Why we rebuilt webxdevelopers.com in Laravel and Inertia instead of WordPress
We have built somewhere north of sixty WordPress sites. We know the ecosystem, the plugins, the pain points, and the workarounds. So when we sat down in late 2023 to plan a rebuild of our own site, the obvious choice was WordPress. We chose something else.
The decision was not about WordPress being bad. It is genuinely the right tool for most clients we work with. But our own site had needs that WordPress kept bending to fit rather than serving cleanly. We wanted server-side rendered pages for SEO, a proper journal with structured content, and a portfolio that could pull data from a database without three plugins fighting each other. WordPress can do all of that. It just makes you feel it.
Why Laravel
Laravel gave us a codebase we could reason about. Controllers, models, routes. No plugin conflicts, no update anxiety, no wondering which hook was overriding what. We could write a feature, test it, and know exactly what it did. There is something genuinely calming about that after years of debugging theme compatibility issues at 11 PM.
Inertia.js let us keep Vue components for the frontend without building a full API. Pages are server-rendered on first load. Navigation is fast without a full reload. We got the SEO benefits of SSR and the UX feel of an SPA without having to maintain two separate codebases talking to each other. That matters when you are a small team and every hour of maintenance is an hour not spent on client work.
The build took about six weeks. Two weeks of architecture and database design, three weeks of templates and content migration, one week of testing and SEO checks. We moved the journal first because that was the highest value piece and we wanted to see how it felt in production before committing fully.
What we learned
Building your own site in a stack you control is a different kind of education than building client sites. There is no one to blame except yourself, which sounds uncomfortable but is actually clarifying. Every slow query, every awkward URL, every layout that breaks on an older phone, all of it is yours to fix.
We added a caching layer early and were glad we did. Laravel's route model binding made the journal pages clean. The structured data implementation was easier than any WordPress plugin we have tried, because we wrote it once in a Blade component and it just worked everywhere.
If you are a WordPress agency considering a custom build for your own site, our honest advice is this: only do it if you have the engineering appetite for ongoing maintenance. WordPress hands you a lot of infrastructure for free. You give that up when you go custom, and you should go in knowing what that trade-off actually costs in time.
We do not regret it. Our site is faster, more structured, and genuinely a pleasure to deploy to. But we also spend time on it that a WordPress agency site would not need. That is the deal.