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An honest guide for small businesses, clubs and charities wondering whether their website has outgrown WordPress — what changes if you move, what it costs, and how to keep the search rankings you have earned.
WordPress has run a big share of the web for twenty years, and for plenty of sites it is still the right tool. We have built on it since the early days, and we still look after WordPress sites today. So this isn’t a page telling you WordPress is finished. It’s for the owner who suspects their site has become more work than it should be, and wants a straight answer.
More and more small business sites are moving to custom-built sites with nothing to update and no plugins to keep alive. We build them on Starting Point, our own platform, and we have moved our own website and several client sites across. Here’s what we’ve learned.
One or two of these is normal. Four or more and the site is probably costing you more — in money, time or worry — than it needs to.
Five short, practical PDFs, sent one a day. Read each in ten minutes. By the end you’ll know whether moving is worth it for your site, and exactly how to do it safely if it is.
Free: one short PDF a day for five days. The self-assessment, the real cost, editing after WordPress, keeping your rankings, and a week-by-week plan.
We’ll ask you to confirm your address first, so nothing is sent to someone who didn’t ask for it. Every email has a link to stop them, and we never share your address.
You sign in and change words, pictures, pages, posts and the menu, just as now. The difference is that the admin only holds what your site actually has, so there’s far less to wade through.
Forms, search settings, sitemaps, redirects and backups are built in. Caching and security plugins mostly have nothing left to do, because there are no third-party plugins to slow down or attack.
We keep your page addresses wherever we can and forward the ones that change, then check every page against the old site before launch and watch the numbers afterwards.
We’ll tell you to stay where you are if your site is working, isn’t costing you much, and is in good hands. Equally if you rely on one specialist plugin that nothing else matches, or a team of people publish every day and already know the editor well. A move costs time and money once; it’s only worth it if it saves you more than that over the years that follow.
shoutwebsites.com ran on WordPress for years. When we moved it to Starting Point we checked all 277 of its addresses before launch: each one answers at the same address, with the same title, description and headings. That’s the standard we hold every client move to.
The free series gives you the decision. These two go all the way. Each comes as a PDF and a Word copy you can type into.
For business owners
A full workbook to plan and manage a move yourself, whoever builds the new site.
£19 PDF + Word
For web designers and developers
Our step-by-step method for moving client sites off WordPress and keeping what they earned in search.
£39 PDF + Word
Downloads are sold to buyers in the UK. Your download link arrives by email straight after payment.
A careful move keeps what your pages have earned: same addresses where possible, permanent forwarding where not, and every important page checked before launch. Some movement in the first few weeks is normal while search engines re-read the site. Nobody can honestly guarantee rankings, on any platform, but we watch the figures for a month after launch and fix anything that slips.
No. Your domain stays in your name, you get a full admin login, your content can be exported, and the site runs on ordinary web hosting. We’ll put that in writing before we start.
They all come across. Posts keep their addresses, images keep their descriptions, and forms are rebuilt so messages arrive in your inbox and are kept in the admin too.
Yes, though a shop is a bigger job than a brochure site. For selling online we also build on ShoutStores, which can import an existing shop’s products and orders. The free review will tell you which suits you.
Most small business sites take a few weeks from the first conversation to launch. Sites with years of blog posts, or a shop, take longer. You’ll have the dates in writing before anything starts.
Send us your web address and we’ll look over the site, then tell you plainly whether moving is worth it, what it would involve and what it would cost. If staying where you are is the better answer, we’ll say so.