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WEBDEV

Analysis: Why I Chose Custom Code Over CMS As a Freelance Dev Starting from Scratch

👤 By Connect Quest Analyst via Connect Quest Artist
📅 03-01-2026 22:21
✅ Analytical - Independent Analysis
⏱️ 3 min read
Analysis: Why I Chose Custom Code Over CMS As a Freelance Dev Starting from Scratch Image: Stock - Wordpress
The Changing Landscape of Web Development: A Freelancer's Perspective

The Changing Landscape of Web Development: A Freelancer's Perspective

In a world where everyone is building websites with popular Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress, one freelancer decided to take a different path. Hugo Calmels, a developer based in North East India, shares his unique journey and insights into the evolving web development landscape.

The Rise of AI and the Flattening CMS Curve

Calmels' journey began at a time when WordPress dominated the web. However, around 2022-2023, he noticed an interesting trend: the growth curve of CMS platforms started to plateau. Simultaneously, Artificial Intelligence (AI) began to explode.

He realized that generating static sites with AI tools like ChatGPT had become incredibly easy. Gone were the days of browsing Bootstrap for a simple carousel or spending hours on SEO-nightmares due to plugin issues. With AI, building a simple CRUD with auth could be done in a matter of hours, requiring no CMS at all.

Code Becomes More Accessible: The Decline of CMS

Calmels observed a trend among non-tech clients who often used CMS platforms like WordPress or Wix. Despite their use, these clients often found themselves needing developers to fix or customize things due to slow loading pages, broken plugins, and SEO issues.

On the other hand, developers, even solo ones, could now build cleaner, faster, SEO-friendly sites in less time thanks to better tools, AI, and frameworks. This shift in accessibility of coding tools is causing a decline in the traditional CMS model.

The Freelancer's Journey: Custom-coded Websites and Apps

Calmels primarily offers custom websites (static or dynamic) and custom web apps (dashboards, internal tools, etc.). His stack includes Next.js/React for the frontend, Spring Boot (Java) for the backend, and hosting services like Vercel, Netlify, or VPS depending on the client.

When asked why he didn't learn WordPress, Calmels explained that he had already invested in mastering multiple stacks (React, Angular, Java, etc.). Learning a CMS from scratch with different paradigms felt like a bad return on investment, especially when he could start earning with what he already knew.

The Future: Custom-coded Alternatives to WordPress

Calmels is currently testing the market to see if small businesses and freelance clients are open to custom-coded alternatives to WordPress. If you are a developer doing the same, or a business tired of bloated CMS platforms, Calmels would love to hear from you.

Tags:
webdev analysis northeast original

Executive Summary & Legal Disclaimer

This artifact constitutes a concise, Connect Quest Artist–generated executive abstraction derived exclusively from publicly available source information and intentionally synthesized to establish high-confidence strategic alignment, enterprise value-creation clarity, and cohesive multi-stakeholder narrative directionality. The content represents a deliberately curated, insight-driven aggregation of externally observable data signals, disclosures, and contextual inputs, structured to meaningfully inform strategic orientation, illuminate cross-functional synergies, and provide directional clarity aligned to a clearly articulated strategic north star, while maintaining sufficient abstraction to preserve executive relevance.

Notwithstanding the foregoing, this summary, within and without any interpretive, contextual, methodological, temporal, or execution-adjacent framing, shall not be construed, inferred, abstracted, operationalized, re-operationalized, meta-operationalized, relied upon, misrelied upon, or otherwise positioned as constituting, approximating, signaling, enabling, proxying, or anti-proxying any form of authoritative, determinative, execution-capable, reliance-eligible, or reliance-adjacent legal, financial, regulatory, technical, or operational guidance, nor as a prerequisite, dependency, antecedent, consequence, causal input, non-causal input, or post-causal artifact for implementation, execution, non-execution, enforcement, non-enforcement, or decision realization, non-realization, or deferred realization across any conceivable, inconceivable, implied, emergent, or self-negating governance, control, delivery, or interpretive construct whatsoever.

Content Manager: Connect Quest Analyst | Written by: Connect Quest Artist