WordPress web design, and the honest case for leaving it

It depends on who builds it and how. A do-it-yourself site on a commercial theme can cost a few hundred dollars plus your evenings. A template site from a small shop often runs a few thousand. A custom build from us, on WordPress or Next.js, is a fixed price most often between $6,000 and $20,000. Then there is upkeep: hosting, premium plugin renewals and fixes, which vary widely by site. The five-year cost guide adds it all up.

Usually it is not WordPress itself. It is what has been piled on it: a page builder that sends layout code with every page, plugins that each load their own scripts, oversized images and budget hosting that builds each page from the database on every visit. Why WordPress is slow walks through the causes, and our speed repair fixes them when a fix is enough.

A custom CMS is an editor built around the things your business actually changes. Instead of a dashboard designed for every kind of website, you get screens for services, prices, hours, menus, posts and team members, each with the fields that item needs. There is less to learn and almost nothing to break. What is a custom CMS? goes further.

Often, yes. Malware cleanup, speed work, a broken theme or builder after an update, a failing WooCommerce checkout: those are repairs, quoted separately and far cheaper than a rebuild. Start at WordPress repair. If the repair bill keeps coming back every few months, that pattern is the best argument for moving.

Four to eight weeks for a typical service business site, longer for a large blog archive or a store. The AI agents shorten the mechanical parts, such as moving posts and generating templates, and the schedule then depends mostly on decisions: the design, the editor fields and the content you want to rewrite.

A store is a bigger decision than a brochure site, because products, orders and customer accounts have to move too. Sometimes the right answer is to keep WooCommerce and fix it, sometimes it is Shopify, and sometimes a custom Next.js storefront. We compare the options for your catalog and order volume before recommending one. See WooCommerce repair and WordPress vs. Shopify vs. Webflow.

Not if the move is done properly. Every URL keeps its address or is 301-redirected, titles, meta descriptions and structured data come along, and we measure rankings before and after. Any relaunch can wobble for a few weeks while search engines recrawl; a faster site with the same content usually settles at least where it was. We show you the numbers either way.

Yes. The site comes with a custom CMS: you log in and change services, prices, hours, posts, team members and locations through plain fields. What you cannot do is accidentally drag a column off the page, which most owners count as a feature. See what a custom CMS is for a closer look.

We do, when WordPress is the right tool: a publisher with a heavy blog schedule, a tight budget, a team that knows the platform, or a plugin the business cannot live without. We build those on a custom theme with a short plugin list. We also repair existing WordPress sites when a fix makes more sense than a rebuild.

No. AI coding agents scaffold pages, move content, write tests and run accessibility and performance checks. A developer plans the site with you and reviews every change before it ships. Your words stay yours. The result is a quicker launch and more custom work for the same budget. How AI agents build websites explains the process.