I recently was forced to use WP for a site due to third party constraints. It simply wreaks of being a swiss cheese of security vulnerabilities once you start adding plugins - so that would be my main reason for staying away from it for a simpler site. For a more complex site you will wind up with so many plugins you are better off custom since something will definitely break from an update down the road.
My favorite thing was how easy it was to create a simple plugin from where I could inject my own php / html / js/ css at just about any stage of the pipeline, and crazily enough, I tried too many cms that would not allow me to override and direct edit the html on a page. It does win in the "easy to deploy but fully customizable" category, just because of that.
But my thought when using it was sometimes "they made this more complicated and difficult than doing it directly, because they managed to convince people the direct programming was out of reach". But that is how I feel about most frameworks, so I might not be objective on that one. Overall it was faster, but the tradeoff was massive opacity. I recently noticed a tracking pixel on my site and have to figure out which a**hole plugin dev is injecting it, then find a different plugin or write my own. I have always been vanilla for my other sites, so learning to combat other vendors and having an adversarial relationship with my own site really breaks the mental model for me.
My favorite thing was how easy it was to create a simple plugin from where I could inject my own php / html / js/ css at just about any stage of the pipeline, and crazily enough, I tried too many cms that would not allow me to override and direct edit the html on a page. It does win in the "easy to deploy but fully customizable" category, just because of that.
But my thought when using it was sometimes "they made this more complicated and difficult than doing it directly, because they managed to convince people the direct programming was out of reach". But that is how I feel about most frameworks, so I might not be objective on that one. Overall it was faster, but the tradeoff was massive opacity. I recently noticed a tracking pixel on my site and have to figure out which a**hole plugin dev is injecting it, then find a different plugin or write my own. I have always been vanilla for my other sites, so learning to combat other vendors and having an adversarial relationship with my own site really breaks the mental model for me.