I decided to make a new personal website. The last time I did this kind of thing was before the pandemic, and I did it with WordPress before, so my first instinct was to try WordPress again. But WordPress seems to have changed a lot since then. Or maybe I just forgot how annoying it is? Anyway, I found an interesting-looking theme to start with, but building on it is really frustrating.
Style changes don’t apply throughout the site when it seems like they should. I can’t change the font in the footer even though there’s a place where you can supposedly do that (you can select a new font but it changes nothing). I can’t move design elements around smoothly in the block editor, and I can’t seem to get out of the block editor either (although maybe that’s just a theme issue?). I’d like to make the background different on different parts of the same page, but I can’t figure out how to do that.
Am I going about this the wrong way? Do I need a different theme? A plugin? Should I use something other than WordPress? I’m annoyed with all of the AI stuff WordPress is pushing at me anyway. Do I just need to bite the bullet and teach myself CSS or whatever, given that I don’t want to vibe-code this site? Advice please!
edit: also, if there’s a better Lemmy community for this kind of question, please point me there!


Mostly just that I registered my domain through there. (It’s one I bought in the past but allowed to lapse, and then I was pleasantly surprised to find it was still available so I bought it again… in retrospect, I probably should have waited to play around with current-day WordPress some more before buying through there.) But I can still move my site with its domain name off WordPress, right?
Ah, if it is actually running on WordPress’s own infra, then updates and perfrormance should be less of an issue, I thought you ran it on your own server.
The only suggestion I have then is that you make sure that you own the domain name, see if you can move it to an external provider (avoid GoDaddy, I have read that they are very annoying) and point it to your WordPress site.