Should I Bail on WordPress?

A few years ago I wrote my first post on this exact topic — on a brand new site I built myself using a WordPress AI builder. My own one. The question then was the same as it is now.

Should I bail on WordPress?

I’m still asking it. Every day.

Right now I’m deep in Base44 building apps for clients — a real cost calculator for realcost.au, accounting automation tools that take the repetitive grunt work out of their week, a CRM I put together and could sell for $750 a pop. I’ve built custom GPTs for clients. I’ve integrated AI chatbots directly into WordPress via AI Engine. I’m currently in the thick of Claude Cowork and Claude Code and seeing possibilities that genuinely don’t stop.

Every tool I pick up gives me that feeling. The oh my god, what is this feeling. The same one I got 16 years ago when I clicked a button on DreamHost and a WordPress dashboard appeared and I didn’t sleep for two days working out DNS and plugins and why the hell everything looked broken in Internet Explorer.

The difference now is I’m not just a person who builds websites. I’m a person who’s thinking about employees. About what I’m actually selling. About whether the thing I’ve built my entire business on is still the right foundation — or whether I’m the last person defending a castle that’s already been surrounded.

So. OpenAI. Anthropic. Google. Which one? And where does WordPress fit in any of it?

I’m training up on Gemini Enterprise now. Makes sense — I’ve been a Google Workspace user and reseller for years. I’m a Google native who got seduced by Claude’s no-code promise. And now I have to actually choose. Because I’m only human. I can only become genuinely expert in one area. And I need to know that the area I choose is still worth building on.

I did the research. Properly. Here’s what I found — and what I decided.

The honest case against WordPress right now.

Let’s not dress this up.

Wix grew its market share by 32.6% in a single year. AI-first builders — Framer, Durable, Hostinger AIM, the whole Generation 4.0 crowd — can produce something functional, designed, and live in minutes. The experience is electric. I understand completely why a small business owner looks at that and never looks at a WordPress dashboard.

And here’s the part that actually rattles me. My whole offering has always been about giving SMEs the ability to update their own website content. Autonomously. Without needing me. That’s the pitch. That’s the value.

Wix does that on day one. No training required.

So why am I still here?

Because autonomy has a second act. And that’s where it gets expensive.

Every closed AI builder is a closed ecosystem. You don’t own your website. You rent it.

The moment a business outgrows the platform — wants a custom AI integration, a proper WooCommerce setup, a connection to their CRM, or just the freedom to change hosting providers — they hit a wall. There is no export button. There’s no migration tool. There’s a very expensive manual rebuild.

Professional migration off Wix? The research puts it at $1,000 to $6,000+. Plus SEO damage if the URL structure changes and it’s not handled perfectly. Years of search ranking, gone.

WordPress’s own community has a name for what happens to these businesses. They call it the “technical dead-end.” They even launched a formal project — the Data Liberation Project, announced at State of the Word 2025 — specifically to rescue businesses from these platforms.

The WordPress community built a rescue operation for people who chose the platform that was supposed to replace WordPress. That tells you something.

The real numbers. What this actually costs.

Wix looks cheaper. Until you want to leave.

And every serious business eventually wants to leave. Because serious businesses grow. They add functions. They need integrations. They want AI agents that connect to their actual systems — not just the ones the platform approves.

WordPress doesn’t have an exit cost. Because you own it.

What WordPress is actually doing about AI. This is the part that settled it.

WordPress 7.0 shipped in May 2026 with a foundational, provider-agnostic AI architecture. A unified PHP AI client that lets developers connect to any model — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, whatever comes next. One connectors screen. No lock-in to any single AI provider.

That last bit matters enormously to me right now, as I’m sitting here trying to decide between three AI ecosystems. WordPress’s answer is that you don’t have to choose. Connect them all. Switch when a better one comes along. Your clients’ websites won’t care.

Then there’s MCP — the Model Context Protocol — an open standard that lets AI agents connect to and interact with a WordPress site, including write access. The site doesn’t just sit there waiting to be updated. It participates. It can draft content, manage inventory, handle customer enquiries, automate lead sequences. All without anyone touching the dashboard.

My whole pitch — give clients autonomy over their own site — just got an upgrade. It’s not just autonomy for the client anymore. It’s autonomy for the business. The site runs itself.

So. What did I decide?

I’m staying on WordPress. Not out of loyalty. Out of two things. Cost and autonomy.

Cost, because the numbers don’t lie. The platforms that look cheaper upfront extract it from you on the way out. Every time. For growing businesses, WordPress wins the total cost of ownership argument by a significant margin.

Autonomy, because that’s still the core promise. Clients own their site. They can update it. They can take it somewhere else tomorrow if they want to. And now, with agentic AI baked into the WordPress core, that site can do things it could never do before — without the client needing a developer, or me, or anyone.

The AI builders are fast. WordPress is becoming intelligent. Those are different things serving different needs.

For a business that wants to get online quickly and never grow — fine, use Wix. But for a business that’s serious about growth, ownership, and not paying $6,000 to escape a platform they chose on a Tuesday afternoon — WordPress is still the answer.

That’s what I’m selling. That’s what I’m doing. And after all of this research, I’m more certain of it than I was before I started questioning.

If you’re a business owner trying to figure out your platform — or if you’re sitting on Wix and starting to feel the ceiling — let’s talk →

Want this kind of setup for your business? Let’s talk →

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