Adobe Muse to WordPress: My journey into discovering WordPress is not the one-click wonder.

To be honest, I had been thinking about modernizing the website for a while, but I was terrified of it. I am a tourist guide, not a tech nerd (no offense to anybody). On paper, the site isn’t even that big—just 15 pages. But we operate in 4 languages, which means we’re actually talking about 60 pages. To a non-tech person like me, tackling that felt like a monumental challenge.

Last year, a neighbor gave me some blunt advice: “Your Adobe Muse site has been dead for like a decade, you realize it’s unsupported? You’re losing guests while we’re talking right now. Make a new one, put a blog on it, make it responsive, get a WhatsApp floating button, and for God’s sake, make it fast. Move to WordPress—it’s easy. You’ll see your site move up the rankings once you do.”

Move to WordPress, right? Easy, right? Easier said than done, apparently. But you start thinking: this guy knows his stuff, I should listen. His company really is way up there. If he says I should change, well, let’s give it a try.

Let’s try WordPress. 40% of the world is on it, so it shouldn’t be the most complicated platform. It should be like a simple “plug and play,” right?

Could I have been more wrong?

Like everybody nowadays, the first thing I did was open an AI and ask: “How to build a website in WordPress?”

For sure, it will say something like:

“Building a WordPress website for the first time is a straightforward process that does not require coding knowledge. In 2026, many hosting providers offer ‘one-click’ setups and AI assistants to simplify the initial launch.”

WOW. Amazing. I can’t believe what I am reading. Straightforward, no coding knowledge, one-click setup, and AI assistance. Exactly what I need. Could it sound any simpler? What am I waiting for, let’s do this…

So here we go. I installed WordPress, picked a “nice” tourism theme, and added a page builder. But where to start? Well, I thought, let’s start with my header. A header is just a logo and some icons. Nothing too complicated. Let’s put those icons up top: a WhatsApp, a TripAdvisor, and a GetYourGuide icon for my profiles. Like this, I figured I would get the hang of it.

Surprisingly, here came the wake-up call.

Immediately, the paywalls started. Want a TripAdvisor icon? Pay. Want a WhatsApp icon? Pay. A GetYourGuide icon? Not possible—unless you upgrade to Pro. Just a €10/month subscription.

Hello? I just got started, and you’re asking for money for the very first icon I want to put in my header.
OK, can I put my own custom-made icon in there instead?
Of course you can! Just pay for Pro.
WHAT?! It’s an icon, for heaven’s sake!

Screw that. DEINSTALL THEME. Let’s check another one. Same thing. Maybe this one? No. This one? Also no. After testing dozens of themes and spending two weeks trying to get a stupid icon in my header, I realized they all wanted money.

Two weeks into the build, my wife asked kindly:
“How’s it going honey, any progress?”
Me: “Ah, well… look honey, an empty page.”
My wife: “But honey, you’ve been on the PC for 2 weeks, like 10 hours a day.”
Me: “Yes, I know. I just haven’t really figured out how to start.”

After all those tries, I realized the “standard” path was just a tax on my wallet. I did the only thing I could: I uninstalled everything. I tried other platforms, only to discover they all are playing the exact same game. Eventually, after days of searching, I discovered you can install WordPress without all the bling-bling. So, I installed WordPress as bare-bones as I could. No builders, no theme, and NO AI ASSISTANCE.

This is where the promise of a “straightforward process that does not require coding knowledge” completely died for me.

But once I was in that bare-bones environment, the sky started clearing up. Icons and images finally got uploaded. The real work could begin. There I was, with WordPress as bare-boned as it gets. I started checking which plugins were actually needed and which weren’t, installing them only when I discovered a real need for them. Some of the first to be installed were Reusable Blocks Extended, Classic Editor, and FileOrganizer. I also decided to use the 2025 theme, as this is as empty as empty goes in WordPress. I don’t want to go too fast, but it was only later I discovered you can actually customize that—but that, that is for much later in the process 😉

Being all set up with my first humble set of plugins, I decided to make my first excursion container. I thoroughly checked what the best way to write code was, wanting to arrive at clean, super-fast code that wouldn’t age after one year of being online. I ended up with a complete CSS build-up using clamp() and var().

If you check my live code, any real developer will notice the complete overuse of !important. Sorry, but I spent 5 days fighting for every single pixel. I used !important more than any “pro” would admit, just to force the platform to respect my vision. How was I supposed to know WordPress was adding unwanted code behind my back?

It was only along the way that I discovered WordPress inherently bloats code. When I looked at my source code along the way, I saw around 10,000 lines that I didn’t write. Even not being a developer, it looked terrible. So here we went again: finding out how to stop WordPress from playing with my code.

This is where I discovered the Code Snippets plugin. This little plugin let me inject custom code to stop WordPress from playing with my mind. Whatever I couldn’t achieve the “normal” way through a plugin’s settings, I managed to force through this way. Honestly, Code Snippets was a true breakthrough for me.

As for my content, I installed ACF Fields because I wanted everything centralized in one place. I made a central page containing all my content. But when I wanted to publish it on the actual live page, nothing was visible. The most stupid part was that it was literally just one slider I had to change (‘Allow Access to Value in Editor UI’) and set the location rule correctly. If you think I figured that out on day one, guess again.

And when I finally did get them to the right place? Surprise: the free version of ACF just spit out raw code arrays instead of showing my actual text. So yes, my working environment does look odd, but once uploaded it’s correct. Honestly, I didn’t care anymore to see the text. As long uploaded it’s OK, it’s OK.

Honestly, for 90 days, I disappeared. 15-hour days. My family thought I’d lost my mind. I fought with WordPress and an AI that constantly tried to push me toward the “path of least resistance.” Not the path I wanted. (Having survived the Thomas Cook bankruptcy, a pandemic, the economic weight of a war, and fuel crises, my budget for this was exactly $0). Hence my constant refusal of paying whatever subscription they wanted.

But I struggled through. Bit by bit, page by page, actual progress started to show. Until one day, unbelievable as it sounds, all the information was in.

It wasn’t a clean victory:
💀 I broke the site 3 times.
💀 I lost a couple of weeks of work multiple times because I made a fatal error, WordPress went blank, and I had to restore. The only thing was, I forgot to back up in the heat of a coding.
💀 During the final migration, my business went dark for 48 hours.

But after an agonizing 3 months—with my back hurting like hell, my nerves completely shot, and red eyes that took a week to heal—I could finally say I did it. The build was finished.

Now came the fun part.

During those 3 months, I had read everything I possibly could. I came across the Google tools: pagespeed.web.dev, the CSP evaluator, Rich Results test, and PWA testing tools. So, after beating WordPress and its stupid bloat, I threw my website into these checks. And yes, I had red alerts here and there. But after what I had just been through, I felt confident. I knew I could fix it.

I thought I just needed to fill in some RankMath details. Wrong again. For full Rich Data implementation, you need the Pro version. Thankfully, I already had Code Snippets in my arsenal. It’s the easiest way to inject whatever schema you want, without paying for the Pro version of whatever plugin is holding you hostage.

Why was I pushing myself through even more testing? Because our excursions are rated 4.9/5. We always go that extra mile for our tourists on every single tour, and I wanted our website to go that exact same extra mile. I couldn’t live with a digital front door that didn’t reflect that standard. When you read our information, our blogs, you’ll see quality is important to us. It’s not just a word, but a goal to strive for. Whether it’s the cleaning of our buses, being on time for the pick up, the execution of our tours. In everything we do we want to excel. That is why we wanted our website to reflect all that.

But after the dust settled and all was over, my back was straight again, and my eyes were back to normal. Proud to show the result of this DIY build:

Built from scratch. Built for $0. Built with pure love.

When I checked the site and saw the final results, I frankly could not believe I was the one who built that. With these results, I made a final decision. As strange as it may sound, I decided to enter the 2026 “Website of the Year” election. It’s most probably a beauty contest, but given the build and the hard work, I could only think: why not.

Looking back, the irony of this whole ordeal is that my absolute refusal to pay a single euro ended up being my greatest advantage.
Because I didn’t want to pay whatever plugin, I was forced to learn how to write everything by myself. I inadvertently bypassed the paywalls by writing my own code. I bypassed the page builder paywalls by writing my own CSS. I even hardcoded long-tail search keywords directly into my HTML Ids.

Without realizing, my refusal to pay cleared the path to end up with a bloat free, integrated rich data, a good SEO setup and a speed which I never dreamed of. I know my code still has a lot of room for improvement, but this is as far as my nerve system could reach.

For anyone wondering how a non-tech guy actually pulled this off without a visual builder, here is exactly what is running under the hood:

• Advanced Custom Fields & Blocks for ACF Fields: For centralizing my content.
• Code Snippets: My absolute lifesaver for injecting custom code and bypassing plugin paywalls.
• Simple Custom CSS and JS: Where I fought for every single pixel.
• Classic Editor: Ditching the Gutenberg bling-bling for an environment I could actually control.
• Polylang: The only way I could manage those 60 pages across 4 languages.
• Rank Math SEO: Handling the SEO groundwork.
• Converter for Media: Converting images to WebP & AVIF to help hit that 99 Performance score.
• SpeedyCache: Caching and minification to keep the site lightning-fast.
• Contact Form 7: Simple, reliable contact forms.
• WP Mail SMTP: Making sure our inquiry emails actually arrive.
• Antispam Bee: Keeping the comment spam away.
• Loginizer & Loginizer Pro: Blocking brute-force attacks.
• Backuply & Backuply Pro: Saving my sanity after I learned the hard way why backups are essential.
• FileOrganizer & FileOrganizer Pro: Managing files directly.
• Media Sync: Scanning the uploads directory to keep the Media Library accurate.
• Reusable Blocks Extended: Extending the Gutenberg feature for better block management.

I’m not a developer. I’m a simple tourist guide who refused to accept “it looks nice and it works.” Our digital front door is finally open, and it reflects the high-end quality of the tours we run.

If you ask me now: Is it true that building a WordPress website is a straightforward process that does not require coding knowledge?

Look, the answer isn’t just a flat “no.”
It’s double. It’s a “yes” if you’re okay with people reading the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy while your site loads. It’s a “yes” if you’re down to pay for a mountain of plugin subscriptions, and it’s a “yes” if we just stop caring about electricity use altogether.
Honestly, with data centers overheating worldwide just to keep up with AI, having a lightweight, superfast site isn’t even a “feature” anymore—it’s just the most normal, responsible thing to do.
But if you really believe it’s just one click? NO. Luckily, I possessed the one thing a business rarely has: TIME. If you have the time, the nerves, and you are willing to bang your head against a wall over and over, then yes, it’s possible. But my advice? Don’t try this at home. As for me, maybe next time I migrate I’ll use Notepad++

Sincerely yours,