We built on WordPress for nearly fifteen years. We know it well. We've built hundreds of sites on it, managed dozens of migrations away from it, and spent years defending it to clients who wanted something shinier. Two years ago we made the decision to move all new client builds to Next.js. This is the honest accounting of why we did it, what surprised us, what we lost, what we gained, and the situations where WordPress still makes sense.
What Changed
WordPress did not get worse. It actually got better over the same period. The block editor matured, performance improved, and the ecosystem remains by far the largest in web development. What changed is that the baseline expectations for web performance shifted dramatically, and WordPress's architecture makes those expectations genuinely difficult to meet. Core Web Vitals became a ranking factor. Mobile performance became a conversion factor. The gap between what a well-optimized Next.js site delivers and what a well-optimized WordPress site delivers widened past the point where we could ignore it.
The Performance Gap Is Real and It Matters
This is not theoretical. We ran both platforms in production simultaneously across comparable client sites for over a year before making the decision. The Next.js sites consistently achieved Lighthouse performance scores in the 95-100 range. The WordPress sites, even heavily optimized with caching, CDN, and performance plugins, rarely exceeded 75-85. On mobile the gap was larger. Time to first byte, largest contentful paint, cumulative layout shift -- on every metric that Google measures and that users experience, the Next.js sites performed materially better.
The business impact was measurable. One client we migrated from WordPress to Next.js saw a 34% reduction in bounce rate and a 22% increase in conversion rate within 90 days of launch. The site content was identical. The difference was entirely performance and user experience. That result was consistent enough across migrations that we stopped treating it as an edge case.
Security Is Not a Minor Consideration
WordPress powers 43% of the web, which makes it the most attacked platform in existence. The plugin ecosystem, which is WordPress's greatest strength, is also its most significant vulnerability. Every plugin is a potential attack surface. Keeping a WordPress site secure requires ongoing vigilance: plugin updates, core updates, security monitoring, and the constant awareness that any plugin you've come to depend on may have a critical vulnerability disclosed tomorrow. Next.js sites have a fundamentally smaller attack surface. There is no plugin ecosystem, no database exposed to plugin code, and no WordPress admin login page for bots to probe.
What We Lost
Honesty requires acknowledging the real costs. WordPress has a content editing experience that is genuinely better for non-technical teams. The block editor is polished and familiar. Nearly every client with a WordPress site knew how to add a blog post. With Next.js and a headless CMS, there is always a learning curve for the client team. We use Supabase for content storage and build custom admin interfaces where needed, but the out-of-the-box editing experience is not as friendly as WordPress for clients who want to self-manage their content aggressively.
The plugin ecosystem is also a genuine loss for certain use cases. WooCommerce, Advanced Custom Fields, WPML for multilingual sites -- these represent years of development work that simply doesn't exist in the Next.js world. We build custom solutions for most of these needs, but that takes more time and costs more money upfront. For clients with complex functional requirements and smaller budgets, WordPress is sometimes still the right answer.
When WordPress Still Makes Sense
WordPress remains the right choice in three situations. First, when the client team will be managing significant content volume independently and needs the most familiar editing experience. Second, when the project requires complex functionality that has a mature WordPress plugin solution and custom development isn't in scope. Third, when the budget doesn't support the additional development time that a headless architecture requires. Outside of those three scenarios, we recommend Next.js for every new build.
The Migration Question
The most common question we get is whether existing WordPress sites should be migrated. The honest answer is: it depends on how much the performance gap is costing you. If your WordPress site is performing well, your team knows how to manage it, and your rankings are solid, migration carries real risk for uncertain gain. If your Lighthouse scores are consistently below 70, your mobile conversion rate is significantly below your desktop rate, or you're spending meaningful time on security and maintenance rather than growth, the migration math often works out. Run the numbers on what a 20% improvement in conversion rate would mean for your revenue, then compare that to the migration cost. That calculation usually tells you everything you need to know.