Ideal wordpress setup in 2025

I recently went shopping for a new host to house couple of my Wordpress blogs, I am not actively maintaining the blog so it’s been a while since I explored the WP eco-system. I used to be a WP fanatic, tinkering with Theme frameworks and performance before page builders era.

Goal

My personal blog used to run on Ghost (pro). For simple blogging I believe a hosted Ghost is the way to go. Simply because it provides below out of the box,

  1. Snappy editing/managing experience.

  2. Don’t have to worry about getting hacked.

  3. Speed (Stuff like image optimisation are taken care of).

  4. Not worry about backups, losing data.

So my ideal Wordpress setup will be to achieve the same, to summarise

  1. Snappy for viewing and editing/managing.

  2. Not worrying about getting hacked.

  3. Quick load times.

Anyway, after hours long reddit browsing, reading forum threads (yup forums still exist :D) this is what I found.

Theme

I was looking for a straightforward theme that has a good starting point out of the box with decent support for ACF. Also Themes are a major contributor to performance of your wordpress site, for low traffic blog most hosting providers are decent. Make sure you are picking the right Theme.

As for page builders, most people recommended below,

  1. Bricks theme

  2. Astra theme (+ Spectra the page builder)

  3. WP Kadence (The one I use)

  4. GeneratePress

I tried them all and here’s the short verdict.

Bricks

People praise for clean code output, straightforward customisation + handling complex scenarios well. Apart from WP Kadence, I think Bricks is the only theme that supports ACF functionality well. I ended up switching to Astra after trying out Bricks. The Bricks starting point is pretty bare-bone, you need to setup the foundation (header, footer, global styling). In my opinion Bricks would make sense if you a developer who build websites for a living.

Astra

Astra is a popular starter theme and the company has their own page builder called Spectra. I tried this combo. I liked Astra for the starting point it gave. With just couple of customisations using theme customizer you can get a decent site up. I also noticed that Spectra handles CSS styles related to individual blocks in a clever way. It maintains css per page/post level instead of accumulating to a one single stylesheet.

WP Kadence

Similar to Astra (At least for me), but the ACF support is pretty good and I like their “Row Layout” block. I had troubles with Astra/Spectra layout blocks when I tried to push it’s limits, but WP Kadence handled it well. Commenting on the ACF Support, Kadence still can’t handle ACF nested repeaters, which I believe Bricks support out of the box.

GeneratePress

I personally couldn’t test it, but it gets raving reviews from the users.

What about Elementor, Divi etc?

The mainstream page builders have a divided audience, for the goals I mentioned above both felt like an overkill.

Plugins

WP Rocket for performance

I’ve been a user of WP Super Cache, but as of 2024 WP Rocket seems to be the gold standard. As I was comparing the feature set with Ghost, WP Rocket seems to be the only plugin that offers stuff like image optimisation, lazy loading out of the box where most of the other caching plugins just cache a static version of the content. I noticed a significant performance improvement just after enabling the plugin, without changing any configuration.

The SEO Framework for SEO

Yoast is the popular plugin, but people are annoyed and refer to it as “nagware” and suggest SEO Framework. It’s lightweight, definitely less nagging. My go to was Yoast before, but SEO Framework seems to get the job done.

WPvivid for backups

Before WPVivid I used updraft, I wanted a hands off approach and that’s when the premium plugins come into play. I like the feature set of WPvivid, and it’s been well reviewed by the community. After installing, I took a manual snapshot and then enabled incremental backups.

WordFence for security

Security is a discussed topic in wordpress space, apart from basics like using cloudflare, prefixing db tables, not using common admin user names (admin, test), disable xmlrpc and deleting readme main advice is to use a security plugin. Top plugins are,

  1. Wordfence

  2. Sucuri

  3. SolidWp

  4. WP 2FA (On top of a security plugin for 2 factor auth)

I am using Wordfence free edition in my site.

Hosting

End-to-end managed

Not in a particular order, these offerings are positioned as end-to-end managed Wordpress hosting, no Cpanel and probably don’t require dedicated performance, security or backup plugins.

  1. rocket.net

  2. WPEngine (as of today there’s an ongoing dispute between

  3. Pressable

  4. hustly.website (cheapest in the category)

Other

  1. Siteground (beware about the renewal fees, their first year is cheap)

  2. Cloudways (along with DigitalOcean or Vultr)

  3. Hostinger

I ended up moving with a provider called DreamItHost in AU, simply because it’s closer to me datacenter wise. My previous host was in US and overall wordpress admin area felt laggy from Auckland, NZ. I just picked a highly rated AU host, apart from that no particular preference.