If We Were the Creators of WordPress and WooCommerce — What Would We Do Differently?

A thought experiment that looks past code into platform design: what to keep, what to change, and how those lessons shape a safer, faster path to headless today.

Story8–10 min read

Recently, I asked ChatGPT a question that digs deeper than code:

“If we were the creators of WordPress and WooCommerce, and we could turn back time to the beginning, what should we continue to do, what should we do differently, and what can we learn for building better platforms today?”

The answer was insightful — not just technically, but strategically. It inspired this post.

What They Got Right — and We Should Keep Doing

Open Source with a GPL License

By choosing a fully open license, WordPress and WooCommerce built not just software, but an entire economy — agencies, freelancers, plugin developers, and hosting companies.

Lesson: Community ownership builds ecosystem dominance.

A Powerful Hook System (Actions & Filters)

From the start, they allowed developers to modify behavior without editing core files. This made it easy to build thousands of extensions.

Lesson: Design for extensibility from day one.

Strong Backward Compatibility

WordPress prioritized stability. Users could update with confidence — and rarely break their sites.

Lesson: Stability earns long-term trust.

Simplicity First

A “5-minute install” and an intuitive admin interface helped millions of non-technical users get online.

Lesson: Lower the barrier to entry — and adoption will follow.

What We’d Do Differently Today

Modular Core Architecture

WordPress was built as a monolith. Over time, trying to separate logic from UI became messy.

Lesson: Design with separation of concerns early — data, logic, presentation.

API-First, Headless-Ready

REST and GraphQL APIs were added later and never fully treated as first-class citizens.

Lesson: Build for multi-channel from day one.

Replaceable UI Layer

Themes and templates were tightly coupled with logic. Developers today want freedom.

Lesson: Keep the view layer swappable. Let devs choose their tools.

Performance Strategy Built In

Performance was outsourced to plugins and hosting tweaks, leading to inconsistent results.

Lesson: Ship with built-in caching and an opinionated performance plan.

Modern Developer Tooling

WordPress resisted tools like Composer and npm for too long, alienating serious developers.

Lesson: Developers are users too — respect their workflows.

What We Can Learn — and What I’m Doing Differently

My own project builds a headless layer for WooCommerce, and I’ve learned from both the successes and limitations of WordPress:

  • Headless-first rendering with fallback to original WooCommerce templates.
  • A hook system in both PHP and JavaScript to support deep extension.
  • API-first control, caching, and GraphQL for performance.
  • Frontend flexibility (Tailwind CSS or reuse of existing Storefront components).

Most of all, I want to support an open ecosystem of developers and agencies — just like WordPress, but with cleaner architecture.

Final Thought

If we could go back in time, we wouldn’t rebuild WordPress and WooCommerce the same way. We’d build them as platforms, not just products.

And that’s the philosophy I’m following now.

If this resonates with you, or you’re building headless WooCommerce too — let’s connect. Stay tuned for the live demo and open-source launch soon.