The plugins are what make leaving expensive

Technology

Most of the sites we migrate started on WordPress, and starting there was the right call. It is cheap to stand up and it runs without an engineer. What it does not give you is a content model somebody designed, so the gaps in the structure widen as the page count grows.

We move teams off it onto Sanity, Contentful, DatoCMS, Prismic, and Payload. Contextual AI's blog posts, research articles, and use cases came across by script with their structure and metadata intact. Every migration gets its own conversion scripts, because every WordPress site accumulated its own plugins.

Monogram logo

Migration

What moving off WordPress actually costs

  1. Plugins are the estimate, not the page count

    WordPress's open plugin ecosystem is the migration cost. Anything that touched content or images wrote its own data shape, and each one needs its own handler. The worst we have hit was a body content plugin serializing to XML, which took a custom parser covering more than two hundred tag types.

  2. Body content is where the hours go

    Titles, descriptions, and basic metadata move in an afternoon. Rich text does not. Shortcodes have to become components, embedded media has to be re-associated, and hand-written HTML blocks have to be parsed and restructured. We scope a WordPress migration by how custom the body content is, not by page count.

  3. It is still the right first answer sometimes

    Before there is revenue for custom development, WordPress is accessible and cheap, and leaving does not have to happen all at once. Addiction Education Society kept its WordPress-based learning system running while we built a new marketing platform beside it. The public pages modernized and the courses never stopped.