If it loads quickly, the people who need to change it can, and the annual bill is reasonable — stay where you are. A rebuild is a real cost and a real risk, and 'it feels dated' is a design problem that a redesign on your current platform will usually solve for less. We would rather say that here than three weeks into a project.
What follows is what each platform is genuinely good at, when staying is the right answer, and the four reasons people actually leave. If none of them describes you, you have your answer and it cost you nothing.
Nothing here is a cross in a box. Every one of these is the right answer for somebody, and one of them is the one we most often tell people to keep.
It runs a third of the web for a reason. The ecosystem is enormous, the talent pool is deep, you can host it anywhere, and your content is genuinely portable — which is more than most of this list can say.
Time to leave when updates have become somebody's part-time job, or the site is slow and the cause is unfindable.
The fastest route from nothing to online, and genuinely good at it. For a business that needs to exist on the internet by Friday, it is the right tool and we would tell you so.
Time to leave when the site starts mattering commercially — or you try to leave and discover what leaving means.
The best-looking defaults of any builder. A Squarespace site that has been left alone still looks composed three years later, which is not true of most things on this list.
Time to leave when you need it to do something the template has no opinion about.
A real professional tool with real design control and clean output. Of everything here it is the one we most often tell people to keep, and a well-built Webflow site is a good website by any measure.
Time to leave when you hit a CMS ceiling, need logic the platform will not host, or the bill stops matching what you get.
Deliberately no price comparison anywhere. Platform pricing changes every few months, and a stale figure would be the one thing here you could catch us being wrong about. Everything on these pages is structural, and you can check all of it yourself.
We name which one before quoting. A speed problem and a lock-in problem have almost nothing in common, and a proposal that treats them as the same thing is guessing.
Usually plugin sprawl, uncompressed images, or a builder rendering everything client-side. Measurable before and after, which makes it the easiest of the four to justify.
Either the platform makes editing dangerous, or the person who built it left. This is a structure problem, and it is fixed by deciding who should be able to change what before anything is rebuilt.
Plugin licences, platform tiers, seats you are not using, a retainer for changes you could make yourself. Worth adding up over three years before comparing it to a one-off build.
The most expensive one, and the one people discover latest. It is also the only one on this list that gets worse the longer you wait, because everything you publish in the meantime is published into somebody else's database.
This is the part that goes wrong when a migration is done badly, and it is the part nobody notices until traffic drops six weeks later.
Old addresses 301 to their new home, so the inbound links and the search rankings you have accumulated survive the move rather than starting again.
Pages, posts and media carried across programmatically. Retyping is how things get quietly dropped, and how the migration takes three weeks longer than it should.
Load time, Core Web Vitals and accessibility recorded on the old site before we touch anything, and again after. It is the one project where the improvement is a number rather than an opinion.
Repository, hosting, domain and analytics. If the reason you are leaving is that somebody else held them, the migration is not finished until that is not true any more.
Export your site and see what arrives. That is the whole argument.
A migration is $4,800 and takes 2–3 weeks, published like everything else. If the assessment says the site you have is fine, we will tell you to keep it — that outcome is on the page too.