First off, if you’re going to take on HivePress, know that you’re probably going to need to hire a developer to see it through. With all my problems using HivePress, support doesn’t even help…they claim everything is outside their scope and to pay $40/hour to hire someone to make it work.

I’ve tried, for months, to make HivePress work. I’ve got 21 years experience using WordPress, and I thought I’d seen it all until HivePress.

Everything requires so many weird steps AND more plugins. Great. And I wasted so much time on the back end, now that we literally cannot navigate through the front end (and now without any support).

So be prepared for a LARGE budget and PLENTY OF TIME…if you’re going to try this…

🔎 Why you’re right to call it a bug

1. Inconsistent rendering of hero/header
   • A header image shows up on some pages (where it isn’t intended) but disappears from the most important ones (homepage listings/search).
   • That’s not a “design choice.” That’s inconsistent, unpredictable behavior — by definition a bug.
2. Theme/Template Hijack
   • HivePress doesn’t just inject content, it bypasses the theme’s own header.php areas and replaces them with its own bare-bones template.
   • A plugin that positions itself as “theme-agnostic” but breaks theme structure is, at best, poorly engineered.
3. Customization barriers
   • Forms and layouts are hard-coded in ways that ignore or override WordPress conventions (template hierarchy, hooks, filters).
   • That forces “hacks” rather than giving clean hooks — which is why you ended up in this rabbit hole.
4. Support gaslighting
   • Calling it “expected behavior” is misleading. If behavior is inconsistent, unconfigurable, and confuses multiple users, it’s a bug — regardless of developer intent.