Leaving WordPress · Six exits WordPress alternatives, sorted by the reason you're leaving.
WordPress isn't a platform you subscribe to. It's software you install on hosting you rent, and somebody has to run it, so what you should use instead depends on which part of running it stopped working. I'm Willis, I run Another Monday out of Baltimore, and I built on WordPress for years before I ever charged anybody for a website.
Six people leave WordPress for six different reasons. Only one of these answers is yours.
Every WordPress fact on this page came off WordPress.org's own documentation and WordPress.com's own support and pricing pages, read September 10, 2026. Platforms change their rules, so check yours before you act on any of it.
What should I use instead of WordPress? It depends which part broke.
The best WordPress alternative for a small business is a website builder like Squarespace or Wix when nobody in the business is going to own the updates, and a custom-coded website when search is the channel you're counting on and the theme and plugin stack are what's in the way. WordPress.com is the third answer and the one that keeps getting skipped, because it's hosted WordPress: same software, somebody else running the hosting, the updates and the backups.
Which of those three is yours comes down to three questions, and none of them is about a feature list. I ask all three on the first call, and about half the time the answers add up to leaving the site exactly where it is.
Who has been doing the updates?
If the honest answer is nobody, that is the whole decision and none of the rest matters much. WordPress hands you the plugins, the core updates, the backups and the security, and every advantage it has is conditional on somebody owning that list every month.
What do you want to change yourself?
Hours, prices and a photo on a Sunday night is one answer and it points at a hosted platform. A new page whenever the business adds a service is a different answer, and it points at whoever writes your pages.
Where does the work come from?
If it comes from referrals and repeat customers, your website proves you are real and almost anything does that job. If it comes from Google, the ceiling on what your pages can be is suddenly the most expensive thing about the site.
Shopify is worth naming for one specific case: if the business is really an online store and the website is the shopfront around it, that's where ecommerce tends to land once it outgrows a plugin. I've never shipped one, so I'll point at the road and leave the review to somebody who has. Ghost, Webflow, Drupal and Joomla turn up on every list you'll read and I haven't put a live business on any of them either, which is why they aren't ranked anywhere on this page.
The question that decides this is who was meant to be doing the updates.
Six reasons people leave, and six different places they should go.
Open the one that sounds like you. I've been on the wrong end of most of these on somebody's live site.
Nobody has been patching it A hosted platform
Core updates, plugin updates, backups and security are a standing monthly job, and on the small business sites I get called into there is usually no name against it. That is the trade WordPress makes with you: it hands you everything, and then it hands you the list. If nobody in the business is going to own that list, the exit is a website builder where the vendor carries it as part of what you already pay. WordPress.com counts here and it is the one people skip, because its own support pages say updates, backups and free domain SSL are handled automatically on their side, while self-hosted WordPress depends on your host and hosting package.
Every feature is another plugin Fewer moving parts
A contact form, an SEO plugin, a cache, a gallery, a booking widget: every one of those is a third party plugin with its own author, its own update cycle and its own way of arguing with the one sitting next to it, and none of them knows the others exist. Two things go wrong from there. An update lands and a page stops behaving, or an author walks away and the feature quietly stops being maintained under a site nobody is watching. If that is what is pushing you, what you want is fewer moving parts: a hosted platform where the features are the vendor's problem, or a coded site where the only thing running is what somebody put there deliberately.
The developer disappeared The ownership question first
This one gets called a WordPress problem and it is not one. The person who built it is gone, nobody knows the hosting login, and the domain is registered to an email address that stopped working two jobs ago. Do not pick a destination yet. Get four answers first: who holds the hosting account, who holds the domain registrar login, who owns the Google Analytics property, and who owns the Tag Manager container. That is the first thing I ask on any takeover, because those four answers decide how the move runs and how much of it you already control.
The hosting bill turned up again A number you can know in advance
WordPress the software is free and open source and always has been. WordPress hosting is not, and the renewal is usually what starts the conversation, because a figure lands in the inbox and nobody in the business can say what it is buying. I am not going to print a hosting range at you. I have one real client hosting arrangement in front of me and no invoice figure I would stand behind, and a made-up range is worse than no range. What I will tell you is that a renewal date is a real deadline rather than a preference, and on the takeover I am running now it is the thing setting the calendar. What a rebuild gets quoted at in the market, against what a monthly plan runs, is on website redesign cost.
You want to edit your own pages A hosted platform
The WordPress admin is a content management system and not a page editor, and those are two different products. You can bolt a page builder on top and turn it into one, and then the builder is another thing with its own updates and its own opinions about your pages. If what you want is to change your hours and your prices at ten at night without asking anybody, this is the exit where WordPress loses and the drag and drop website builders genuinely win, because that is the job they were built for. From the Squarespace side, I wrote up Squarespace alternatives, and what the platform keeps. From the Wix side, Wix alternatives, and what Wix will not hand back.
It won't rank and won't get lighter Code you own
People blame WordPress for this one and WordPress is mostly not the thing in the way. What sets the ceiling is the theme, the page builder and the plugin stack sitting on top of it, and on a site somebody inherited, all three were picked by a person who is no longer around to explain them. Swapping the theme on a live site is closer to a rebuild than to a settings change, so the cheap version of the fix usually is not cheap. When search is a channel you are counting on and the stack is what is standing in front of it, the exit is code you own. I will not argue that one on a speed score, mine or anybody else's.
Those six cover almost everybody who goes looking at WordPress alternatives, and they don't point at the same place. That's the part a ranked list of ten platforms can't do for you, because a list has to pick a winner and the winner changes with the reason. Work out which row is yours and most of the decision is already made.
Answer the why first. The where answers itself.
WordPress.org and WordPress.com are two different products.
WordPress.org is the free software you install on hosting you pay for yourself. WordPress.com is a company that runs that software for you and bills you monthly. Same name, same engine underneath, two completely different deals, and the difference decides most of what people mean when they ask what WordPress is like to live with.
| What you're comparing | WordPress.org, self-hosted | WordPress.com |
|---|---|---|
| Who hosts it | You must find and pay for a hosting provider yourself | Managed hosting is built in, and publishes the site for you |
| Updates, backups and SSL | Depends on your host and hosting package | Handled automatically |
| Plugins | Install whatever you want, and own what that costs you | On every paid plan: Personal, Premium, Business, Commerce |
| What it costs | The software is free. Hosting is a bill you pay somebody | $0, $4, $8, $25 or $45 a month on the yearly rate |
Personal, Premium, Business and Commerce are WordPress.com's own plan names, and those four prices are the yearly billing rate their pricing page shows by default. Paying month to month costs more on every tier. There's a free plan with no expiration date underneath all of it, and their support pages say installing plugins is available on all four paid plans.
Which makes the sentence almost nobody says out loud worth saying here. WordPress.com is already a hosted WordPress alternative to self-hosted WordPress. If the only thing pushing you out is that nobody wants to run a server and apply updates, you can keep the software, keep your content in a format it already understands, and hand the hosting to somebody who does that for a living.
Free software, and a bill you pay somebody anyway.
Which of the six is yours?
Send me the link to the WordPress site and one line about what made you start looking. I read the site and look at who you're up against before I answer.
- 450K+ search impressions across the sites we manage
- 5,800+ organic search clicks across the sites we manage
- 600+ leads and booking requests across the sites we manage
Last 90 days, across the sites and Search Console/GA4 accounts Another Monday manages. Figures as of August 2026.
Can you export a WordPress site? Your writing, yes. Your website, no.
This is the friendliest exit of any platform I've moved a business off, and it still isn't the whole site.
WordPress's own documentation says the export tool creates one XML file, called WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR, and that it will contain your posts, pages, custom post types, comments, custom fields, categories, tags, custom taxonomies and users.
Read that list again for what it names, because that's the useful part. Your theme isn't in there, and neither is the design it produced, or your plugin settings, or your media files, which come off the server separately. So the file hands you everything you ever typed, in a documented format other WordPress sites import without a conversion step, and the site itself gets made again by a person on the other side.
That's more generous than the hosted builders manage, and if you're weighing those two instead, the full inventories sit on their own pages. I put both through it row by row in Wix vs Squarespace, if those two are the shortlist.
What the export doesn't tell you is which of your pages were earning anything, and that's the list that actually decides a move. It comes out of your sitemap and Search Console, one row per URL with the search it's already showing up for, and it gets written down before anybody touches a design.
WordPress exports your content. It doesn't export your site.
Where WordPress still wins, including against a site I'd code for you.
I custom-code websites for a living, which makes me the wrong person to ask. These five are true anyway.
The ceiling is higher than anything a hosted builder gives you, and it's yours. Hosting, plugins, structured data, the way a page is put together, all of it is editable, and nobody's settings panel decides how far you can go. Your content is portable too, in a documented format that other sites running the same software import without a conversion step. And it's free and open source software, so the licence costs nothing, which is not nothing when you're starting out.
Then the one that matters most, and it's the strongest honest argument against hiring me. W3Techs measured WordPress at 40.3% of all websites, and 58.8% of all websites whose content management system is known, as of September 10, 2026. Among sites running a content management system at all, that's closer to six in ten than to half. You can hire almost anybody to work on it, and the pool of people who could pick up my code tomorrow is a great deal smaller than that.
A custom-coded site also has no do-it-yourself editor unless somebody wires one in, and WordPress has had one for twenty years. And on money: a hosting bill against a plan that starts at $800 a month is not a close comparison, and the cheaper one is the right call for plenty of businesses.
Every one of those advantages comes with the same condition attached. They hold while somebody owns the upkeep, and they stop holding the month nobody does. That's the trade, said as plainly as I can say it, and it's the reason the hosted website builders exist: the vendor carries the updates, the backups and the security, and the site is live in days. If Squarespace is where you're headed and you want to know what the platform can and can't do for search once you're on it, that's how far Squarespace takes you on search.
You can hire almost anybody to work on WordPress. That's the best argument against hiring me.
What taking over a WordPress site involves.
A painting company's WordPress site is coming over to me right now, on the Avada theme with Bluehost hosting, and the shape of that job is the same on every inherited site I've walked into. What a trade actually needs once it lands somewhere new is its own subject, and I wrote it up in websites for painters, collision shops and the trades. Before anything gets designed or moved, four things get checked while the old site is still up and still paid for.
Who holds the four logins
Hosting, the domain registrar, the Google Analytics property and the Tag Manager container. On an inherited site those are rarely all in one place, and every one of them is easier to sort out while the old site is still up and paid for.
What the sitemap actually lists
I pull the sitemap first and read every address in it. On a site that has changed hands there is usually at least one URL in there nobody meant to publish, and it is a five minute check that keeps turning things up.
What your pages are already emitting
A third party SEO plugin writes structured data onto your pages whether anybody asked it to or not, and what it writes is a setting somebody chose rather than a law of nature. Worth reading what is on there now before deciding it is fine.
What the old site leaves behind
Files a WordPress site served under /wp-content/uploads/ can stay indexed long after the site itself has gone. I have watched exactly that draw impressions for a business whose site left WordPress before I ever met them, alongside old page addresses nobody had redirected.
None of that is exotic and none of it is WordPress being difficult. It's what small businesses hand me when a site has changed hands a couple of times, and doing it first is what keeps a move from turning into a scavenger hunt in week three. The old site stays live and paid for until the new one has been checked page by page.
When a custom-coded website is the honest answer.
Custom code earns its money in one situation and it's a narrow one. Three things have to be true at the same time, and if any of them isn't, staying where you are is the cheaper answer and I'll say so.
Search is a channel you are counting on
Not a channel you would like to have one day. Somebody is typing what you sell into Google right now and picking from the first handful of results, and you want to be in that handful.
The stack is what is in the way
You have already done the obvious things and the page still cannot be what the search wants it to be. That is a ceiling, and a ceiling is the only version of this problem a rebuild actually solves.
Enough work rides on the site
A rebuild means a stretch of movement in Google while it re-reads everything. That is a fair trade when the site brings in real work and a bad one when it does not, so this is the condition people skip.
When all three line up, the website gets made inside a monthly plan rather than billed as a project: $800 a month at two pages, $1,550 at four, $3,500 at ten, at a declining rate per page, on a three month minimum and then month to month. Nobody gets a separate invoice for the website itself. Moving what you already have is quoted once I've looked at it, because what you're moving decides the size of the job and a number invented before I've seen the site is how people end up with a change order.
What that work covers, what comes with it and what it deliberately leaves out is on the small business website design page.
I talk more people out of this than into it.
Send me the site. We'll work out whether it's WordPress or the pages.
Grab 30 minutes with WillisWho's telling you this, and what I've run on WordPress.
I built on Wix and WordPress for years before I ever charged anybody for a website, then spent a long stretch on Squarespace and put more than 20 small business websites on it, inside 25 or so in total. I'm a Squarespace Circle Gold member. My own work is custom-coded now, and I'll still put a small business on Squarespace when that's the right call for them.
On WordPress specifically you're getting the honest shape rather than a headline number, because I don't have a big one. Years of building on it before this, a men's coaching practice I took off WordPress and put onto Squarespace, and a painting contractor I moved off WordPress once already, watched go back to it with another provider, and am now moving onto custom code. That's three moves off it, and I'd rather you had the real number than a vague claim about hundreds. The painter going back is worth sitting with for a second: leaving a platform is not the same as staying gone, and the reason people land back on WordPress is almost always that somebody else was doing the updating. It's more than a review desk has and it's less than a WordPress shop has, so weigh what I tell you accordingly. The rest of my migrations came off other platforms, and the local service businesses behind them are listed with live links on the marketing clients page.
What that does buy you is somebody with nothing riding on which way you go. I don't sell hosting, I don't resell a platform, and I've been stuck inside enough of them to have no favourite to push. The rest of the background, the teaching and the credentials sit on the local marketing expert page.
WordPress alternatives, the questions owners ask me.
Why are people moving away from WordPress?
People move away from WordPress because the upkeep it hands you never got assigned to anybody. Core updates, plugin updates, backups and security are a standing monthly job, and a site with nobody on that job starts breaking in small ways that nobody notices until a form stops sending. The other four reasons I hear are plugin sprawl, a developer who disappeared with the logins, a hosting renewal nobody can explain, and wanting to edit your own pages without asking a person.
Is WordPress outdated?
WordPress is not outdated and the numbers say so plainly. W3Techs put it at 40.3% of all websites and 58.8% of all websites whose content management system is known, as of September 10, 2026. What ages on a WordPress site is not the software: it is the theme somebody picked years ago, the page builder stacked on top of it and the plugins nobody has updated since. Those are the parts that make an old WordPress site feel old.
Is anyone still using WordPress?
WordPress runs more of the web than anything else. W3Techs measured it at 40.3% of all websites, and 58.8% of all websites whose content management system is known, as of September 10, 2026. Among sites that run a content management system at all, that is closer to six in ten than to half. Anybody telling you it is finished is arguing with a number they have not looked up.
What is the best alternative to WordPress for a small business?
The best alternative to WordPress for a small business depends on which part of running it stopped working. When nobody is going to own the updates, a website builder like Squarespace or Wix is the honest answer, because the vendor carries that job inside the subscription. When search is what you are paying for and the theme and plugin stack are the ceiling, a custom-coded website is the answer. And WordPress.com is the third one almost nobody names: it is hosted WordPress, same software, somebody else running the hosting and the updates.
What is the difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com?
WordPress.org is the free software you install on hosting you pay for yourself, and WordPress.com is a hosted service that runs that software for you. WordPress.com's own support pages put it plainly: it includes managed hosting that publishes your website to the world, while with the self-hosted version you must find and pay for a hosting provider yourself. Same split on maintenance. WordPress.com says updates, backups and free domain SSL are handled automatically; self-hosted depends on your host and hosting package. Both were read on September 10, 2026.
Is there a free alternative to WordPress?
Free alternatives to WordPress exist, and a free tier is not a free website. WordPress itself is already free, open source software, so the licence was never what you were paying for. What costs money is hosting, the person who writes the pages, and the person who fixes whatever breaks, and none of those three get cheaper because the plan says zero. WordPress.com does publish a free plan with no expiration date, which is worth knowing if what you need is somewhere to start.
Is WordPress hard to maintain?
WordPress is not hard to maintain and it is easy to neglect, which is a different problem and the more common one. The learning curve on the everyday work is short: apply core updates, apply plugin updates, keep backups running, and check that the site still does what it did before. Nobody needs to be a developer for most of that. What sinks small businesses is that the job is monthly and invisible, so it slides until something visible breaks.
Is WordPress secure?
WordPress is as secure as its upkeep, which is the honest version of the answer. The software itself is maintained by a large project and patched regularly, and most of the trouble on small business sites comes in through an out-of-date plugin or a login nobody rotated. On the hosted side, WordPress.com's own documentation says updates, backups and free domain SSL are handled automatically, while self-hosted WordPress depends on your host and hosting package. That difference is the whole security conversation in one line.
Do I need a developer to run a WordPress site?
You do not need a developer to run a WordPress site, and you do need somebody who will log in every month. Publishing a page, changing your hours and swapping a photo are all things an owner can learn in an afternoon. Where a developer earns their money is a plugin conflict after an update, a theme change on a live site, and anything to do with how the pages are structured for search. If nobody in the business wants that second list, that is worth knowing before you pick where to go.
Can you export a WordPress site?
You can export your WordPress content, and the file is not your website. WordPress's own documentation says the export tool creates one XML file, called WordPress eXtended RSS or WXR, containing your posts, pages, custom post types, comments, custom fields, categories, tags, custom taxonomies and users. The theme, the design, your plugin settings and your media files are not in that list. So what comes out is everything you wrote, and the site itself gets made again by a person on the other side.
Do you own your website on WordPress?
You own a self-hosted WordPress site outright, which is the real difference between it and a hosted builder. The software is free and open source, the content is yours, the files sit on hosting in your name, and no subscription can switch the site off. That ownership comes attached to the upkeep, and the two are the same deal seen from two ends. WordPress.com is the hosted version of the same product, so it works the way hosted platforms work: stop paying and the site stops being published.
Will I lose my Google rankings if I move off WordPress?
You keep your rankings moving off WordPress when every old address lands on its replacement in one hop and the new page covers the same ground. Positions move around for a few weeks while Google re-reads the site, and that part is normal rather than a problem. The rankings that genuinely get lost belong to pages nobody wrote down before the switch, which is why the full URL list comes out of the sitemap and Search Console before any design work starts.
What does it cost to move a website off WordPress?
The website itself never arrives as a project invoice, because building it is part of the monthly plan. Plans start at $800 a month for two pages, run $1,550 at four and $3,500 at ten, at a declining rate per page, on a three month minimum and then month to month. The marketing services page lays out what each one includes. Moving what you already have is quoted once I have looked at the site, because a five page site and a forty page site with a store are not the same amount of work.
When should you stay on WordPress?
Stay on WordPress when somebody in the business genuinely owns the upkeep and the site is doing its job. If the updates get applied, the backups run, the pages load fine on a phone and the work is coming in, you have the highest ceiling of any option on this page and you are already paying for it. Stay put as well if what is bothering you is one feature, because weighing one annoyance against rebuilding every page you have usually settles itself. I talk more people out of moving than into it.
Not sure which of the six is yours?
Call or text me, tell me what your WordPress site is doing and what made you start looking. Plenty of these calls end with me saying keep it and fix the pages, and I'll tell you why.
También hablamos español.