Leave WordPress behind. Keep everything you built on it.
Your content, your URLs, your search rankings, your customer history — all of it comes across. What gets left behind is the plugin stack, the update treadmill, and the ceiling you keep running into every time you want the site to do something new.
What comes with you — and what doesn't.
Migration quotes tend to stay vague about this, because vague is easier to sell. Here's the whole list, including the things that don't survive the move. Those are the ones people wish they'd heard about before signing, not after.
Content and its structure
Pages, posts and every custom post type — remodeled into a proper schema with the fields you actually use, instead of a soup of meta keys.
The full media library
Every file, with alt text and captions intact, re-served through a modern image pipeline that resizes and compresses on the fly.
URLs, one for one
Every existing address gets mapped. Where a URL genuinely has to change, it 301s to its new home. This is the part that decides whether you keep your rankings.
SEO metadata
Titles, descriptions, canonicals, Open Graph tags and structured data all come across — whether they came from Yoast, Rank Math or your theme.
Forms and where they go
Rebuilt natively, with submissions routed wherever they go today — inbox, CRM, spreadsheet — plus spam handling that isn't one more plugin to maintain.
Users, roles and history
Accounts, permissions and the records attached to them. On a commerce site that means order and transaction history stays with the customer it belongs to.
The plugins themselves
Whatever they do gets rebuilt into the site instead of ported across. That's the point — you stop maintaining thirty moving parts that each update on their own schedule.
Your PHP theme
Templates get rebuilt in React. The design carries over faithfully; the code underneath doesn't, because it can't.
Page-builder layouts
Elementor, Divi and WPBakery store layouts in their own markup. Those pages get rebuilt as real components — usually a visual upgrade, but it's real work, and page count is what drives the estimate.
wp-admin
You get an admin built around your content instead — usually simpler, because it only does what your site actually needs. It's a different screen, and your team will want an hour with it.
Next.js on the front. A back end built around how you work.
The front end is always Next.js — rendered on the server, so pages arrive complete instead of assembling themselves in the browser. What sits behind it gets built around what you actually manage, and it has one job to do well: let you and your team get on with the work without anyone needing to be trained first.
Your admin, not a product tour
An off-the-shelf CMS has to serve everybody, so it gives you a thousand options and leaves you to work out which twelve are yours. You end up hiding fields, disabling features, and explaining to a new hire why the thing they want is three menus deep behind a setting that must never be touched.
We build the other way round. The screens cover the things you actually change, labeled in your words, in the order you do them. If your team calls it a colorway rather than a variant, the screen says colorway. Somebody should be able to sit down and update the site without a handover session — that's the standard we build to, and it's the one worth asking any vendor about.
Allodium, where it fits
We maintain our own headless CMS toolkit, Allodium, built for exactly this — Next.js and Postgres, with the schema and admin screens shaped per project rather than handed down by a product. It's open source and MIT-licensed, so the thing your site runs on isn't a private box only we can open.
It's not what every project gets, and we won't pretend otherwise. Some sites are better served by an established CMS your team already knows, and some need something more purpose-built than either. The decision gets made against your site, not against what we'd prefer to build on.
What about headless WordPress?
It's the obvious middle path, and it's a real option — but it keeps the half of WordPress you were trying to get away from. You still run PHP on a host that needs patching. You still carry a plugin surface and its update schedule. You still inherit WordPress's data model, with your content shaped around posts and meta fields rather than around your business. You get a faster front end and none of the maintenance relief, and for most people who tell us they've outgrown WordPress, the maintenance was the actual complaint.
That said — if your team genuinely likes the Gutenberg editor, your plugin stack is small and stable, and your only real complaint is front-end speed, then keep WordPress and put Next.js in front of it. That's a smaller, cheaper project, and we'll tell you when it's the one you actually need. We're not short of work.
If you want the technical detail before talking to anyone, our complete guide to migrating from WordPress to Next.js walks through the same process at implementation level.
Moving the site is the floor. Not the ceiling.
If all you get out of a migration is the same website on faster infrastructure, it probably wasn't worth doing. The reason to leave the plugin model is that features stop being things you go shopping for and start being things you describe. You want the site to do something specific to how you work? That's now a conversation, not a search for a plugin that almost fits.
Accounts and portals
Somewhere your customers log in to see their own history, documents, orders or status — instead of emailing you to ask.
Quoting, booking and checkout
Built around your actual pricing rules and real availability, rather than bent to fit whatever a booking plugin assumed about your business.
Integrations that hold
Your CRM, accounting, inventory or scheduling software, talking to the site directly. No nightly CSV, no copying numbers between tabs.
Internal tools and dashboards
The screens your team needs to run the business, built into the same system — like the fulfillment dashboard we built so warehouse staff never touch a CMS.
You don't have to decide all of it now
Most people migrate first and add the interesting parts afterwards, one at a time, once the foundation is there. Your plan includes a monthly development allowance for exactly that — the site keeps getting more useful instead of slowly going stale. See what a site can actually run.
Two migrations worth reading about.
Drupal, then WordPress, then Next.js
A fabric catalog that outgrew two platforms in a decade. We built the WordPress system that carried it for years, then rebuilt on Next.js once filtering thousands of SKUs became the bottleneck. Customer-facing catalog, a portal for the outside rep network, and a fulfillment dashboard the warehouse team uses without ever touching a CMS.
Read the Justin David case studyFrom plugin sprawl to a platform
Tiered memberships, renewals, event registration and continuing-education tracking had accumulated into a stack of plugins that fought each other on every update. The rebuild moved that logic into the application itself, so the features an association actually runs on stopped depending on third-party compatibility.
Read the NIBA case studyPlenty of sites should stay on WordPress.
We build and look after WordPress sites too, so we've got no particular stake in talking you off it. Migrating is a real project with a real cost, and it's the wrong call more often than the industry admits. Here's roughly how we decide.
It's a brochure site that rarely changes
A handful of pages, modest traffic, updated twice a year. WordPress handles that perfectly well, and a rebuild won't earn its cost back.
Nobody will own it afterwards
A custom build needs someone accountable for it — us on a plan, or a developer you trust. If there's no budget for that, a well-maintained WordPress site is the more honest choice.
The real problem is one plugin or your host
Plenty of sites we look at are slow because of a single bloated plugin or cheap shared hosting. That's a far cheaper fix, and we'll say so.
You redesigned twelve months ago
If the site is young and the frustration is cosmetic, you'll get more from fixing the specific thing that annoys you than from starting again.
Staying put is a perfectly good answer. If the site just needs someone keeping it patched, backed up and fast, that's what our WordPress support and maintenance plans are for — and it's a fraction of the cost of a rebuild.
You've hit a performance ceiling
You've already optimized, cached and pruned, and it's still slow — because the architecture is the limit, not the configuration.
The plugin stack has gone fragile
Updates are something you schedule nervously. Things break sideways. Two plugins disagree and the fix turns out to be a third plugin.
You need things plugins do badly
Member portals, real booking logic, commerce that doesn't fit the template, integrations with the software you actually run the business on.
Your content has outgrown the queries
Thousands of items with real filtering. WordPress can store it; it struggles to let visitors search it quickly.
Not sure which column you're in? That's a fine reason to get in touch. It's a short conversation, and sometimes the answer is “do nothing yet.”
The numbers, up front.
Migrations start at $250/mo, and a straightforward one can go from kickoff to launch in as little as two months. Same model as everything else we do: nothing down, one flat monthly fee over a minimum term, and the code and design are yours at the end of it. What moves the number is page count, how much of the site was built in a page builder, and how many plugins are doing work that has to be rebuilt rather than dropped.
Audit and inventory
We crawl what you've got: every URL, every content type, every plugin doing real work. You get the inventory whether or not you hire us.
Shape the data
Your posts and meta fields become a structured schema built around your business, with admin screens for the things you actually edit.
Build and migrate
The front end gets built while content, media, users and history move across and get checked against the source.
Redirects and launch
The full redirect map goes in, we check it URL by URL, then cut over. Rankings travel with the redirects, not with luck.
The audit in phase one is the honest starting point — it tells us the real size of the job, and tells you whether it's worth doing at all.
Start with an auditNot sure your site needs this? Get it measured first.
Before anyone talks you into a rebuild, find out what's actually wrong. The GlossyDev Score rates your current site 0–100 across performance, SEO, accessibility, security and email health, with a plain-English summary and a prioritized list of fixes. Plenty of sites come back needing an afternoon of work rather than a migration.
Tell us about the site.
Send us the URL and what's frustrating you about it. We'll come back with an honest read on whether migrating is worth it, roughly what it would involve, and what we'd do instead if the answer is no.