely upon. However, from what I have read WP-Multisites usually face issues with HTTPS as multiple sites are run using the same IP. To which I actually found a dead simple solution – Caching as DNS request via Cloudflare solves the issue of individually creating HTTPS certs for each website and managing them. Coupled with the face that such robust Caching infrastructure is available for Free is simple unbelievable.
