If you are on WordPress

WordPress didn't fail you. It assumed you had a developer.

WordPress is a developer's toolkit that got sold to people who are not developers. It is powerful, it is free, and your content is genuinely yours. It also quietly assumes somebody is around to update it, test it, patch it and change it. If that somebody was supposed to be you, and you have a business to run, that is the whole problem — and it shows up in five specific places.

What moving actually involves →See the price

The short version

Five specific places it shows up.

  1. Nobody owns “your site works”Your site is WordPress core, plus a theme, plus a dozen plugins from a dozen authors. No one tests that particular combination except you.
  2. Updates are a risk you carryThe standard advice is to back up first and try it on a copy. That advice exists for a reason.
  3. Small changes need big helpTyping new hours is easy. Moving a section, or adding one the theme does not have, is a developer or a page builder.
  4. Speed is the sum of everything installedEvery plugin can add its own CSS and JavaScript to every page, whether or not that page uses it.
  5. Your security surface is every plugin you ever installedIncluding the ones whose authors stopped maintaining them, which still run on every page.

The difference in one line

A pile of parts, or one machine.

A WordPress site is assembled from parts that were never designed together, by people who have never met, and the assembly is yours to keep working. Ours is one engine, built and run by us, and every site we ship is the same engine dressed differently.

Why does my WordPress site need so much maintenance?

Because WordPress on its own does not do very much. Core gives you pages, posts and users. Everything a business actually needs — a contact form, a booking calendar, a gallery, a shop, backups, caching, SEO fields — arrives as a plugin, and most plugins are written by somebody who has never heard of your site.

Each one has its own author, its own release schedule, its own support policy and its own idea of what finished looks like. Some are maintained by companies. Some are maintained by one person in their evenings. Some are not maintained at all any more, and nothing announces that — the plugin simply stops changing.

That is the maintenance tax, and it is not a defect in WordPress. It is what a plugin architecture is: enormous choice, and the assembly is yours.

What a small-business WordPress site is made of

  • WordPress core
  • A theme, often a commercial one
  • A page builder
  • A forms plugin
  • An SEO plugin
  • A caching plugin
  • A backup plugin
  • A security plugin
  • An image optimizer
  • Whatever the last person added

That is ten independent release schedules and one website. Nobody is looking at the whole of it except you.

Why do WordPress updates break things?

Because nothing updates together. WordPress core, your theme and every plugin ship on their own schedules, and each is tested against its author's idea of a normal site — not against yours. Your combination exists once, on your server, and you are the only person who has it.

The standard advice is the tell: back up first, try the update on a copy, check the site afterwards. That is good advice. It is also a job description — one that comes round every time any of those parts releases, forever, whether or not you wanted anything to change.

And when it does break, it breaks in public. The site is live and wrong while you work out which of the ten did it.

Turning updates off is worse, not safer. The security fixes arrive through the same door as the breakage.

Why do I need a developer to change my own website?

You don't, for words. Every WordPress install has an editor, and typing new opening hours into it is genuinely easy.

You need one for shape. Moving a section above another one, adding a kind of section your theme does not have, changing what a template renders on every page at once — that is theme code. The usual escape from theme code is a page builder, which is another plugin, with its own way of storing your layout; content built inside one is difficult to take anywhere else.

So a change you can describe in a sentence — "put the testimonials above the pricing and swap the header photo" — becomes a quote, a schedule and somebody's afternoon. Most small-business sites do not go stale because the owner stopped caring. They go stale because changing them stopped being worth the friction.

A pile of parts, or one machine.

Why is my WordPress site slow?

Usually because of what is installed on it, rather than because of WordPress itself.

A plugin can add its own CSS and JavaScript to every page on your site, whether or not that page uses the plugin. A theme can load fonts and sliders you never asked for. Ten plugins means ten authors each deciding what your homepage downloads, and not one of them is looking at the total.

Google publishes what it measures — Core Web Vitals: Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift — and all three are affected by exactly that total. A caching plugin can compensate for some of it. It cannot remove what was added.

How safe is a WordPress site?

About as safe as the least-maintained thing installed on it.

Every plugin is code running on your site with access to your database. That is exactly what makes plugins useful, and it is also the whole security question: your surface is not WordPress, it is WordPress plus your theme plus every plugin you have ever installed and not removed.

Being popular is part of it too. A platform this widely used is worth writing automated attacks against, and those attacks go looking for known holes in known plugins. That is survivable when everything is current. The risk is the plugin that stopped being maintained two years ago and still loads on every page.

What WordPress gets right

  • It is free and open, and it will still be here in ten years.
  • Your content is yours, and it exports.
  • There is a plugin for very nearly anything, which is a real answer when your business needs one specific strange thing.
  • If you have a developer — on staff, on retainer, or in the mirror — the flexibility is genuinely hard to beat at the price.

None of that is in dispute, and we are not going to pretend otherwise in order to sell you something. WordPress is a good piece of software with an assumption baked into it. The only question is whether that assumption is true for you.

Should you move?

Stay on WordPress if…

  • You have a developer you like, and a budget for them.
  • Your site leans on a specific plugin ecosystem — a membership system, a course platform, a store with years of history in it.
  • You want to host and own the code yourself, and you enjoy that.
  • It works, you never touch it, and none of this has ever bothered you. A working site is not a problem.

Move if…

  • The last three things you wanted changed never got changed.
  • You have been quoted for a change you could describe in one sentence.
  • You do not know when your site was last updated, and neither does anyone else.
  • You are paying for plugins you could not name.
  • You are the person who would find out it was down.

If you read the left-hand column and recognized yourself, stay. We would rather tell you that here than three weeks into a build.

Changing your site should be a message, not a project.

Questions people ask

Is WordPress bad?

No. WordPress is good software that assumes somebody is running it. If that somebody exists — a developer on staff, on retainer, or you, because you enjoy it — it is an excellent choice. It goes wrong when the operator was supposed to be you and you have a business to run instead.

Can I just get a WordPress maintenance plan instead?

You can, and if you like your site that is a reasonable thing to do. It is worth knowing what it buys: somebody applies the updates and checks that nothing broke. It does not usually mean you can ask for a new section on Tuesday and have it on Thursday.

What about Squarespace, Wix or Shopify?

They solve the same problem a different way. You get one system instead of a pile of plugins, and you do the building yourself in their editor. With us, the building is ours — you ask, we do it. If you would rather be hands-on, those are good tools and we will say so.

Will I lose my Google rankings if I move off WordPress?

Not for technical reasons, if the move is done properly. Every old address is mapped to its new one with a permanent redirect, the sitemap is regenerated on every build, and pages are rendered on the server. Nobody can promise rankings, and anyone who does is selling you something.

What does reddysite cost?

$1,995 to build and $295 a month. Selling online is the Commerce add-on, $3,000 to add and $250 a month. That is the whole price — hosting, updates and support are in the monthly, and updates are unlimited.

Changing your site should be a message, not a project.

Sign in, say what you want in plain words, drag in a photo. It is live within 48 hours, as often as you like, on the same flat monthly.

What moving involves →Start your intake