I spent a decade recommending WordPress. Last Friday I turned mine off.

If you have been around this site for a while, you know what I was. I was the WordPress guy. For the better part of ten years, if a friend asked me how to build a website, my answer started with WordPress and usually ended with me talking them out of Wix. I wrote Elementor tutorials here. I compared page builders like other sites compare graphics cards. I built client sites on it, my own sites on it, and I defended it in more comment sections than I care to admit.

Last Friday I turned WordPress off. Not the site. The site is faster than it has ever been. Just WordPress.

Every page you are reading is a finished HTML file sitting on a server near you, and nothing gets computed when you visit.

WordPress was the right answer, and I want to be clear about that

It is easy to write the "WordPress is over" post. It is also lazy, and it would be rewriting my own history.

When I went all-in on WordPress, the alternatives were genuinely worse. Site builders locked you into their walled gardens and their pricing. Hand-coding a site meant hand-coding everything: the RSS feed, the sitemap, the SEO tags, the image resizing, comments, search. WordPress gave you all of it for free, with a community that had already solved every problem you were about to have. The plugin ecosystem was the whole argument. You did not build features, you installed them.

That math was correct for a decade. If I could go back, I would make the same call every time.

So why leave now?

Three things, and none of them is "WordPress got bad."

First, my content stopped needing WordPress. Over the last couple of years I rebuilt every post on this site as a self-contained block: the layout, the styles, the schema, everything in one piece of HTML. WordPress was still serving those blocks, but it was not really doing anything to them anymore. It had quietly become a very elaborate way to concatenate files I had already written. When I finally looked at what the database was contributing, the honest answer was: overhead.

Second, the edge platforms grew up. What used to take a stack of paid services is now sitting on Cloudflare's free tier: global hosting, redirects, a contact form that sends real email with no third-party mail service, bot protection on that form, and analytics if you want them. My entire hosting bill is now zero dollars a month, and I do not say that as a flex. I say it because "free tier" used to mean "toy," and it does not anymore.

Third, and I will be upfront about this: I did it with an AI collaborator. The honest reason a one-person site cannot leave WordPress is never the hosting. It is the ten thousand small jobs: exporting every page, preserving every URL, every meta tag, every redirect, rebuilding search, testing all of it. That is months of evenings, which is why nobody does it. I did it in two days, working with Claude the way I would work with a very fast contractor: I made every decision, reviewed every change, and did a lot of follow-up testing, and it did the ten thousand small jobs. I am not going to pretend this migration happens on that timeline any other way. Times changed here too, and it would be strange to write an honest post about modern web publishing and leave that part out.

The part I was most wrong about

Going in, I was convinced the media library would be the nightmare. Thirteen hundred images, a decade of accumulation, most of it probably unused. I had been dreading that cleanup for years.

It took four minutes. We copied everything, kept every URL identical, and moved on. The audit even settled an old bet with myself: only about 43 percent of those images are actually used anywhere. The rest can be pruned someday, or never, because storage at this scale is effectively free. The thing I dreaded most was the easiest step of the whole project.

The actual hard parts were smaller and funnier than I expected. A few favorites:

• The cache that would not die. After the DNS switch, the site kept showing me WordPress. I messaged something like "the cache is strong with this one" before we figured out the old pages were still living in the edge cache. One purge later, the new site appeared.
• The comment that outlived its bug. Deep in my stylesheet was a CSS rule with a comment that said, in all caps, DO NOT simplify this, because it worked around a quirk in my old page builder. On the new site, that workaround was the bug. We deleted the thing the comment forbade deleting. The fix had outlived the problem it fixed, which might be the whole migration in one sentence.
• The placeholder nobody mentioned. We found a page on my live site that still said "[Your Site Name]" in the copy. It had apparently said that for years. Nobody told me.
• Too many brands starting with CK. At one point the contact form's bot protection refused to work, and it turned out I had authorized the wrong domain. That one was entirely on me.

What actually got faster

I am a reviewer, so here is the review. Same site, same content, same design, measured before and after.

That zero milliseconds of blocking time is my favorite number. It means there is no JavaScript framework chewing on your phone's processor before the page will respond to your thumb. There is simply nothing left to chew.

And it is the same reason the ads left this site earlier this year. Every change I have made in 2026 has been the same change: removing layers that sat between you and the content.

What I gave up

This would not be a CK Tech Check review if I skipped the downsides, and there are real ones.

There is no admin screen anymore. No dashboard, no visual editor, no logging in from a hotel to fix a typo on my phone. My site is a folder of files in version control, and changing it means editing files and pushing them. My workflow assumes git and an AI assistant I trust with the mechanical work. That is a real prerequisite, and it is not everyone's setup.

There are no plugins to save me. If I want a feature now, somebody builds it. It turns out most features I actually use took an afternoon each to build, and now I own them outright, but "somebody builds it" is doing real work in that sentence.

And there is no ecosystem safety net. WordPress problems have ten thousand forum answers. My problems now have a much smaller audience.

Who should still use WordPress

Plenty of people, and I mean that.

If your site has multiple authors, or an owner who will never touch a code file, WordPress is still the right call. If you run a store, WooCommerce is still the pragmatic answer. If you rely on plugins doing genuinely complex things for you, or you just want to write and never think about the machinery, the machinery WordPress gives you is still excellent. And the managed hosts have never been better at running it. My hosting at WP Engine was genuinely great to the end, and if you are staying on WordPress, they are still exactly who I would point you at. The platform was never the problem. My site just stopped being the kind of site that needs a platform.

The proof was already live before I wrote this

Here is the part I like best. While I was still drafting this post, the new stack quietly published two full lab reviews: the Kioxia Exceria G2 and a counterfeit SanDisk teardown. Nobody emailed me to ask what happened to the site. Nobody noticed the platform underneath had changed at all, which is exactly the outcome you want from a migration.

No editor screen, no database row, no publish button. I write it, we turn it into a page, I push it, and it is live worldwide about three minutes later.

Ten years ago I told everyone WordPress was the way, and I was right. This year the answer changed, and I would rather change with it than defend the old answer out of loyalty. That is the same standard I try to hold every product on this site to. It was only fair to hold my own stack to it too.