Moving off WordPress
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.
Stay on it when: You publish often, somebody technical looks after it, and the plugins you depend on are few and well maintained.
If that describes you, close this tab — you have your answer and it cost you nothing. What follows is for everyone else.
Press export and see what arrives.
The WXR export is real and it is genuine content portability — posts, pages, taxonomies and references to your media. What it does not contain is most of what makes the site look and behave the way it does: the theme, the plugin configuration, and anything a page builder stored as its own markup. Export a site built in Elementor or Divi and the content arrives wrapped in shortcodes that mean nothing outside the plugin that wrote them.
What comes with you
- Posts, pages and their publication dates
- Categories, tags and any custom taxonomy
- Media files, re-downloaded from the URLs in the export
- The URL structure, which is what the redirects are built from
What gets rebuilt
- Templates and layout — the theme does not come with the content
- Anything a page builder rendered, which arrives as shortcodes
- Forms, and wherever their submissions were going
- Plugin behaviour: sliders, popups, membership, booking, SEO fields
Deliberately no item counts, plan tiers or quoted limits anywhere on this page. Those change on somebody else’s release schedule, and a stale specific is worse than no specific on a page whose whole claim is that you can check it yourself.
What WordPress charges you that isn’t on the invoice
Every plugin is a dependency with its own update cycle and its own security history. They accumulate, they interact, and the performance and maintenance debt is nobody's job until it is everybody's problem. The usual symptom is a site that got slow and nobody can say which of the twenty-six plugins did it.
Updates have become somebody's part-time job, or the site is slow and the cause is unfindable.
It is slow, and nobody can say why
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.
Nobody can change it without calling somebody
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.
The annual bill keeps growing
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.
You have realised you cannot leave
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.
What a WordPress migration actually involves.
The content is the easy half. The work is deciding what the site should be now — which plugins were solving a real problem and which were solving a problem the theme created — then rebuilding templates against a content model rather than porting a theme. Redirects are generated from the exported URL list rather than typed, so nothing is missed, and the old site is measured before it is switched off.
Every URL, redirected
Old addresses 301 to their new home, generated from the crawl rather than typed — so the rankings and inbound links you already paid for survive the move.
Measured on both sides
Load time, Core Web Vitals and accessibility recorded on the existing site before anything is touched, and again after. It is the one project where the improvement is a number rather than an opinion.
Instrumented on arrival
Named conversion events wired at build, so the new site can tell you which page did the work — which the old one almost certainly could not.
In your accounts
Repository, hosting, domain and analytics in your name. If the reason you are leaving is that somebody else held them, the migration is not finished until that is not true.
Most sites should not migrate. If yours should, it is a known job at a known price.
A migration is $4,800 and takes 2–3 weeks, published like every other figure on this site. The free assessment can also tell you to keep what you have — that outcome is on the page too.