how are people building a website with wordpress in 2026?

cheap hosting with a one-click install, a light theme (one of the block themes, or something like generatepress or kadence), and build the pages in the block editor rather than a heavy page builder. first setting to change is permalinks to post name. plugins, keep it to five or six: an seo plugin, caching, a form, backups, maybe security. every extra plugin is something that breaks on update. for a small site that's the whole build, most of the time goes into writing the pages not the theme.