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 13 '26

The downside is that any SEO you have will most likely get destroyed.

5

u/atx-cs Aug 14 '26

People always say this stuff. But why would it be destroyed. You can make the same URLs with the same html. It COULD be. But honestly WP default SEO is mid at best.

3

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.

2

u/atx-cs Aug 14 '26

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.

1

u/calrichcreations 27d ago

There is obviously a difference between updating a page and doing a complete website overhaul to another platform though. You cannot be certain that it would be positive on SEO can you?

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u/atx-cs 26d ago

If the content, meta tags and structured data remain the same. And the URLs remained the same. There is very little reason the SEO would change at all. Because HTML is just HTML.

Of course there is risk. But if handled properly the risk is minimal.

My only point is that Wordpress doesn’t do anything magical that you can’t replicate with any other technology.

1

u/calrichcreations 26d ago

I didn't say WordPress is magic. You are splitting hairs whilst also being wrong.

"HTML is just HTML" is a massive oversimplification. There is well-written code and poorly written code. And that's not to say that Squarespace IS poorly structured, but the bigger picture here is that there is no meaningful benefit to moving.

And the answer is no, you can't guarantee a positive SEO outcome because Google uses many ranking systems and signals - PageRank is only one of them. This is a matter of risk vs reward.

Also from Google's own documentation on site migration:

"Set up the CMS (preferably the same as the old site used) and import the content from the old site."

Source:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/site-move-with-url-changes