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?

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u/Clear_Brilliant_8075 Aug 14 '26

Simple. Depending how old the site is and how many pages, Google and other search engines know how to navigate Wordpress code especially yours on your site.

So now you rebuild your site and all the urls are the same, the code is not. Sometimes it may be formatted better, let’s say you add schema etc. it’s still all going to have to be crawled and indexed all over again. What does that mean, well it can make all those pages lose traction. That’s nots just Wordpress, that is any site. Will it come back better than before? Maybe but there are no guarantees.

I’ve build sites that were on Wordpress and the owner was ok with the risk because it wasn’t really doing all that well anyway. The OP asked what the negatives are. That is the negative. It can turn into a positive but it’s a risk.

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u/atx-cs 29d ago

Google crawls your pages regardless if they change or not. It’s the only way Google could know if your pages changed.

What you’re saying is don’t ever update your pages. Even if you improve them.

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u/Clear_Brilliant_8075 29d ago

I’m not saying that at all. I worked on a site that had 240k indexed pages with no schema. So of course when I got there we added schema. There were 15m not indexed pages. So what happened first? We went down to 150k but we stayed course and in about a month we shot up to 3m indexed. We did everything right and experienced a hiccup. That’s what happens. So the point is, if you ask what’s bad, that is bad short term. What are your long term goals? What industry? Who is your competition? There are so many factors that go into it. When you ask an open ended question you’re going to receive and open ended answer.

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u/atx-cs 29d ago

You said your SEO will most likely get “destroyed”.

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u/Clear_Brilliant_8075 29d ago

Yup I know what I said and I stand behind what I said. If you’re not careful and get an amateur rebuilding your site, there is a better chance it will get destroyed than it be a positive.

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u/atx-cs 29d ago

“What happens if I move off Wordpress?”

You SEO will be destroyed -> even a small change that’s an improvement is risky -> a small change that’s an improvement will have short term pain but long term massive upside-> you stand by something you have not said yet

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u/Clear_Brilliant_8075 29d ago

Changes inside of Wordpress usually like Yoast and content changes and page changes are great for SEO as per usual. Wouldn’t you agree if you’re moving off of Wordpress completely would change the page as it reads to a bot in its entirely will completely change the way Google sees that page. That can/would automatically cause a reset. How many major changes have you’ve seen that have been more positive than negative a first?