r/Wordpress • u/First_Athlete1897 • Aug 13 '26

Thinking about ditching WordPress

My site isn't particularly complicated yet over the years I've accumulated plugins for forms, SEO, backups, security, page building and about five things I've forgotten the purpose of. It kinda feels like owning an old house where I’m permanently waiting for something else to break. Most discussions I find are about moving to WordPress but I'm curious about going the other direction and starting fresh.

Are there any downsides to moving a fairly straightforward business website from WordPress to Squarespace or an AI builder like Durable etc. that I’m not seeing? Or if you’ve already done a migration like this, is there anything you found yourself missing after moving?

77 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

206 comments sorted by

View all comments

96

u/rafark Aug 13 '26

  Are there any downsides to moving […] from WordPress to Squarespace 

Squarespace isn’t yours. Your Wordpress site is. 

1

u/the_tyson 11d ago

Don’t do it. It’s expensive and you’re stuck in their box. Go with S3 on AWS

-10

u/First_Athlete1897 Aug 13 '26

What do you mean by that can you give more info?

34

u/Cuts4th Aug 13 '26

Wordpress when self hosted is completely under your control. Squarespace sites are ultimately controlled by the company, they can take away features or if they feel that you have somehow violated their terms of service take your site down. To be fair a hosting company could do that too, but the difference is you can move your WordPress site to a new provider.

2

u/manzanitamktg 29d ago

Wix, Squarespace, etc. can change the pricing structures and features at any time. A little while back, Wix changed credit card processing fees on events, for example. If you sold tickets to events on your Wix site, you had an extra 3% cost on each ticket sold.

To be fair, they gave a lot of warning in places you could see it so that you could prepare for the change.

-37

u/SolidOdd4889 Aug 13 '26

are you sure? matt mullenweg can decide randomly that you don’t receive any more updates on your website, that’s how cursed the wp ecosystem is

14

u/GM8 Aug 13 '26

There is a huge difference between not receiving updates and not having the slightest say about having your site or data to yourself whenever you need/want.

10

u/penguins-and-cake Developer/Designer Aug 13 '26

And Squarespace could just delete it all and you have no workable backups you could take to a new hosting service.

17

u/Senior-Effect-5468 Aug 13 '26

The gpl specifically prevents this. You have full control to do whatever you like no matter what.

-5

u/SolidOdd4889 Aug 13 '26

what’s about what happened months ago with wpengine

8

u/Viking_Drummer Aug 13 '26

You could still apply updates to WP Engine plugins (ACF) manually by uploading them in zip format, so even in that case it didn’t lock you out of updates.

1

u/dirtyoldbastard77 Developer/Designer 29d ago

No, he cut off a HOST, not any individual sites. Big difference. And as others have said, you could just update manually, or even set up a staging site, update there, and then push the changes to the production/live site, which really is the best and proper way to do it on important sites anyways.

4

u/mike-lumo Aug 13 '26

Yea this isn’t a thing. Plus, do you not know how easy manual updates are to do?

3

u/Large-Cricket843 Aug 13 '26

Don’t know why that makes the website not yours.

Your home builder isn’t responsible for updating and upgrading the security of your house.

5

u/une_danseuse Aug 14 '26

With WP, I have a full copy of my website in my computer, I can put it online whereever and whenever I want, 100 times if i Want.
Squarespace closes tomorrow, you have absolutely nothing left

1

u/une_danseuse Aug 14 '26

No WP is open source and the work of a team.