We have a confession. We still build WordPress sites — about 12% of our projects in 2025. WordPress is not dead, not dying, and is the right answer more often than the Next.js evangelist crowd will admit.
But after migrating 31 sites from WordPress to Next.js in two years, we also have data on a question almost nobody quantifies: what does a WordPress site actually cost the business that runs it?
This is the honest comparison we wish someone had given us before we ourselves migrated 30+ clients. Where WordPress wins. Where it secretly drains the bank account. And the 5-question framework we now use to make the call in 30 minutes flat.
The hidden costs you don't see on an invoice
WordPress's quoted price is typically very low. The real cost shows up on lines nobody adds up.
Cost #1 — Plugin sprawl and the security bill
The average WordPress site we audit has 34 active plugins. Some are critical (WooCommerce, Yoast, ACF). Most are duct tape: a plugin to fix a WooCommerce limitation, a plugin to fix the first plugin's bug, a plugin to do the thing the theme should do.
Cost realities:
- Premium plugin licenses: typically €450–€1,200/year per site, recurring forever
- Conflicts between plugins: ~3 hours of dev time per quarter on average
- Security incidents: 1 in 4 WP sites we onboard had a breach in the previous 18 months. Cleanups average €600–€2,400 plus reputation damage.
For a real client (a B2B services company in Madrid), the invisible WP bill was:
- Plugin licenses: €1,180/year
- Hosting (managed WP, decent): €39/month = €468/year
- Two emergency cleanups: €1,800
- A redesign that took 5 months because the theme couldn't be modified safely: €11,000
Their "free CMS" cost them €14,448 in a single year. They thought they were paying €468.
We wrote a separate post on this, but it bears repeating: WordPress's typical bundle includes 4–8 plugins that each fire scripts on every page. Even with WP Rocket, NitroPack and a CDN, the median Lighthouse mobile score of the WP sites we audit is 42.
Recall: every +1 second of LCP costs ~€4,200/month for a mid-size Spanish e-commerce. WordPress's plugin model makes performance an upstream battle that never ends.
Cost #3 — Iteration speed (the killer nobody invoices)
This is the cost that rarely shows up in spreadsheets but kills businesses:
- WP: marketing wants a new section on a landing page → ticket → designer → page builder → cache flush → hope it doesn't break the responsive grid → 3 days, average.
- Next.js + headless CMS (Sanity, Contentful, Hygraph): marketing edits the section themselves in the CMS, hits Save, the change is live in 12 seconds.
We've measured it on a SaaS client: a-b test deployment time went from 9 days (WP) to 6 hours (Next.js + Sanity). Same team. Same effort. Different tool.
Speed of iteration is a strategic moat. Slow iteration is a strategic mortgage.
Cost #4 — The "we need a developer for that?" tax
Every WP-stuck client we see has a list of small-but-painful tasks queued up that they keep paying for:
- "Update the team page" (1.5h to a developer because the theme used Beaver Builder for the team page but not the homepage)
- "Add a new field to the contact form" (3h because Gravity Forms decided to break with the latest WP update)
- "Translate the homepage to French" (8h because WPML doesn't play nicely with the page builder)
Add up a year of these and it's another €2,500–€5,000 in invoices for things that should be a 2-minute click.
Where WordPress is the right answer
We promised honesty, so:
Use WordPress when:
- Your team includes someone who already knows WP, and they manage daily content. The biggest predictor of a successful WP site is a competent WP person on the inside.
- You're a content-first site with rare design changes, big editorial volume, and SEO needs that WP serves very well — Yoast remains best-in-class for technical SEO authoring.
- You need a marketplace of plugins for niche functionality — WP's ecosystem is unmatched. If the plugin already exists for your specific case, building it from scratch is a waste.
- Your budget cap is real: under €5,000, a clean WP build with a quality theme is hard to beat. We will tell you that.
- You're not going to migrate again. WP rewards slow, consistent care.
Migrate to Next.js (or similar) when:
- Performance is a measurable revenue lever — e-commerce, lead-gen, SaaS marketing.
- You need fine-grained design control that fights with whatever theme/builder you're on.
- You ship multiple iterations per week and the team is sick of the publishing latency.
- You need real internationalization (5+ locales, with regional pricing, content variation).
- You want to integrate the marketing site with internal tools (your own SaaS, CRM, partner portal). Headless makes this 10x easier.
- Security and compliance pressure is rising: SOC 2, ISO 27001, finance/health regulations. A bespoke Next.js + headless CMS is much easier to audit.
A real migration case (the boring math)
A B2B SaaS in Bilbao. Marketing site on WordPress. Stack: Avada theme + 28 plugins + WPML + WooCommerce (yes, even though they didn't sell physical products).
Before migration:
- Lighthouse mobile: 36
- LCP (CrUX, Spain mobile): 4.6s
- Free-trial conversion rate: 1.4%
- Iteration time for a landing page change: 4–7 days
- Annual stack cost (plugins + hosting + emergency dev): €7,800
- Devs hated it. Marketing hated it.
After 9 weeks of work:
- Migrated to Next.js + Sanity CMS, Vercel hosting
- Lighthouse mobile: 97
- LCP (CrUX, Spain mobile): 1.4s
- Free-trial conversion rate: 3.1% (yes, more than doubled)
- Iteration time for a landing page change: 30 minutes
- Annual stack cost: €1,920 (Sanity + Vercel)
- Marketing now ships mid-funnel pages without a single ticket
The free-trial rate alone, given their funnel, was equivalent to €114,000 of incremental ARR. The migration cost: €32,000. ROI: positive in 4 months on conversion alone, before counting the operational savings.
The 5-question framework we now run in 30 minutes
Sit your team in a room. Answer these. Be honest.
- Who edits content monthly? A non-technical person? → headless CMS like Sanity is easier than WP today, despite the reputation. Still, weight WP a little if your editor lives in WP.
- Is page speed already a board-level KPI? If yes, WP is a structural disadvantage you'll never fully fix.
- How many landing pages will you ship in the next 12 months? If > 30, you need a system that respects your time. WP page builders break under that load.
- How many languages? 1–2: WP is fine. 3+: Next.js + a real i18n stack is dramatically less painful.
- What's your team's seniority? A junior dev maintaining WP is fine. A junior dev maintaining a custom Next.js + headless stack is a recipe for chaos. The migration should match the team you'll actually have in 18 months.
If 4 out of 5 answers point to "modern stack", migrate. If 4 out of 5 say "stay", stay.
If it's 2/2 with a big "it depends" hanging in the air — do a small migration spike: rebuild only the homepage on the new stack and measure for 30 days. The truth will reveal itself.
What about Astro, SvelteKit, or staying on a different CMS?
We're not religious about Next.js. We've shipped:
- Astro for content-heavy / blog-first sites where a 1-engineer team needs to move fast
- SvelteKit when the team's frontend lead happens to love it (and is going to maintain it)
- Webflow for pure marketing sites under €15k where the team won't have a dev in-house
- Shopify (custom theme) for e-commerce — almost always the right answer in 2026
The framework matters less than the fit between the tool, the team, and the problem. Anyone who tells you "always migrate, framework X is king" is selling something.
Get a no-bullshit migration recommendation
If you're on WordPress and wondering whether to migrate, we'll do a 2-hour audit for free. Output:
- A real cost breakdown of your current WP stack (the hidden ones too)
- A migration ROI projection if it makes sense
- A clear "stay" recommendation with a maintenance plan if it doesn't
- A 1-page architecture diagram either way
We send away about 40% of clients with a "stay where you are" recommendation, and we sleep great.
Request a migration audit or explore our web development services.
The right tech doesn't make you faster. The right fit does.
