the writing wordpress · 29 essays

WordPress

Care plans, agencies, migration, plugins, and the platform itself. Everything I have learned shipping over 5,000 WordPress sites since 2018.

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4 nov 2026 Contact Form 7 Not Sending Email? Fix It in This Order Work through the likely causes in order: the Mail tab, spam, SMTP and DNS records. Then keep a copy of every submission so a mail failure never costs you a lead.
1 nov 2026 Elementor Alternatives in 2026, Including No Builder at All Most Elementor alternative lists are vendors recommending another builder. Here are the builders, the native block editor, and building without one.
31 oct 2026 How to Choose a WordPress Web Design Agency in 2026 Ten questions to put to any WordPress agency, the red flags to watch for in proposals, and a quick test for whether your project needs WordPress at all.
16 oct 2026 Why Enterprises Are Leaving WordPress in 2026, and Who Should Stay Enterprises don't leave WordPress because it broke. They leave when governing it costs more than replacing it. A weighted scorecard to decide which side you're on.
28 aug 2026 WordPress vs Custom Website Development: The 2026 Answer WordPress, headless, or custom in 2026, compared honestly: real cost bands, a decision table, and why Claude and Cursor have not made production software easy.
15 aug 2026 Translate WordPress Without Wrecking Your SEO Most WordPress translation setups quietly wreck your organic traffic before you notice. After building 5,000+ sites at Seahawk, here's the exact approach that keeps your SEO intact across every language.
10 jul 2026 WPML Alternatives Worth Trying in 2026 WPML built the multilingual WordPress category, but in 2026 it's no longer the obvious default. Here's what I actually use on client sites now, and why I switched.
5 jul 2026 ManageWP alternatives in 2026: 10 tools ranked for agencies and hosts ManageWP alternatives compared for agencies and hosts. WP Umbrella, WP Remote, MainWP, SolidWP — plus why WP Maintain is a different category for fleet-scale WordPress care.
2 jul 2026 Hosting WordPress on Vercel (Headless): When It Works and When It Doesn't I've set up headless WordPress on Vercel more than a dozen times. Sometimes it's the right call. Sometimes it's a six-month headache disguised as a modern architecture decision. Here's how to tell the difference.
14 may 2026 How to contact WordPress support in 2026: every option, ranked honestly There is no single WordPress support line. Forums, hosts, plugin developers, paid care plans, headless. Every option ranked from a 5,000-site agency operator.
12 may 2026 WooCommerce alternatives 2026: eight honest picks from a WordPress agency Eight WooCommerce alternatives worth considering in 2026, ranked by use case from someone who runs WooCommerce at agency scale and builds the alternatives at agency scale. Shopify, Medusa, BigCommerce, Hydrogen, Saleor, Commerce Layer, Wix, Squarespace. Plus the case for staying.
12 may 2026 WordPress market share in 2026: the small dip, the two-decade legacy, and the AI tooling worth your tokens WordPress dipped from 43.6% to 42.2% in twelve months. The honest read from a 5,000-site agency: small softening, market maturing, two-decade legacy intact. Seahawk WordPress demand was steady. The real 2026 move is investing in the AI coding tools that compound across every stack.
10 may 2026 emdash CMS, honest 2026 review of the Cloudflare-built Astro CMS that wants to replace WordPress Cloudflare shipped emdash CMS in April 2026 as v0.1.0. The architecture is interesting, sandboxed plugins, per-post-type tables, AI-first via MCP. The editor is TinyMCE. Here is what is right, what is wrong, and whether you should put it on a real project.
2 may 2026 WordPress Multisite vs Subfolder vs Subdomain: Multi-Brand SEO Running multiple brands on WordPress? The architecture decision, Multisite, subfolder, or subdomain, will quietly shape your SEO for years. Here's what I've learned building 5,000+ sites.
2 may 2026 Indexation Issues on Large WordPress Sites: A Diagnosis Guide When a site with 40,000 pages suddenly has 6,000 in Google's index, something has gone badly wrong. Here's exactly how I diagnose indexation problems on large WordPress sites, and what I've learned building 5,000+ of them.
2 may 2026 Headless WordPress + Astro: A Working Setup for Content-Heavy Sites Headless WordPress sounds great on paper. Astro makes it genuinely worth doing. Here's the exact setup I use for content-heavy sites, routing, data fetching, ISR, and the gotchas nobody warns you about.
1 may 2026 Drupal to WordPress Migration: A 5,000-Site SEO Playbook After migrating 5,000+ sites at Seahawk Media, I've seen every flavour of Drupal-to-WordPress disaster. Here's the exact SEO playbook I use to make sure Google doesn't even notice you moved.
30 apr 2026 WordPress vs Next.js: When Each Is the Right Call I've shipped WordPress sites and Next.js apps in the same week, billed to clients in the same industry. Here's the honest, opinionated breakdown of when each is genuinely the right tool, and when you're just following hype.
30 apr 2026 WordPress Page Builders Compared in 2026: Bricks, Elementor, Beaver, Divi, and Gutenberg A working comparison of the major WordPress page builders in 2026, Bricks, Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, and native Gutenberg with a modern block theme. From 5,000+ sites of practical experience.
29 apr 2026 Why I Finally Ditched GoDaddy's Website Builder After building 5,000+ sites I kept hitting the same wall with GoDaddy's builder, locked layouts, no real extensibility, and a false sense of speed. Here's what I moved to and why it matters for agency owners and freelancers.
29 apr 2026 Outsourcing WordPress Dev: What Agencies Get Wrong Outsourcing WordPress development sounds straightforward until you've handed a six-figure project to the wrong partner. Here's what I've learned after 5,000+ sites and years of doing this badly, then well.
28 apr 2026 Top 10 WordPress development companies in 2026 An honest 2026 ranking of the best WordPress development companies in the world, with what each is actually best at and where each falls short.
28 apr 2026 How to choose the best WordPress hosting in 2026 Most WordPress hosting reviews are affiliate-driven. This is not. Honest comparison of the top hosts in 2026, plus how to actually evaluate any provider.
28 apr 2026 Headless WordPress in 2026: the complete practical guide The practical headless WordPress guide we wish existed. Real stacks, real numbers, and the pitfalls we saw most often at Seahawk Media.
28 apr 2026 WordPress vs Next.js in 2026: my honest comparison Two of the most-asked questions in our agency days: should we use WordPress or Next.js, and which is better for SEO in 2026? Here is the honest comparison.
28 apr 2026 Sitecore and Typo3 to WordPress: a migration playbook Why marketing teams are leaving Sitecore and Typo3 for WordPress in 2026, and the migration playbook we used at Seahawk Media.
28 apr 2026 My week with EmDash CMS: the WordPress alternative tested I spent a week stress-testing Cloudflare's EmDash CMS. Here's what impressed me, what didn't, and why WordPress 7 still has me excited.
10 feb 2026 WordPress Maintenance Is Mostly About Care
10 feb 2026 I Built This AI Website in 24 Hours, and Learned More Than I Expected Spoiler: a lot of caffeine was involved. This website didn't come together because I wanted a redesign. It came together because I wanted to test myself, and test what building an AI website really looks like in practice.