Let me tell you a story. A friend of mine earns a living creating WordPress sites for other people. Whenever there is a bigger problem I will get hired as the cavalry to fix it. That guy literally installs a plugin for everything. By that I mean every aspect of the original Wordpress is replaced by a set of plugins that were never intended to work together. Including layout. The content of posts is no longer stored in posts. There are multiple SEO plugins. There are plugins for simple things like image carousels that display ads in the admin interface, the code to display those ads is probably more complex than the plugin itself. There are paid themes, where the update would cost money that the customer usually is not willing to pay, since the website just works fine, until it does not. Needless to say if I wanted to build a ball of mud that is guaranteed to fail, I would probably call this guy the greatest of all time at that particular goal.

Needless to say, every now and then a plugin is not or cannot be updated and then a PHP update comes around and boom the house of card collapses. Or it is simply just a plugin that gets uninstalled and leaves the database vandalized. These are usually incredibly complex fixes and I am not cheap.

I have told the guy multiple times very precisely how to avoid these issues, but hey YOLO.

When he had a very important customer that demanded a low maintenance, high reliability website, he brought me on board from the start for once. Since I could not manage to steer him away from Wordpress, I at least told him every single plugin has to be vetted, and no fancy theme/layout builders. I still had to stop his urge to install plugins for some things and showed him how to fix them with simple CSS overrides, for the one thing we couldn't manage I wrote the plugin in extremely defensive PHP myself.

The site is going fine, but I didn't check in a while and he has admin rights.