CMS

To stay on WordPress or not? Let’s settle this once and for all.

Why more marketers — and the developers who build for them — are moving their sites off WordPress, and what your team could gain by doing the same.

Last updated

May 6, 2025

Read time

7 min

Written by

Lindsay Elswick

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Introduction

WordPress has long been a dominant force in the online world. Originally built for content publishing, it gave teams a fast way to get online, and its plugin library made it easy to expand. Even in 2026, WordPress still powers more than 42.5% of all websites on the internet. It’s deeply woven into the web’s publishing backbone.

That foundation worked well when publishing content was the end goal, but today, that’s just the starting point. Today, websites are expected to generate leads, support logged-in experiencecs and tie into the rest of your marketing infrastructure. For teams using WordPress, that often means piling on plugins, patching together tools and hoping it all holds together.

What once felt flexible now eats up time, budget and dev resources, and holds your marketing back.

In response, many teams are shifting to a different kind of setup: one where your website is in the same platform as the rest of your marketing. Platforms like HubSpot and Ontraport offer integrated web builders that are built to do more than just publish content. They’re designed to drive results across the full funnel, from the first visit to the final conversion.

This article walks through the pros and cons of WordPress versus a platform where your CMS, CRM and marketing automation all live together. It gives WordPress credit where it’s due and helps you figure out whether it’s still the right choice as your team’s needs evolve.

Why WordPress became the default

Before WordPress, getting a website online meant learning to code or hiring someone who could. It gave marketers a way to publish and manage content independently, while giving developers a flexible, extensible foundation they could build almost anything on top of.

Over time, WordPress’ plugin library grew to cover just about every feature a team could need: SEO, pop-ups, payments, memberships, forms, forums and more.

That combination of accessibility and flexibility is what made WordPress so appealing — and it’s why so many teams still use it today.

When flexibility becomes a bottleneck

WordPress gives you endless options, but it rarely gives you one clear path. As your site starts doing more, that flexibility turns into decision fatigue, and complexity creeps in fast.

Say you want to promote a free download on a few pages. In WordPress, that can mean:

Installing a popup plugin to promote the offer
Adding a form plugin to collect email addresses
Adding a CAPTCHA plugin to block spam submissions
Customizing the form design to match your branding (often via manual CSS)
Embedding the form manually on each relevant page
Connecting the form to your CRM
Creating an automation to deliver the downloadable file
Setting up a confirmation message or redirect after form submission
Testing everything across devices
Double-checking your analytics to make sure conversions are being tracked
Keeping all related plugins updated and troubleshooting when an update breaks something

Multiply that by every new campaign or workflow your team wants to build — and suddenly, scaling becomes a tangle of manual steps and maintenance.

One broken step can mean missed leads, more dev work and lost revenue, all from a channel that should be fueling growth.

Your website is now a business tool

Today, your website isn’t just a place to share ideas. It’s often one of the first touchpoints a customer has with your brand and a key driver of lead generation, conversion and retention.

To play that role effectively, a site needs to:

Capture site visitors as leads through forms
Segment contacts based on topic interest or behavior
Trigger follow-ups and automations when someone engages
Deliver gated content or support a member experience
Track attribution from site visit to conversion
Schedule consultations or appointments
Take payment for online purchases
Provide portals for customers to view their purchase info or loyalty points
Offer a partner center for gaining and tracking referrals

With the right mix of plugins, dev support and third-party integrations, you can make WordPress do most of this. But that’s the issue: You’re constantly stitching together separate tools just to replicate what other platforms now offer out of the box.

Over time, that approach creates more fragility than flexibility. It slows teams down, increases costs and introduces risks that are tough to scale past.

When your plugin stack starts working against you

The average WordPress site uses between 12 and 15 plugins, each with its own settings, maintenance schedule and potential for breaking something else. Every new tool adds friction that can lead to site crashes and downtime.

In fact, 60% of WordPress sites experience plugin or theme conflicts, and plugin issues are a leading cause of the dreaded "white screen of death," where your site becomes completely inaccessible.

And while WordPress itself may be free, the real costs come from everywhere else:

Plugin licenses and premium themes
The time it takes to troubleshoot issues, keep plugins updated and maintain your site
Hosting, security and backup tools
Time lost copying content between tools or fixing broken flows

That all adds up fast, especially when you consider that 63% of WordPress sites have at least one outdated plugin, with most having two or three. The more outdated tools you’re juggling, the harder it becomes to keep your site stable, secure and running smoothly.

What WordPress is costing you

If you're a marketer

Marketers are measured on outcomes: leads generated, campaigns launched, conversions driven. When every new idea requires a plugin, a dev request or a manual workaround, execution and results take longer.

Here's where that tends to show up:

Every meaningful change requires a developer. Anything dynamic like forms with logic, gated content or personalized pages require a developer. Marketing ideas stall waiting for developer bandwidth.
Your tools don't share data. Website activity lives in WordPress, leads live in your CRM and purchases live somewhere else. There's no single source of truth, and connecting them requires Zapier chains, webhooks or custom code.
Personalization is harder than it should be. Showing different content to different users based on what they've done or where they are in the journey requires plugins, custom logic or dev work that most marketing teams can't do on their own.
Post-conversion experiences feel disjointed. You convert leads just fine, but everything after the form feels like a different system entirely. There's no cohesive next step, and the site doesn't react to what happens downstream.

If you're a developer

Building on WordPress every day, you already know how capable it is — and how quickly a complex project turns into a stack of plugins, integrations and ongoing maintenance that nobody budgeted for.

WordPress is excellent at what it was designed to do. The frustration is with what happens when you're asked to push it beyond that, which increasingly is what clients expect.

Here's what that looks like:

Plugin dependency for anything non-trivial. Memberships, portals, directories, LMS, conditional content — almost every real-world requirement means stitching together plugins instead of building on a cohesive foundation.
Plugin conflicts eat your time. One update can break something completely unrelated, and debugging whose fault it is can take hours. That's time you're not billing for anything new.
Fragile update cycles create ongoing stress. Core updates, theme updates and plugin updates all carry risk. Even routine maintenance on a complex site can feel like defusing a bomb.
Custom logic ends up everywhere. Business logic gets split between theme files, plugin settings, code snippets, webhooks and third-party tools, making the system hard to reason about and even harder to hand off.
Scaling beyond "content site" requires workarounds. WordPress excels at publishing but starts to strain when used as an application-like system with logged-in users, workflows or complex data relationships.
Projects become harder to hand off or resell. Highly customized WordPress builds are difficult to document, transfer or scale across multiple clients.
You end up doing more maintenance than building. Ongoing patching, updating and fixing often takes more time than actual development, which limits how many clients you can take on and how much you can earn.

What your team could be doing instead

While some teams move away from WordPress because of constant crashes and maintenance headaches, many switch because they realize how much more they could be getting from their site — and how much time they’re losing to tasks that should be automatic.

When your team is stuck troubleshooting broken forms, syncing tools or reformatting pages, the creative and strategic work gets pushed aside. Instead of building something new, you're chasing tech issues.

But when the systems run themselves, your team can:

Launch new content faster, with follow-ups and tracking already in place
Personalize page content based on real-time contact data
Test and iterate quickly, without tech bottlenecks
Track performance from first visit to final conversion
Build more, with less time spent on maintenance, syncing and fixes

These are the kinds of things that actually drive growth, and they’re only possible when your content, data and automations work together by default.

What it looks like when everything’s connected

When your website and the rest of your business live in the same system, you stop thinking about how everything fits together — because it already does.

Instead of manually gluing tools together, you get one platform with all the essentials built in: a website, a CMS, a CRM, automation, lead capture, email and SMS, performance tracking, memberships, payments and more — no extra plugins required.

That also means one login. One monthly fee. One support team. And no surprise updates that take your site offline while you’re in the middle of a launch.

Because the entire system is managed by the same team — not a dozen third-party developers — updates and new features work across the board. You’re not stuck checking plugin compatibility or rewriting workflows every time a tool changes.

And because everything’s connected, the entire customer journey becomes smarter. A visitor sees an offer tailored to their segment, fills out a form, and is instantly added to the right follow-up campaign — no syncing required. Their data updates in real time, so if they book a call, your sales team already knows what they looked at, what they care about, and how to speak to their needs. You see the full picture, from first click to closed deal.

How to know when it’s time to move on

If your site is still doing what it needs to do — and you have the team and tools to keep everything running — there’s no reason to overhaul what works. But if you’ve been feeling the friction, it’s worth asking:

For marketers:

Are you spending more time maintaining tools than creating content?
Are you relying on dev help for basic marketing workflows?
Are you missing out on opportunities because your tools don’t talk to each other?
Are your plugins creating more problems than they solve?
Are you duplicating effort across tools just to get a single campaign out the door?
Are you putting off updates because you’re afraid of breaking something?
Are you struggling to track which site content actually leads to conversions?

For developers:

Are you spending more time on maintenance than on building new things?
Are plugin conflicts and update cycles eating into your project capacity?
Are your builds becoming too customized to hand off or scale?
Are clients asking for features that WordPress wasn't really designed to support?
Are you leaving money on the table because complex WordPress builds take too long?

If the answer to any of those is yes, it might be time to consider moving to a connected platform.

The switch doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Many teams move their most important pages over before they rebuild their entire site — unlocking immediate wins without starting from scratch.

Final thoughts: A smarter way forward

WordPress helped marketers get online and gave developers a flexible foundation to build on. But today, publishing is just the beginning — and if your site is expected to do more, the platform it’s built on should, too.

Modern teams need more than plugins and patched-together tools. They need connected systems that support the way they work: agile, data-driven, and focused on growth.

If you’re feeling the strain of juggling tools or patching together workflows, it’s not just a tech problem — it’s a growth blocker. The good news? There’s a better way. One system, purpose-built to bring your content, data and automation together, so you can do more with less effort — and finally focus on what really moves the needle.

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