Should I Move Off WordPress?
Something on your site is not right. It got slower, or an update broke a layout, or you went to change one paragraph on the homepage and found that you could not. Somebody has probably already told you the answer is to rebuild the whole thing.
I am going to frustrate you slightly, and I would rather do that than lie to you. The answer is frequently yes. It is also frequently no. Which one you are depends on things almost nobody asks you about before quoting you for a rebuild.
There is exactly one thing I will say flatly, with no qualification. A WordPress site can never be as fast, as lean or as secure as the same site hand-coded. That is not a slight and it is not really an opinion, it is arithmetic: you are running a system built to host anything, so it carries the parts you use and the parts you do not. I have made that whole case elsewhere and I am not going to re-run it here.
But here is the part that matters, and it is the reason this post exists. That gap is not automatically your problem. Most of what follows is me arguing that it might not be yours, which is an odd thing for somebody who sells the alternative to spend a morning writing.
The useful way to think about it is that WordPress fits a range. Below that range you are paying for a machine you never switch on. Above it, the thing you want does not exist and you are quietly trimming your plans to fit. Inside it, which is most of you, the platform was never the problem in the first place.
Why WordPress exists, and I am not going to pretend otherwise
Take an online shop, because it is the clearest example there is.
Somewhere in that site there is a payment gateway. There is PCI compliance, which is a real obligation with real consequences and not a checkbox. There is inventory that has to stay true, product pages that behave like products rather than blog posts, tax rules, shipping integrations that talk to carriers who change their minds. Every one of those is a project. Several of them carry liability if you get them wrong.
A small business cannot fund that from a blank file. Not because the work is impossible, but because it is months of it, and the bill would be a serious fraction of what the shop makes in a year. That is why WordPress exists, and a good developer reaching for it there is not cutting a corner, they are doing their job. The client gets what they actually need at a price that does not empty the account, and the liability sits with software that thousands of shops have already stress-tested.
I sell the custom alternative and I will still tell you that. If somebody in my position tells you every business should be hand-coded from nothing, check whether they have ever had to quote a payment integration.
Below the floor: paying for a machine you never switch on
Now the first of the two places the platform genuinely is the problem, and this one has nothing to do with who built your site.
WordPress has to be global. It is built to work in as many situations as it possibly can, because that is how it becomes the thing everybody uses, and that generality is not free. It arrives able to host anything: a database, an admin system, user accounts, a comment system, a plugin architecture, an update cycle for all of it.
If your site is a handful of pages that change twice a year, you are carrying every bit of that and using almost none of it. You pay for it in weight your visitors wait through, in a queue of monthly updates for code that never runs on your site, and in doors you did not know your building had. Nobody attacks your five pages. They attack the plugin.
This is the cleanest yes in the whole post. A simple brochure site on WordPress is a refrigerated truck with a lift gate and a second fuel tank, bought to carry one box of paper across town. It will do it. You are just paying to own a truck.
Past the ceiling: when the plugins simply do not do it
The other end, and it sneaks up on people.
At some point the thing you need does not exist. There is no plugin that does it, or the three that claim to each do about sixty percent of it and none of them agree with each other. You have gone past what the ecosystem can hand you.
At that point you have a real choice, and both halves of it are legitimate. You can make concessions with what you asked for, or you can pay for the custom-built option. Plenty of businesses should take the first one: the requirement turns out to be a nice-to-have, and trimming it costs less than building it. But you should at least know you are making that trade, because the thing I see most often is a business that trimmed the same requirement four years running without ever once pricing the alternative.
Think you might be in this category? Send me a message and I will tell you honestly what I would do if it were my business, including when the answer is that the compromise is the better deal.
In between, and this is most of you, it is not the platform
Here is the part that will frustrate the people who came here for a straight answer.
Most of the time a complex site can run on WordPress perfectly well, if whoever builds it has the chops to do it properly. Complexity is not the thing that breaks these sites. It never was.
This is where you see the difference between somebody who installs plugins and somebody who develops. A developer works with the platform and with the plugins, using what they already do and extending them where they were designed to be extended, and the result feels like one thing. Somebody who only installs plugins, handed the same custom request, ends up fighting the built-in behaviour of the tools they chose: overriding things, working around things, bolting a second plugin on to correct the first.
And you can see it. Put the two approaches side by side and the difference is not subtle, even if you cannot name what you are looking at. One site behaves consistently everywhere. The other has a checkout that looks like a different company built it, a form that styles itself differently on two pages, a mobile layout that works right up until the one template nobody re-checked.
The online shop makes this concrete too. A lot of the custom work I am asked to look at turns out to be somebody rebuilding, badly, something the shop software already did properly, because nobody sat down and learned what they had bought.
I am not against plugins, and I want to head that off now. A plugin chosen because the site needed the thing it does is a good decision. A plugin installed in place of a decision is how you end up with thirty of them. The difference is not the software, it is whether anybody was thinking.
Which is also the strongest argument against moving that I know, and it is the one nobody quoting you a rebuild will make: if the same hands build the next one, you have bought the same site in a different wrapper. Changing platform fixes the sort of problem that came from the platform, and almost nothing you are unhappy about came from there.
So why does it feel like it is falling apart?
Because nobody chose this. Not in one go, and not on purpose, and that is the part worth understanding before you go looking for somewhere to lay the blame.
What actually happened is a sequence of small, reasonable yeses, each one made by somebody sensible on a Tuesday. A theme was bought because it had the right homepage. A page builder went in because the theme could not do the about page. A plugin arrived for the contact form, another for the slider, another for the cookie banner, one for search engine optimisation, then a second one because the first was confusing. A caching plugin went in at the end to fix the speed problem all the others had quietly created.
Not one of those was the wrong call in the moment. Every one of them was the cheapest available answer that day. Together they are why the homepage now weighs six megabytes and takes eight seconds on a phone, and there is no single decision in that story you could go back and reverse to undo it.
I have written about the general version of this over here, because it is not a WordPress disease. It is what happens to any site where nobody was ever in a position to say no. WordPress simply makes saying yes very easy, which is at once its best feature and how you ended up reading this.
When staying is the right answer
Three questions. If you like all three of your answers, close this tab and spend the money somewhere it will show.
Is it fast enough on a phone, on a normal connection, away from your office wifi? Has it been maintained? Has it broken in the past year?
The middle one is the one people hesitate on, and the hesitation is the answer. If you do not know whether your site has been maintained, it has not been.
Two more worth asking, because they catch the things the first three miss. When you ask for a change, does it actually happen? Asking somebody is not the problem, and I want to be clear about that, because plenty of perfectly healthy sites have a developer on the other end of an email and that is the arrangement working exactly as intended. The problem is asking and not getting it: the reply that never comes, the small change that takes five weeks, the quote that arrives shaped like a hostage note. And second, does the site still look like the business you are now? That one has nothing to do with WordPress, and it is the most common honest reason to rebuild anything.
Good answers all round mean the platform is doing its job, and there is no version of a rebuild that improves a site nobody is struggling with. The honest failure mode of my end of this industry is selling one anyway. A site that works is not a problem waiting to be solved.
Count it yourself, it takes ten minutes
Do not take a quote for this part. Four things, all of them a screen you click, and there is no code involved in any of it. Log in to your site and go looking.
One. Plugins, then Installed Plugins. How many are there, and how many are actually switched on? Plugins sitting in that list deactivated are the interesting ones. They are things somebody tried, decided against, and never took out, which tells you what the standard of care has been.
Two. The Updates screen. How many things are asking to be updated, and roughly how long have they been asking? This is the maintenance question with a number attached to it, and it is the single most honest reading you can take of your own site in under a minute.
Three. Your mobile score. Put your busiest page into Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Read the mobile number and ignore literally everything else on that page. The rest of that report is written for developers and it will make your site sound like it is on fire, which it probably is not. You want the one number, and you want the mobile one rather than the desktop one, because the desktop score is flattering and nobody is discovering you from a desk.
Four. What it is actually built with. Two places to look. Appearance, then Themes, tells you the theme your site runs on. Then back to the plugins list, looking for names like Elementor, Divi Builder, WPBakery or Beaver Builder. Those are page builders, and if the theme itself is called Divi, that is the same answer arriving from the other direction.
Finding one of those does not condemn your site, and I do not want that to be the thing you take away. Plenty of sites built that way are looked after and perfectly fine. What it tells you is where the ceiling is, and that a fairly large decision about how your site would work was made before anybody asked you what you needed.
Read the four together rather than one at a time, because that is the whole trick. Nine plugins, nothing waiting to update and a decent mobile score is not a site that needs rebuilding, it is a site that needs an afternoon of tidying. Forty plugins, twenty-three updates that have been waiting since last spring, a score in the thirties and a page builder underneath it all is not four problems. It is one problem, wearing four different hats.
One more, and it is the quietest of the lot. If you cannot get into your own site at all, and nobody can tell you who can, you have just answered the maintenance question without needing any of the rest of this.
The four situations where moving actually pays
These are the ones where staying is the expensive option, and the cost never arrives as an invoice, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed for years.
- Nobody is looking after it, and nobody is coming. The person who assembled it moved on, or stopped replying, or the arrangement quietly ended and was never replaced. Paying somebody to look after your website is not the problem, it is the normal and correct way to own one. Having nobody is the problem, and a site with nobody does not stay still, it degrades.
- The design has a ceiling and you have started planning around it. If “the theme cannot do that” has quietly shaped what you were willing to ask for, the tool is now deciding what your business looks like. That matters most for the businesses whose work is the pitch, where the site is the portfolio rather than a brochure sitting in front of it.
- The maintenance has become the product. Licences, a security subscription, a caching layer bought to fix a speed problem the plugins caused, and somebody on retainer to keep the arrangement agreeing with itself. Add up twelve months of that and hold it next to a number for building the thing properly once. Sometimes it is closer than anybody expects, and when it is close, the rebuild is already paid for.
- It has actually broken, more than once. Hacked, or taken down by an update nobody chose to run. Once is bad luck. Twice is the stack telling you it has more moving parts than anyone is genuinely maintaining.
One of those is a reason to look into it. Three of them is a reason to move.
What moving actually involves
The honest version, since most pages answering this question were written by people hoping to send you a quote at the end of it.
The code is the fast part. The slow part is the content. Every page has to be looked at, and a migration is usually the first time in years that anybody reads the whole site start to finish, which is generally when it becomes clear that a third of it should not come across at all. Budget for writing, not just for building.
Then the redirects, and this is where migrations genuinely go wrong. Every old address has to point at its new one. Miss that and you do not only lose the rankings you had, you lose every link anybody ever sent you, and the sites that quietly disappear after a redesign almost always disappear here rather than in the design. Expect a wobble in the search results for a few weeks even when it is done properly. It comes back. Done improperly it does not, and no amount of new design makes up for it.
You are also not obliged to move all of it at once, and you are not obliged to end up with nothing to edit. That second one is worth saying plainly, because the pitch you usually hear is absolute in both directions. A content editor can go in as one part of a build rather than as the platform the entire site is assembled from, and anywhere publishing genuinely matters, it should.
What you keep either way
Your domain is yours. Your content is yours. Whatever you decide here, that does not change, and if anybody in this conversation implies otherwise, that is the thing to be suspicious of rather than the platform.
What you are really choosing between is two ways of paying. One is a small amount every month, indefinitely, to keep a stack of other people’s software agreeing with itself. The other is more at the start, for something with fewer moving parts to disagree in the first place. Neither one is the honourable choice. They are just shaped differently, and the second only starts to make sense once the first has stopped being cheap.
If you want the long version of the case for starting from an empty file, it is the argument I make here, and this is what it looks like as a process.
I am not going to give you a number
You came here for a yes or a no, and I have given you a range, a floor, a ceiling and a lecture about who built your site. I know how that reads.
But there are genuinely too many factors to hand you a straight answer from here, and I would rather leave you slightly frustrated than confidently wrong. Everybody publishing a firm yes to this question is selling the migration at the end of it. That is not a coincidence, and it is worth noticing before you take any of their advice, mine included.
The single biggest factor in how your next site turns out is not the platform you pick. It is who you hand it to, which is a whole subject of its own, and the next thing I am going to write about.
In the meantime: think your site might be ready to graduate from WordPress? Think it might not be? Send me a message and I will take a look and tell you what I actually see, including the fairly regular case where what I see is a site worth keeping.