Why More Small Businesses Are Moving Off WordPress in 2026

More small businesses are moving off WordPress in 2026 than in any previous year. The reasons are not sudden. They built up over time: rising security vulnerability counts, hosting costs that kept creeping upward, and a growing sense that maintaining a CMS was not a good use of a business owner’s attention. Something tipped for many of them. Here is what that something was.

The vulnerability numbers are no longer ignorable

11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities were found in 2025. That is a 42% increase from 2024. 91% came from plugins.

Most small business WordPress sites have 10 to 30 plugins installed. Each plugin is a potential vulnerability. Each vulnerability is a potential entry point. Keeping all of them updated is a constant task. Falling behind is a risk that compounds.

Roughly 13,000 WordPress sites are hacked every day. The average small business recovery from a hack costs $14,500 in lost time, cleaned-up content, recovered reputation, and often a completely new site.

These numbers were manageable when WordPress was the only option. They are harder to justify now that alternatives exist.

Hosting costs kept rising

When WordPress became popular, hosting was cheap. Shared hosting plans started at a few dollars per month. That was fine.

Over the years, the market moved. Managed WordPress hosting, with automatic updates, daily backups, and security scanning, became the safer option, and the price reflected it. A managed WordPress host can run $30 to $100 per month for a basic business site.

Then add a premium theme. A form plugin. A security plugin. An SEO plugin. Each one has a license fee. The total monthly cost of a simple five-page business site, once all the software licenses are included, often reaches $100 to $200 per month.

Many business owners did not notice the creep. They added one thing at a time. But when they look at the total now, the question becomes unavoidable: what is all of this actually buying?

Maintenance became a job nobody wanted

Running a WordPress site properly means keeping WordPress core, all plugins, and the theme updated. It means checking for conflicts when an update breaks something. It means monitoring for malware. It means restoring from backup when something goes wrong.

For a business that sells plumbing services or dental care, none of that is their job. But for years, it was the default burden that came with having a website.

The business owners who are moving now are the ones who finally decided that maintaining a website software platform is not a reasonable expectation for someone whose actual job is something else entirely.

Simpler alternatives got good enough

For years, the argument for staying on WordPress was that the alternatives were not good enough. Squarespace was for portfolios. Wix was for hobby sites. Nothing else had the flexibility of WordPress.

That argument has weakened. The alternatives have improved substantially. For a service business that needs a homepage, a few inner pages, a contact form, and a blog, the alternatives have been more than sufficient for several years.

The shift in perception is that flexibility has a cost. WordPress gives maximum flexibility in exchange for maximum maintenance responsibility. Most small businesses do not need the flexibility. They need a site that works, loads fast, and does not send them security alerts at 2 a.m.

What to expect if you decide to move

Basalt moves small business websites off WordPress to a platform with nothing to hack and nothing to update. The move is free. Your existing content transfers. You review and approve before anything goes live.

The honest comparison of alternatives is here. What the move actually costs over time compared to staying is here.

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