WordPress broke. The fix needs a fixer.
The old way stopped working. The new way works — but only if you know someone. How the fall of the web's default tool quietly created a new kind of gatekeeper.
Figures from Aaron Edwards's own account of rebuilding his sister's site@uglyrobot; the small-business count is Ronic's estimate.
A 15-year veteran can no longer build a site with it
Aaron Edwards has spent fifteen years building on WordPress. He was CTO of WPMU DEV, co-founded InfiniteUploads before it was acquired, and is now growing DocsBot.ai toward $5M ARR. If anyone alive can make WordPress work, it is him.
His sister needed a website. She had already bought WordPress hosting and a domain — and still could not figure out how to build a site. Fifty plugins preinstalled. Upgrade notices everywhere. Overwhelming. So the veteran looked at WordPress in 2026 and reached a verdict that should unsettle the whole ecosystem: he could no longer build a site with it either.
"My sister needed a new website. Had already bought WordPress hosting and a domain. Couldn't figure out how to build a site. 50 plugins preinstalled, upgrade notices everywhere, overwhelming. I've been in WP for over 15yrs. I no longer can build a site with it." Aaron Edwards · @uglyrobot · 06 Apr 2026
WordPress powers roughly 40% of the web. It was the right answer for twenty years. But the product calcified — layer upon layer of plugins, themes, page builders, security patches, and update conflicts, each one solving the side effects of the last. The tool built to democratize the web slowly became the thing standing in the way.
The incumbents didn't lose on features. They lost on complexity they couldn't undo.
The new way is beautiful — and fragile
So Aaron did what any technical founder would. He set his sister up on Cloudflare Pages, wrote a few prompts in Codex, and within ten minutes had a fast, secure static site deployed. "Now she can just tell ChatGPT if she needs any updates and it just does it," he wrote. A genuinely great outcome. It is also duct tape.
Who chose Cloudflare Pages over Vercel over Netlify? Aaron. Who wrote the prompts that actually worked? Aaron. Who understood that a static site was the right architecture for a personal website? Aaron. Who will she call when the deployment breaks, the domain lapses, or she needs a contact form that actually sends? Aaron. His sister didn't build a website. She got a tech co-founder for free — because her brother is one.
"Folks want other people to take responsibility. If you do it yourself, you give up that privilege." Matt Harrison · replying to Jason Fried · 21 Mar 2026
The new tools — Codex, Lovable, Emergent, Claude — are genuinely powerful. They collapsed the cost of building from weeks to minutes. What they did not collapse is the cost of knowing what to build, maintaining what was built, and being responsible when it breaks.
That is still a person's job. Right now it is being done by favors, freelancers, and duct tape: brothers who happen to be CTOs, friends who happen to know React, Fiverr freelancers who will vibe-code something and disappear. The old gatekeepers fell. New ones took their place — they're just harder to see, because they look like helpfulness.
Three eras of putting a business online
The trajectory is clear once you line the eras up. The cost of building has fallen to near zero. The cost of responsibility has not moved at all — it has only changed hands.
| Era | What putting a business online feels like |
|---|---|
| Before | WordPress, Wix, Squarespace — learn our tool, configure everything, manage it yourself. Complexity is the product. |
| Right now | Codex, Lovable, Emergent — describe what you want, get something fast. But you still need someone technical to set it up, choose the right architecture, and fix what breaks. The duct-tape era. |
| What's next | Tell someone about your business. Your website exists. It works. It updates. It answers your customers. It gets smarter every week. You never think about it again. |
What 33 million businesses actually need
Most businesses do not have a brother who is a CTO. The 33 million of them without one need something that doesn't require a fixer. Not a better tool. Not a faster builder.
They need a system that understands the business, builds what's needed, maintains it, and takes responsibility when something breaks — so the duct tape never has to go up in the first place. That's Ronic.
The through-line
Every era removed one barrier and quietly raised another. The next one only matters if it removes the last barrier standing: needing a person you trust to own the thing after it ships.
Sources
This essay is built from two public exchanges on X, read against the state of the small-business web in 2026.
- Aaron Edwards (@uglyrobot), on rebuilding his sister's site after 15 years in WordPress — 06 Apr 2026. x.com/uglyrobot
- Matt Harrison, replying to Jason Fried on who carries responsibility — 21 Mar 2026. via X