Is WordPress Good for Your Website? What We Learned When We Left It

Our own website ran on WordPress for five years. We have since rebuilt it on a custom platform, so you might expect this article to tell you to leave too. It doesn't. Is WordPress good? For a lot of small businesses, yes. What decides it is less the platform and more who looks after it, and our old site shows what happens when that upkeep slips.

Is WordPress a good option for a small business website?

Yes, for many small businesses. WordPress is free to install and easy to edit. If you need help, plenty of developers know it. The trouble starts when plugins and page builders pile up and nobody owns the upkeep. The site gets slower, and small things break without anyone noticing.

WordPress is also the default for a reason. W3Techs, which tracks the technology behind websites, counts it on roughly four in ten of all sites it surveys. Choosing it is not a risky bet.

What was wrong with our WordPress site

When we audited the old site before rebuilding, this is what we found:

• Weak performance. The site was built with a page builder on top of a theme, and it was slow.
• Messy code. The heading structure was in the wrong order, the header was built twice (once for phones, once for desktops), and some links pointed nowhere.
• Too many pages. It had grown to 35 pages, including landing pages for places we no longer targeted, and 46 blog posts. Seven of those posts were demo content that came with the theme and had never been deleted.
• No reliable data. The tracking setup still sent visits to Universal Analytics, which Google has switched off. The newer Google Analytics property had been created and never connected. For a long stretch, we simply did not know what visitors did on the site.
• Copies of the site in Google. A development copy and an old subdomain were both indexed and showing up next to the real site.

The result, in the 15 months before we moved: about eight clicks a month from Google, at an average position of 63. That is page seven.

Most of that list is not WordPress's fault. It is what gets added over five years and never cleaned up. That distinction matters if you are deciding what to do with your own site.

Why we moved instead of tidying up

We wanted four things the old site could not give us without starting again:

1. Fewer, clearer pages. The 35 pages became a handful of service pages, each with one job.
2. Speed and clean code as a requirement. Before any code was written, we put the targets in writing, with tests the new site had to pass.
3. Two languages done properly. English and European Portuguese, with the Portuguese written for Portuguese readers, not translated word for word.
4. Structured data built in, so search engines and AI tools can read who we are and what we do.

When we measured the new homepage with PageSpeed Insights the day after launch, it scored 98 for performance on mobile, with the main content loading in 0.4 seconds.

It was not painless. The first weeks needed fixes to redirects and to tracking, which we found by checking instead of assuming. If you move platform, budget time for that part.

WordPress or a custom build?

When WordPress is the right choice

• Someone will keep it updated every month, whether that is you or someone you pay.
• You want to edit pages and posts yourself without calling anyone.
• Your budget is limited and a well-chosen theme covers what you need.
• You want an online shop, and a mainstream plugin such as WooCommerce fits how you sell.

When to look at something else

• Nobody will maintain it after launch.
• The site is your main source of enquiries and its speed and structure directly affect sales.
• You need features that would mean stacking plugin on plugin.
• Your current site has years of layers on it, and fixing them would touch almost every page anyway.

Fix it or move it? Four checks before you decide

These come straight from what went wrong with ours.

1. Run your homepage through PageSpeed Insights on mobile. A poor score on a simple page usually points to the theme, the page builder or too many plugins.
2. Check your analytics is recording. Open the real-time report in Google Analytics and visit your own site. If nothing appears, you have been working blind.
3. Search Google for copies of your site on other addresses, such as a staging or development subdomain. If they show up, they compete with the real one.
4. Count your plugins and ask who updates them. If the answer is "nobody in particular", that is the first thing to fix, whatever platform you end up on.

If the site passes all four, tidy it up and keep it. If it fails most of them, a rebuild may cost less than a long list of repairs. Either way, if your traffic has already fallen, read why your website traffic is dropping before you blame the platform, and remember that your website is the foundation of your marketing, whatever it runs on.

Frequently asked questions

Is WordPress free?

The software is free. Running a site on it is not: there is hosting and a domain to pay for, often a theme or plugins, and the time someone spends keeping it all updated.

Is WordPress bad for SEO?

No. Google does not rank a site lower for being built on WordPress. Our old site ranked badly because of how it was structured and because duplicate copies of it were competing in Google. Both can happen on any platform.

Is WordPress secure?

The core software is maintained and patched regularly. Most problems come from themes and plugins that are out of date or abandoned by their developers, which is why monthly updates matter more than the choice of platform.

What are the alternatives to WordPress?

For a simple brochure site, hosted builders such as Squarespace or Wix need almost no upkeep. For an online shop, Shopify is built for selling. For a business site built around how you work, a custom build like ours is an option, at a higher upfront cost.

Can I move away from WordPress later without losing my Google rankings?

Yes, if every old address is redirected to its new equivalent. We mapped every page and post of the old site before switching, and still found a few gaps after launch. Plan the redirects first and check them again once the new site is live.

Salty Lavender, a full-service marketing agency in Faro, designs and builds websites as part of the marketing it runs for small businesses. If you are not sure whether to fix your site or move it, tell us what you are working with or write to hello@saltylavender.com.