Should you leave WordPress?

01Stay if these are true

Some WordPress websites should stay on WordPress. If most of the statements below describe your site, a rebuild is not the best use of your money this year.

• Staff publish or edit pages themselves at least weekly, and the editor is the reason they can.
• The site passes Core Web Vitals on real devices, not only in a lab test.
• Core, theme and plugins are updated on a schedule and backups are tested, whether by you or a maintenance provider.
• A plugin or integration you depend on (membership, courses, a mature WooCommerce store) works and your staff know it.
• Your monthly maintenance and plugin costs are modest and understood.

02Leave if these are true

If most of these describe your site, the platform is costing you more than it gives back.

• The site is a brochure that changes a few times a year, and every change goes through a developer anyway.
• You pay monthly for security, caching and backup plugins or a maintenance retainer to keep a simple site safe.
• Core Web Vitals still fail after a caching and image optimization pass.
• Plugins conflict after updates, or you have stopped updating because of it.
• You want the site wired to a CRM, booking, automation or an AI receptionist and the plugin route is fragile.
• The site has been compromised before, or the admin login is shared and unmonitored.

03A decision table

Match your situation to the closest row. Where the answer is 'stay', the note says what to keep doing.

04Migration steps in order

A migration done in this order keeps your search visibility and your content. Skipping the first and fifth steps is how sites lose rankings after a rebuild.

• 1. Inventory every URL: the sitemap, Search Console's pages report and analytics, so nothing that receives visits is forgotten.
• 2. Export content: pages, posts, images and metadata, then decide what to keep, merge or retire.
• 3. Rebuild on Next.js from components, with the search foundation (metadata, sitemap, robots, structured data) built in rather than bolted on.
• 4. Write the redirect map: every old URL that changes gets a permanent redirect to its new home.
• 5. Review on staging: content, forms, redirects and Core Web Vitals checked on real devices.
• 6. Cut over DNS, confirm SSL, then submit the new sitemap in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
• 7. Monitor for several weeks: crawl errors, redirect chains, pages that dropped out of the index, and enquiry volume.
• 8. Keep a WordPress export and database backup for a period after launch, then cancel the old hosting and plugins.

05The redirect map

The redirect map is the document that protects your rankings and your existing links. Each old URL maps to exactly one new URL with a permanent (301) redirect, avoiding chains. WordPress URLs that were never meant for visitors, such as tag archives and author pages, are usually redirected to the nearest useful page or allowed to return a clean not-found.

06What WordPress Modernization includes

Redenn's WordPress Modernization starts at CA$499 and moves your site to a modern Next.js build: the same content, faster pages and no plugin maintenance. It includes the redirect map and the Search Console handover, so the new site inherits the old one's search history instead of starting over. Hosting afterwards is Redenn Lite at CA$99 per year for a static site or Redenn Business at CA$199 per year where forms and server rendering are needed.

The price rises with page count, custom layouts and integrations, and the quote states the figure and a ship date before work starts. If you want a blog you can edit yourself, the blog or simple CMS add-on is from CA$49.

07Risks and how they are managed

A migration has real risks, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Each one has a control.

• Lost rankings: controlled by the URL inventory, the redirect map and post-launch monitoring. No provider can promise rankings will not move at all.
• Lost content: controlled by a full export and a content audit signed off before the build.
• Broken forms and integrations: controlled by staging review with real submissions.
• Editor dependence: controlled by adding a CMS where staff genuinely publish, and by Redenn handling changes at CA$49 per standard page where they do not.
• Downtime at cutover: controlled by building the new site in parallel and switching DNS only when it is approved.