Is your WordPress site a good candidate to move? Five questions, and when to stay

The short answer

Your WordPress site is a good candidate to move if five things are true: it sells nothing through a checkout, nobody logs in to see private content, no single plugin is the reason the site exists, you don't rebuild page layouts yourself every week, and it has roughly 5 to 250 pages. Any "no" means stay on WordPress for now, and that is a sound decision, not a failure.

So is there anything better than WordPress? For a site that is mostly pages, posts and a contact form, often yes: a platform with no plugin list to keep patched. For a store, a members area or a site built around one plugin, WordPress is still the better home. Our EmDash vs WordPress comparison covers the platform side; this post is about your site.

• Do you sell through a checkout? A store stays. Checkout, stock and payments are an application, not pages.
• Do people log in to see anything? Member areas and courses stay. Logins and private content need their own rebuild.
• Is one plugin the reason the site exists? If the site stops doing its job without it, stay.
• How often do your page layouts change? Rarely is the best fit. Publishing often is fine, even several posts a day. Rebuilding layouts yourself every week is the reason to stay.
• How big is the site? Roughly 5 to 250 pages and posts fits. A one- or two-page site is usually cheaper to leave alone.

One thing comes before all five. If your site works, costs you little and nobody touches it, there is nothing to fix. Stay.

1. Do you sell anything through a checkout?

If customers put items in a cart and pay on your site, stay on WordPress. A WooCommerce store is checkout, stock, tax, shipping and payments working together, and none of it is a page you can copy across. Moving a store means rebuilding a shop, which is a different and much larger job than moving a website.

EmDash, Cloudflare's open-source CMS built on Astro, calls itself "the spiritual successor to WordPress" (emdashcms.com). Even its own guide to porting WordPress themes draws this line: "treat commerce behavior as a separate application integration", because porting the design "does not replace product, cart, checkout, payment, or order semantics" (EmDash docs).

What does not count as a store: a "Buy" button that sends people to a payment link, an Etsy shop or a booking service somewhere else. That is a link on a page, and links move like any other content.

If you do sell, stay and keep the store current. Plugins are where the risk sits on any WordPress site: Patchstack counted 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025, and 91% of them were in plugins (Patchstack). A store usually depends on several plugins at once, so paying someone to apply updates promptly is money well spent. Our guide to WordPress care plans lists what a good plan should include. We do not move stores at all for now.

2. Do people log in to see anything?

If members, students or customers sign in to reach private pages, stay. Logins, paid tiers, course progress and gated downloads are features that a membership or course plugin runs, and on a new platform each one has to be rebuilt and tested with real accounts. That is a software project, not a content move. Only you and your editors signing in is fine.

Even the simplest kind of private content does not carry over on its own. EmDash's importer brings private WordPress posts across as drafts, and its documentation says "WordPress visibility rules are not reconstructed" (EmDash docs). Someone has to decide, page by page, who should see what, and then build it.

If people log in, stay. Keep the membership plugin and its payment add-ons current, for the same reason as a store. One exception is worth checking: if the login area is a leftover nobody uses, such as an old customer portal or a single gated PDF, removing it first can turn the rest of the site into a good fit.

3. Is one plugin the reason the site exists?

Picture the site with that plugin switched off. If it would still tell visitors who you are and get them to contact you, the plugin is a helper, and helpers can be replaced. If the site would stop being useful, the plugin is the core, and you should stay on WordPress, where that plugin already works.

Most WordPress sites carry a handful of helpers. These are normal and do not rule a site out:

• An SEO plugin such as Yoast or Rank Math. The titles and descriptions it stores can be carried over and checked page by page, as our website migration SEO checklist explains.
• A contact form plugin. The form gets rebuilt on the new site and tested with a real message before launch.
• Caching and security plugins. Their job is to look after WordPress itself, so they are not needed once WordPress is gone.
• A page builder used for layout. The layouts get rebuilt as page templates (more on this in question 4).

A plugin at the core looks different: a directory that visitors search and submit listings to, a booking engine with calendars and deposits, a job board, property listings, or event ticketing.

EmDash does not run WordPress plugins. Its docs describe porting one as "separating its content behavior, stored data, HTTP routes, and user interface", then rebuilding it in EmDash's own plugin format (EmDash docs). That is developer work. EmDash's own registry plugins are sandboxed and permission-gated, but the registry is young, and the plugin your site depends on may have no equivalent there yet.

There is a middle case: a content site with one modest feature beyond the pages. We rebuild what your plugins did as part of the move wherever we can, and anything new is quoted before we start (pricing).

If one plugin is the site, stay. A large plugin ecosystem is what WordPress is genuinely good at.

4. How often do your page layouts change?

Publishing often isn't a reason to stay. EmDash handles drafts, scheduled posts, a publishing calendar and a revision history, whether you post a few times a month or several times a day. Stay on WordPress if you rebuild page layouts yourself in a drag-and-drop builder every week.

For the ordinary editing jobs, EmDash will feel familiar. You save drafts, preview them, publish or schedule them, and the revisions panel shows each saved version "with the time and the person who saved each one", with a button to restore an earlier one (EmDash docs). If two people open the same page, the second sees who has it and can open it read-only instead of overwriting the first person's work.

One kind of site should think twice:

1. An owner who redesigns pages often. On EmDash, page layouts live in the site's templates, and editors choose among the ones built for them. The docs put it this way: "If editors must choose among multiple page layouts, add a select field to the pages collection and map each stored value to a known component" (EmDash docs). That suits a site whose design is settled. If you enjoy dragging sections around in Elementor or Divi every week, you will miss it.

If the layout changes constantly, stay. Editing text, swapping images and publishing posts on a settled design is the job a move suits.

5. Is the site between about 5 and 250 pages?

Roughly 5 to 250 pages and posts is the range a move suits best. Below that, a one- or two-page site that nobody edits rarely costs enough to keep for a move to pay off. Above it, a site can still move, but there are more addresses to keep and redirect, and very large sites get a personal quote.

Size matters for two reasons. Every page is an address Google already knows, and every address has to answer on the new site or redirect to its closest match. And size sets the price. Our move costs from $790 for up to 25 pages to $1,990 for up to 250, with up to 500 posts included; above that we quote personally (pricing). A site with 30 pages and 80 posts, for example, comes to $990.

If the site is tiny and quiet, stay. If it is very large and working, there is no rush either. Move when WordPress is costing you time, money or worry, not because of its size.

Where WotWP fits

We bring WordPress sites into the AI era on EmDash and Astro, and these five questions are our readiness gate in plain words. A free, read-only check of your public pages gives you a fit result and the exact price before you ask. If your site is a store, a members area or built around one plugin, it says "not yet", before anyone pays anything.

If your site is a fit, we build a private preview, check every URL, redirect, form and search detail against your live site, and switch the domain only after you approve it, with the rollback written down. After launch we host the site and email you a monthly certificate listing the checks we ran and what changed. If it is not a fit, staying on WordPress is the right call.

Not sure which side of the table you are on? Check your site for free.

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