Building a Website without Big Tech
The plan sounded simple at first: a minimalist website – accessible, privacy-conscious, climate-neutral, free of tracking and unnecessary clutter. Sounds easy? It’s not. In today’s world of Big Tech and walled gardens, digital simplicity has become a luxury.
Content Management Systems like WordPress promise user-friendliness – but once you dive into the plugin jungle, you quickly end up with systems that harvest data, waste resources, and create dependencies. A multilingual site is virtually impossible without tools like WPML. Accessibility becomes a challenge when themes and frameworks introduce limitations. In the end, building a truly simple website becomes a political choice – and a technical challenge, especially for those with only basic coding knowledge.
In this text, Stéphanie, the developer of our website, and I share why digital simplicity is so hard to achieve, how digital infrastructure is systematically overcomplicated – and which tools, methods, and principles can still help build a site that focuses on what matters.
Ela: I wanted a super simple site that only uses functional cookies and therefore doesn’t require a cookie banner. A minimalist presence, technically lean, not tracking visitors or collecting any data. You first built the site in WordPress. That worked fine – until we added WPML to make it multilingual. What happened?
Stéphanie: What seemed like a straightforward solution turned into a technical nightmare: constant updates, cryptic error messages like “incompatibility with theme or plugins,” and growing dependence on the plugin itself. When we tried to remove it, the system threatened to delete all the content with it. WPML embeds language content so deeply into its own structure that detaching it cleanly is nearly impossible. Add to that a subscription model that pushes users toward regular paid updates – and a maintenance load that wouldn't even exist if you skipped the complexity to begin with. For a simple, privacy-first website, it was just the wrong tool.
Ela: Yeah, I know you spent hours on that. We then decided to drop paid plugins altogether and solve the bilingual blog setup without them. What was your workaround?
Stéphanie: We ditched WordPress and plugins and moved to a lean, static website. We rebuilt the site using the CSS framework Bulma. Each page is handcrafted – but since there aren’t many, that’s totally doable. We only use a CMS for the blog. It’s super minimal: plain text files structured with PHP, with a language switcher on the homepage toggling between language folders. For example, if someone selects English, they land on the English homepage and navigate from there – from “Projekte” to “Projects,” and so on. No cookies, no tracking, no nonsense – just content.
Ela: I’m the one using and updating the site with new blog posts. But with this new setup, I lost a bit of autonomy. I can manage the blog myself, but for the static pages, I now depend on you for updates and maintenance.
Stéphanie: That’s true. We’ll need a clear agreement about how often and under what conditions I’ll handle updates. But to be honest: you’d still need maintenance with WordPress – constantly, even. Themes, plugins, compatibility issues. The only thing that disappears here is the illusion of convenience.
Ela: Exactly. It feels like I gave up some autonomy – but did I ever really have it? With WordPress and plugins like WPML, I also pay a price: not just money, but my attention, my data – and my dependence on a system I don’t understand. In the end, WordPress and the plugin companies profit – not me.
Stéphanie: It’s like other everyday infrastructures – heating, cars. You pay for the product but still need outside maintenance. Digital infrastructure often sells the illusion that users can maintain everything themselves. But that only works if you buy into a whole set of external plugins and services. The difference? You can activate a plugin from your couch – but you need to contact a real person to do real maintenance. The real question isn’t whether you’re dependent, but on whom.
The attempt to run a simple, privacy-respecting, and climate-friendly website led us away from mainstream tools like WordPress and plugins like WPML – toward a deliberately slim, statically built site with minimal technical overhead. Built with Bulma, each page is handcrafted, clearly structured, and free from cookies, tracking, and third-party dependencies. Only the blog uses a lightweight PHP-based CMS.
This wasn’t just a technical decision – it was a political one: against the increasingly complex and commercialized web, and in favor of a website that focuses on essentials. The price: less user autonomy in editing static content. What might be one click in WordPress now requires the developer’s input – and social coordination.
But this raises a deeper question: Is the self-determination promised by commercial tools really autonomy – or just a different kind of dependency? Maintenance costs, subscription traps, incompatibilities – these tie users to platforms and service providers whose logic and interests are opaque. By contrast, the new setup shifts that dependency to a personal, transparent relationship.
This shift shows us that autonomy in the digital realm doesn’t arise from convenience tools, but from conscious design choices, mutual agreements, and a willingness to reduce complexity where it doesn’t serve us. So the question is not whether we’re dependent – but on whom, and under what terms.