Stop paying WordPress to keep the lights on.

Many small businesses pay for their showcase website the way they pay for electricity: a little every month, without quite knowing what for. Hosting, theme and plugin licences, updates, "maintenance"… And when you ask what all of it is for, the answer is often: to keep WordPress alive.

I installed and maintained WordPress sites for years. That is exactly why I no longer build them: for a showcase site, it is technology from another era, and an expensive one to keep standing.

WordPress is twenty years old, and it shows

WordPress was born in 2003, on PHP, a language that appeared in 1995. Both have evolved since, but the principle has not changed: on every visit, the server runs code, queries a database, assembles the page, then sends it. On every visit, for a page that has not changed in months.

Everything else is bolted on as plugins: a cache to make up for the slowness, a security plugin to plug the holes, another for backups, search ranking, forms. Each has its own vendor, its own update cycle, its own vulnerabilities. An ordinary WordPress site is a stack of third-party software that nobody fully controls.

A modern site: built once, served instantly

The sites I build run on Next.js and React, today's web standards. The page is built once, when you publish it, then kept in cache and served as is. On the site you are reading, a cached page answers in a few milliseconds.

• Faster: no computing on every visit, and visitors only download the code their page needs — never the admin interface. On mobile especially, where your visitors' patience and part of your search ranking are decided.
• Leaner: a page computed once rather than on every visit means a server that no longer runs for nothing.
• Safer: no third-party plugins, the number one way into hacked WordPress sites. Forms and the admin are part of the application and tested with it.
• Readable by robots: all the content is in the page from the first load, for Google and AI assistants alike.

And you stay in control: text, images and pages are edited from a simple interface, without touching code and without going through a contractor.

Your data stays in Switzerland

A business website collects data: contact requests, newsletter sign-ups, sometimes documents. With a WordPress hosted who knows where and a dozen plugins, finding out where that data goes is detective work.

As an option, I guarantee my clients fully Swiss hosting: the site, its database and its files at Infomaniak, a Swiss host, on Swiss soil. Your data falls under the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP, in force since 1 September 2023) — and stays out of reach of the CLOUD Act, the 2018 US law that requires American providers to hand over data, even when it is stored in Europe.

What you really pay for with WordPress

• Hosting for a server that keeps rebuilding your pages, even at night, even when nobody visits.
• Licences: premium theme, page builder, forms, SEO, backups, security — often as yearly subscriptions.
• Updates: WordPress, the theme and every plugin, which must stay compatible with each other. Skipping them opens the door to security holes; applying them risks a plugin breaking the home page.
• Incidents: the hacked site, the form that no longer sends anything, the blank page after an update. Always at the worst moment.

When to keep WordPress

I will say it plainly: if your WooCommerce shop works and earns you money, or if a team publishes on it every day and is comfortable with it, keep it. Switching tools on principle costs more than it brings. For a showcase site, though, WordPress is almost always a power station to switch on a lamp.

How a migration goes

1. The inventory: the pages that matter, the ones that can go, the forms, what Google knows about your site.
2. The new site, built from your existing content — a good moment to make it clearer.
3. Redirects: every old address points to the new one, so you keep the search ranking you have earned.
4. The switch-over — to Switzerland if you choose the option — then a few weeks of monitoring.

Once it is live, you edit your site yourself. The site you are reading runs without WordPress: content edited from an interface, no plugin to update.

If you wonder what your current site really costs you, send me its address: I will tell you honestly whether you are better off keeping it.