This week we moved our own website, hixfi.com, off WordPress and onto Vercel. We did not do it because WordPress is bad. We maintain WordPress sites for a living and will keep doing so. We did it because for a marketing site like ours, WordPress had become a lot of moving parts to keep a few pages fast and safe. Here is what changed, with our own numbers, and the honest list of businesses that should not do the same.
First, what is actually different
A WordPress site builds every page on request: a visitor arrives, PHP runs, the database is queried, plugins add their pieces, and the result is sent back. Caching plugins exist to skip that work as often as possible.
A site on Vercel, built with a framework like Next.js, does most of that work once, when the site is published. The finished pages sit on a global network of servers, close to whoever is asking for them. There is no database answering visitors and no plugin running per request. Anything that does need to be live, like a form or a counter, is a small, separate piece.
Almost every benefit below follows from that one difference.
1. Speed you can measure
Google's PageSpeed test, mobile setting, on our home page:
Our home page, mobile
PageSpeed performance score, out of 100
Old WordPress home page against the rebuilt one, with the same tracking tags. Measured by HiXFi with Lighthouse, October 2026.
Server response time, the wait before the browser receives anything at all, went from roughly 0.6 to 0.9 seconds to 0.2 to 0.3 seconds in our tests. On a phone with a weak signal, that difference is the gap between a page that feels instant and one that feels broken.
To be fair about it: the page was redesigned during the move, so not every point of that gain belongs to the platform. But the server response time is pure platform, and so is the fact that the score now holds without a caching plugin propping it up.
Speed is not vanity. It is part of how Google judges pages, and it decides whether someone on a phone waits for you or taps back to the next result.
2. Nothing left to update
Our WordPress site needed a steady stream of core, theme and plugin updates, and some of them bit back. In the last year alone we dealt with a caching plugin's add-on that crashed the site after a PHP upgrade, an object-cache add-on that started serving blank error pages, a page-builder cache that kept showing old versions of edited pages, and WordPress's built-in scheduler driving server load spikes that slowed every other site on the same machine.
None of that exists anymore. There are no plugins to update, no PHP version to keep current, and no database to optimise. The site is code and content in a repository. When it changes, the change is reviewed and published as a new version.
3. A much smaller target
Most hacked WordPress sites are not hacked through WordPress itself. They are hacked through an outdated plugin, or through endless guessing at the login page. Our old site had Cloudflare rules in place just to keep bots off the login page and slow down crawlers hammering it.
After the move there is no login page, no admin dashboard, no plugin code and no database facing the internet. Visitors receive finished pages. The questions a WordPress security plan exists to answer, like whether the plugins are patched, whether the logins are strong and whether the admin is locked down, simply stop applying to the public site.
This does not make a site invincible. The domain, the DNS and the accounts behind them still need protecting. But the everyday attack surface shrinks to almost nothing.
4. Mistakes are reversible in seconds
Every publish on Vercel is a complete, separate version of the site. If a change goes wrong, rolling back is one click to the previous version, not a restore from last night's backup and a prayer that the database matches the files. We are also keeping the old WordPress site running, untouched, for two weeks after the switch, so a full rollback is a DNS change away.
5. Total control over what Google and AI tools read
On WordPress, what ends up in your page's code depends on your theme, your SEO plugin and every other plugin that injects something. Moving gave us exact control over titles, descriptions, structured data, the sitemap and the files AI assistants read, like llms.txt. Every page now gets its own share image, generated automatically when the site is published. Small things, but they are the details that decide how you look in search results and when someone shares your link.
What it cost us
An honest post has this section. The move was a real project, not a button:
- Every page was rebuilt. Seventy-five addresses, each checked against the old version so no text, heading or link went missing.
- Every old address had to keep working. Old links, old blog addresses and even WordPress's numbered links now redirect permanently to the right page, so nothing anyone bookmarked or Google indexed breaks.
- Forms and tracking were moved deliberately. Contact, proposal and support forms post straight into our CRM. Analytics and ad tags were checked one by one after the switch.
- Editing works differently. There is no WordPress dashboard. Content changes go through us, or through a headless CMS if a client wants to edit their own pages.
Who should stay on WordPress
For a lot of small businesses, WordPress is still the right answer. Stay put if:
- Your site runs on plugins. Bookings, memberships, online courses, WooCommerce stores and directory plugins are WordPress's real strength. Rebuilding them costs far more than maintaining them.
- You edit your own pages often. If staff update menus, prices or listings several times a week and like doing it themselves, the WordPress editor earns its keep.
- Your site is small, simple and already healthy. A five-page brochure site on decent hosting with a proper maintenance plan does not need a migration. It needs its updates done.
The move makes the most sense for marketing sites that matter to the business, where speed and search visibility drive enquiries, where content changes are planned rather than daily, and where the plugin list has grown into something nobody wants to touch.
If you do migrate, do not skip these
- Keep every old address working, or redirect it permanently to its new page.
- Carry over every title, description and piece of structured data, not just the visible text.
- Test every form end to end, all the way to the inbox or the CRM.
- Move the analytics and ad tags, then check that they are actually firing.
- Submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console and watch it for a few weeks.
- Leave your email settings alone. Changing where the website lives should not touch the records that deliver your mail.
- Keep the old site running, untouched, until you are sure.
Not sure which side you are on?
Run your site through our free website audit. It takes about a minute and shows whether speed, security or search visibility is actually holding you back. If the answer is the platform, ask us for a proposal and we will tell you plainly whether a move is worth it. If it is not, a care plan will usually get you most of the way for a fraction of the cost.
