There's a moment in every project where someone suggests the shiny new framework that hit the front page last week. It's tempting. It's also usually a mistake — at least when someone else has to live with the codebase.
Client sites have a different lifespan
Your side project can be rewritten next month. A client's site needs to survive handovers, plugin updates, and the developer who inherits it in three years. Every exotic dependency is a future support ticket.
What "boring" actually buys you
- Documentation that exists. Ten years of Stack Overflow answers beat a Discord server with 400 members.
- Hiring flexibility. Any developer can pick up a mainstream stack; few can pick up last year's experiment.
- Predictable failure modes. Old tools break in known ways. New tools break in exciting ways, at 2 a.m.
When new tech earns its place
Boring-by-default isn't never-new. Adopt fresh tools when they solve a problem you demonstrably have — not a problem the launch video says you have. A build tool that cuts deploy times from ten minutes to one changes your team's day. A rewrite that produces the same site in a newer syntax changes nothing but the risk profile.
The one-sentence test
If you can't explain what the new tool fixes in one sentence a client would understand, you don't need it yet. Choose the stack that will still be answering support questions when the contract renews.