A small business should move off WordPress when its site is mostly service pages and a blog, and someone is spending money or evenings keeping plugins patched. It should stay on WordPress if it runs a WooCommerce store, has a large team publishing every day, or depends on a plugin with no clean replacement.
TL;DR: WordPress itself is in decent shape. The plugins bolted onto it are where the security holes and the update chores come from, and they drag down speed too. A site built as code and hosted on Vercel has no plugins to patch and is fast by default, and with the right back office you can still publish a blog post without calling anyone. Stores and big newsrooms should stay put.
What WordPress really costs you now
WordPress runs 40.2% of all websites, according to W3Techs' September 2026 numbers. That popularity is why attackers love it. One bug in a popular plugin opens thousands of sites at once, and the scanning is automated.
Plugins are where the risk lives
The WordPress core software isn't the problem. Patchstack's State of WordPress Security in 2026 counted 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025, up 42% from the year before. Only six were in WordPress core, and all six were low priority. The rest were in add-ons: 91% in plugins and 9% in themes.
A typical small-business WordPress site runs a page builder, a forms plugin, an SEO plugin, a backup plugin, a security plugin, and a few more. Each one comes from a different vendor. Each one ships on its own schedule, with its own idea of how careful to be.
Updates are your job, and they can't wait
Patching only works if a patch exists. Patchstack found that 46% of those vulnerabilities had no fix available when they were made public, so for nearly half there was nothing to update to. For the bugs attackers went after hardest, the weighted median time from public disclosure to the first attack was five hours.
If you check for updates on Friday afternoons, you're days behind.
Your host's firewall won't close that gap on its own. In one Patchstack study, standard hosting defenses blocked only 12% of attacks on known, exploited WordPress vulnerabilities.
Abandoned plugins pile up
We pulled the public data for the WordPress.org plugin directory on September 27, 2026. Of the 73,679 plugins listed, 48% had not shipped an update in two years or more. That includes 165 plugins with at least 10,000 active installs each.
If one of those is on your site, nobody is coming to fix it. You find out when it breaks, or when someone else finds the hole first.
Speed takes work
WordPress can be fast. Out of the box, with a page builder and a stack of plugins, it usually isn't. The HTTP Archive's 2025 Web Almanac found that only 45% of WordPress sites on mobile pass Google's Core Web Vitals, which puts it among the lowest of the platforms measured. Duda sites passed at 85% and Wix sites at 74%.
Then there's the bill nobody adds up. Hosting, a yearly license for each premium plugin, and the time someone spends clicking "Update" and then checking that the contact form still works.
WordPress vs Vercel for a small business
Strictly speaking, this comparison mixes categories. WordPress is software that runs your site, and Vercel is a hosting platform where a site runs. When people search "vercel vs wordpress," the real choice is between a WordPress site on a typical host and a site built as code (usually with a framework called Next.js) and deployed on Vercel.
Here's how those two stack up as of September 2026:
| WordPress on a typical host | Code-built site on Vercel | |
|---|---|---|
| Who applies updates | You or your developer: WordPress core, the theme, and every plugin, each on its own schedule | Your developer, when the framework ships a security release. There are no plugins to track |
| Attack surface | A public login page, PHP, a database, and the code of every plugin you've installed | Most pages are prebuilt and served from Vercel's network. No plugin code to probe, and a firewall and DDoS protection come with every plan |
| Speed out of the box | Depends on the theme, plugins, and host. Only 45% of mobile WordPress sites pass Core Web Vitals | Fast by default, because most pages are built ahead of time. Oversized photos can still slow it down |
| Typical running cost | Hosting, plus a yearly renewal for each premium plugin, plus someone's time for updates | $20 a month on Vercel Pro (the free Hobby plan is for personal, non-commercial use), plus whoever maintains the code |
| Who edits content, and how | You, in the WordPress dashboard, any time | You, in a simple back office for things like blog posts. Design and layout changes go to your developer |
| If the builder disappears | WordPress freelancers are easy to find, though someone has to untangle the plugins | Any Next.js developer can take over. The code sits in a repository you own, with no plugin licenses to transfer |
In a WordPress vs Vercel decision, the row most owners underrate is the first one. On WordPress, security is a chore you repeat forever. On a code-built site, most of that chore disappears because there's far less software sitting on the server.
The honest cost of the Vercel column is the fifth row. You can't drag a new section onto the page yourself. For most service businesses that's a fair trade, since the layout rarely changes and the blog changes all the time.
Custom code also used to be the expensive option. Claude Code changed that for us. We use it to build and maintain client sites, which is a big part of why a code-built site is now a realistic choice for a small business instead of a luxury.
Who should stay on WordPress
Some sites belong on WordPress, and moving them would cost more than it saves.
- Stores that live on WooCommerce. Inventory, orders, shipping rules, tax settings, and payment gateways are a lot to rebuild, and rebuilding them rarely pays for itself.
- Big editorial teams. If ten people publish every week and an editor signs off on each post, WordPress's editing workflow earns its keep.
- Sites built around one specific plugin. A membership system or an online course platform wired into your whole business may have no clean replacement.
- Owners who actually enjoy running WordPress and keep up with updates. If it works and it's patched, leave it alone.
If that's you, stay. We'll maintain a WordPress site for you: updates, backups, and a regular look at the plugin list, so a stale plugin doesn't sit there for two years while you run your business.
What changes when your site is code you own
The usual worry about leaving WordPress is needing a developer to fix a typo. For everyday content, you won't.
A code-built site can have its own back office, a private admin area where blog posts and similar content live. On a client site we built, an AI agent drafts new blog posts straight into that back office. The owner reads the draft, edits it if needed, and approves it with one click. That setup is running today.
The agent never publishes on its own. It connects to the site's database through a restricted role that can create and edit drafts and nothing else. The database enforces that limit, not an instruction written into a prompt. So even if the agent misread a request, or was fed a malicious instruction hidden in something it read, it still couldn't publish or change a live page. For the longer version of how agents like this work, see our post on AI agents for small business.
Bigger changes work differently. A new section on the home page, a price change, a fresh photo of your team: those come to us. We make the change, you review it, and it goes live after your OK. Every change is recorded in the site's history, so anything can be rolled back.
To see what these sites look like, browse our portfolio.
How to move without losing your Google rankings
Rankings attach to addresses. Most of the search damage in a migration comes from pages that move without anyone telling Google.
- Keep URLs where you can. If /services/ ranks today, the new site should have a /services/ page.
- Map every old address that can't stay to its closest new page, and add a permanent redirect. A 301 or a 308 both tell Google a page has permanently moved. Don't point everything at the home page; Google's site move guide warns it may treat those as soft 404s.
- Submit the new sitemap in Search Console on launch day.
- Watch the Page indexing report for a few weeks, and look for "Not found (404)" entries.
Step four is the one people skip. When empowerment-ai.com left its old WordPress site, old addresses like /contact-us/, /privacy-policy/, /about-2/, and /elementor-1924/ kept showing up as 404s in Search Console until we added permanent redirects. Two of those were WordPress leftovers. "about-2" is the address WordPress hands out when "about" is already taken, and the page builder left a page of its own. Nobody would have put them in a migration plan. Search Console found them for us.
Google's own help page says Googlebot keeps retrying a missing address for a while, and that there's no way to make it forget one. A redirect is the fix.
Not sure which side of the line your site falls on? Our free website analysis checks your current site's health and search visibility and sends back a few quick wins, whether you move or not.
Questions people ask
Is WordPress outdated in 2026?
No. It still runs 40.2% of all websites, and the core software is well maintained: Patchstack found only six core vulnerabilities in 2025, all low priority. What has aged badly is the typical small-business setup around it, a page builder plus a stack of plugins that someone has to keep patched.
What is the downside of using WordPress?
Maintenance. Every plugin is code from a different vendor, and 91% of new WordPress vulnerabilities found in 2025 were in plugins. Nearly half had no fix when they went public. Someone has to watch for updates, apply them fast, and check that nothing broke. Speed is the other downside: only 45% of mobile WordPress sites pass Core Web Vitals.
What are people using instead of WordPress?
Small businesses that leave usually go one of two ways. Some pick a hosted builder like Wix or Squarespace, or Shopify for a store. Others get a site built as code, often with Next.js, and hosted on a platform like Vercel. The first is easier to rearrange yourself. The second is faster, has fewer moving parts, and needs a developer for layout changes.
Can ChatGPT build a WordPress website?
It can help. ChatGPT can write page copy and generate code for a custom theme or plugin, and WordPress.com has its own AI site builder. What it won't do is host the site or keep the plugins patched next month. Building a WordPress site was never the expensive part. Keeping it updated is, and that job is still yours.