WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world, powering roughly 43% of all websites. Most of those websites are not particularly fast, not particularly secure, and not particularly well-maintained. WordPress is genuinely the right answer for some businesses and aggressively wrong for others; this page is the honest comparison.
What WordPress is good at
Four things WordPress does materially better than the static-site alternative. Editorial workflow for multi-author content teams — Editor, Author, Contributor, Subscriber roles plus the native editorial workflow handle real publication operations well. Plugin ecosystem — there is a plugin for almost every niche functional requirement, and the WordPress plugin marketplace is the deepest in the web ecosystem. Tax-and-affiliate complexity — WooCommerce with the right plugins handles tax jurisdictions, affiliate programmes and subscription-billing edge cases that custom builds have to re-implement. Content portability — WordPress's WXR export is the most complete content-migration format any platform produces.
What WordPress is bad at
Four things WordPress does materially worse than the static-site alternative. Core Web Vitals — most WordPress sites on shared hosting ship 4-second LCP and fail Cumulative Layout Shift on the mobile profile; fixing this requires substantial engineering investment that most WordPress agencies do not deliver as standard. Security — the plugin attack surface combined with the typical update-lag pattern produces a steady drip of compromises; the cost of running WordPress safely is genuinely higher than the cost of running a static site safely. Hosting cost compounding — a £15/month shared host runs the site slowly; a £80/month managed-WordPress host runs it acceptably; the maths shifts substantially once you cross from one to the other. Plugin debt — the longer a WordPress site runs, the more plugins accumulate, the harder updates become; we have seen 6-year-old WordPress sites that cannot be updated without breaking layout.
The cost reality for a typical UK SMB on WordPress
A representative example. Initial agency build: £4,200. Monthly retainer for minor edits and security: £400. WP Engine UK hosting: £40/month. Plugin licence stack (Yoast Premium, WP Rocket, Gravity Forms, Smush Pro, WooCommerce extensions if applicable): £80/month. Year-one total: £4,200 + (£400 × 12) + (£40 × 12) + (£80 × 12) = £10,440. Year-two and beyond, without the build cost: £6,240/year. Three-year all-in: £22,920. The same scope on the same-day Growth tier ships for £899 one-off plus £180/year hosting; three-year all-in £1,259. The saving is £21,661 across three years.
The migration sequence for WordPress specifically
WordPress migrations are more involved than Wix or Squarespace migrations because the source content is richer. Steps: full crawl of the existing site for the URL inventory and the live rendered content. Export via the WordPress REST API of every post, page, custom post type and taxonomy. Yoast settings extracted from the database via the REST API. Media library exported and re-uploaded to the new asset host. URL-to-URL mapping based on the existing permalink structure (we preserve the slug structure unless there is a compelling reason to change it). Schema rewrite — we hand-author the new schema layer rather than relying on Yoast's automatic generation, which is typically a quality improvement. Redirect map for any URLs that do change (rare; we usually preserve everything). Search Console submission. Day 7, 14, 30 health checks.
When WordPress is still the right call
Three scenarios where staying on WordPress is the better economic choice. First: you have an active multi-author editorial team that uses WordPress's native publication workflow and they will not move to a different CMS. Second: you depend on a WordPress plugin with genuinely no static-ecosystem equivalent — most commonly a bespoke directory plugin (LifterLMS, MemberPress) or a specialised WooCommerce extension. Third: WooCommerce running at substantial volume with deep integration into your operational stack (Trade Pro, Subscriptions, multi-vendor) where the migration cost is genuinely higher than three years of saved spend. In each case we will tell you on the brief call rather than pushing the migration anyway.
When the same-day rebuild wins
The pattern that almost always points to migration: WordPress on shared hosting, PageSpeed mobile below 50, plugin updates outstanding for more than six months, agency retainer delivering minor copy edits for £300+/month, owner not personally writing or updating content. The build pays back the migration cost inside the first three months on the retainer savings alone, and the operational footprint drops to near-zero on the new stack.