Why I Left WordPress — and How It Transformed My Web Business
For over a decade, WordPress was my default choice for building websites. It was inexpensive, familiar, and flexible enough to handle most client needs.
But over time, that convenience came at a growing cost. Projects took longer to maintain, troubleshooting became routine, and every “simple change” introduced new complexity.
Today, I’ve transitioned completely away from WordPress to a modern stack built on Astro.js and PayloadCMS — and the business impact has been substantial. Maintenance overhead dropped by nearly 80%. Profit margins improved. Client satisfaction increased. Most importantly, I stopped spending weekends firefighting broken plugins and started building again.
Here’s why I made the change — and what it might mean for your business.
1. The Hidden Cost of “Convenience”
WordPress has long been marketed as easy and accessible — and for hobbyists or basic blogs, it still is. But for professional use, especially when building custom client sites, the cracks start to show.
Every plugin adds technical debt. Page builders create heavy, inconsistent code that slows down performance. Updates break things unexpectedly. Documentation is fragmented.
Individually, these issues seem manageable. But collectively, they compound into lost time, increased risk, and reduced profitability.
In practice, I was spending $500–600 annually on plugin licenses across my portfolio — paying for functionality I could easily code myself in a modern framework. SEO tools, custom fields, form builders — features that come built into PayloadCMS or take minutes to implement in Astro or Svelte.
Worse, the freemium model means every additional feature now costs $8–10 per month, per site. Want better caching? That’s a subscription. Advanced forms? Another subscription. It adds up fast.
And each new plugin creates fresh problems. More security vulnerabilities. More potential conflicts. More time spent troubleshooting when something inevitably breaks — often 10+ hours of unbillable work to get a site back online.
You’re paying for convenience upfront, then losing money on the backend in maintenance and firefighting. VPS hosting added another $200–300 per year per site, and routine maintenance still consumed 2–4 hours monthly for smaller builds.
On a typical client site generating $2,000–3,000 in annual retainer revenue, that math stops making sense quickly.
The truth is: “easy setup” doesn’t mean “easy business.”
2. Maintenance Doesn’t Scale
With five WordPress sites, maintenance is annoying.
With ten, it’s a business constraint.
At my peak, I was managing six client sites — and that was my ceiling. Not because I lacked skills or ambition, but because WordPress maintenance consumed so much time that taking on new clients meant I’d have no capacity left to actually build anything.
Every week brought the same routine: monitoring for plugin updates, testing compatibility, patching security issues, troubleshooting conflicts. And occasionally, something would break spectacularly.
The worst example: I was migrating a client to my hosting service when I discovered their theme was filled with deprecated PHP code that wouldn’t run on my server. I spent hours going through the codebase line by line, updating functions just to get the site operational. Then, after migrating the database, emojis throughout the site turned into mojibake — garbled characters in titles and content everywhere. Eight hours of debugging. An entire business day lost on a migration that should have taken two.
That kind of firefighting doesn’t scale. You can’t grow when you’re constantly reacting to problems you didn’t create.
By contrast, static or headless frameworks like Astro eliminate nearly all of that overhead. No plugin conflicts. No deprecated code surprises. No emergency weekend patches because a security update broke a client site.
Today, I manage 15 active clients without needing additional help — more than double my WordPress capacity. The difference? I spend my time building and improving sites, not maintaining them.
Less time firefighting. More time delivering value. Better margins and happier clients.
3. Modern Tools, Better Results
My current toolkit centers on Astro.js for front-end development and PayloadCMS for content management. Together, they’ve replaced everything I once relied on WordPress for — and done it better.
Astro.js: Sites load in under a second without endless optimization. Code stays clean and maintainable. I can build exactly what clients need without fighting a theme or page builder.
PayloadCMS: Clients actually enjoy using it. The editing experience is intuitive enough that I rarely get “how do I…” support requests — a stark contrast to the WordPress admin panel that always seemed to confuse clients despite its supposed ease of use. And because it’s developer-first, I can customize workflows to match how each client’s team actually works.
For smaller clients, I often skip the CMS entirely and manage content via Markdown files — simple, fast, and zero ongoing costs. For larger organizations, Payload provides the full content management experience they expect, without the plugin chaos or security headaches.
The result is a stack I have complete control over. No surprise updates. No license renewals eating into margins. No weekend emergencies because something broke in production.
Just fast, reliable sites that work — and a development process I actually enjoy again.
4. The Path Forward for Agencies
If you’re still building on WordPress out of habit, it might be time to re-evaluate.
Don’t switch overnight. Start with a small experiment — maybe build a headless WordPress site where Astro or Next.js handles the front end. You’ll quickly see the difference in performance, code clarity, and control.
Or explore newer CMS options like Payload, Craft, or Ghost. They require a bit more technical skill upfront, but they return far more in flexibility and long-term profitability.
The Bottom Line
Moving beyond WordPress wasn’t just a technical upgrade — it was a business decision that compounded.
Lower maintenance costs freed up time.
More time meant better client work.
Better work strengthened my positioning.
Stronger positioning allowed me to be more selective.
Being selective led to higher rates and healthier margins.
The cycle builds on itself.
If your business has outgrown WordPress, you already know it.
The question isn’t whether to move — it’s when.