At some point I tried to run a few small websites dedicated for activism (couple of Wordpress instances, a forum and custom PHP code) using docker. It was time sink as updating and testing the images turned out to be highly non-trivial.
Eventually I replaced everything with a script that generated systemd units and restarted the services on changes under Debian using the Wordpress that comes with it. Then I have a test VM on my laptop and just rsync changes to the deployment host and run the deployment script there. It reduced my chores very significantly. The whole system runs on 2GB VPS. It could be reduced to 1GB if Wordpress would officially support SQLite. But I prefer to pay few more euros per month and stick to Mariadb to minimize support requirements.
Eventually I replaced everything with a script that generated systemd units and restarted the services on changes under Debian using the Wordpress that comes with it. Then I have a test VM on my laptop and just rsync changes to the deployment host and run the deployment script there. It reduced my chores very significantly. The whole system runs on 2GB VPS. It could be reduced to 1GB if Wordpress would officially support SQLite. But I prefer to pay few more euros per month and stick to Mariadb to minimize support requirements.