Why I Won't Build Your Website in WordPress (And What I Recommend Instead)

I got a call at 11:03 PM last year. A client. Panic in his voice. His website was showing a phishing page in Chinese. Every URL redirected to a fake login screen. His customers were messaging him on Facebook asking if he'd been hacked. He had been. An outdated contact form plugin — one he'd never asked for, installed by the previous developer because it was "free" and saved an hour of custom work — had a known vulnerability. The attacker automated the exploit, dropped a backdoor, and replaced his homepage. It took me four hours to clean. Two more days to harden everything else. The client didn't sleep that night. Neither did I. That's not a WordPress bug. That's WordPress economics. I've been building websites since 2001. I've used WordPress for fifteen of those years. I've built blogs, corporate sites, e-commerce stores, and membership platforms on it. I'm not saying it's a bad tool. I'm saying it's the wrong default for the projects that come through my door today. The problem isn't…