Five-year cost
Security, honestly
Where Webflow loses
What a move costs
Five-year cost
Security, honestly
Where Webflow loses
What a move costs
Webflow vs WordPress · September 2026
Your site ison WordPress
So the question is not which is better. It is whether what you have is costing you more than moving would. This page is written for that decision, with current numbers and a section listing the six cases where we would tell you to stay exactly where you are.
The short version
Before you read
all of it
We sell Webflow, so you should read the rest of this with that in mind. Here is the summary anyway, including the third of it that costs us work.
move if
Your site is mostly marketing
Pages, a blog, case studies, landing pages, a contact form. That is what Webflow is for, and the whole plugin layer that breaks your WordPress site every few months simply does not exist.
move if
You are paying for plugins and maintenance
Eight licences, a maintenance retainer and a hosting bill is the normal shape of a WordPress site. Over five years that gap is real money, and the table below shows it.
Stay if
You need logins, a shop or server code
Webflow has hard edges and we would rather you find them here than three weeks into a migration. There is a whole section on this below, and it is not a short one.
Side by side
Ten rows,four to WordPress
Not forty rows with a tick in every Webflow box. Ten, and four of them go to WordPress.
Webflow
WordPress
What you pay the platform
$25 a month on the Premium plan, billed annually
$0 for the software. $18–$90 a month for hosting, depending on how good
Plugins for a marketing site
None. SEO, forms, caching, backups and CDN are in the plan
Typically five to eight premium licences, renewed every year
Who can publish a page
Anyone with an Editor seat, with no training
Anyone with a login — once somebody has built the template
Updates
Webflow ships them. There is nothing on your side to patch
Core, the theme, and every plugin. Forever, and on your schedule
Hosting, CDN and SSL
Included in the site plan
Chosen, paid for and monitored by you or someone you pay
Backups
Automatic, and you restore from inside the Designer
A plugin — assuming somebody installed one and it still works
Design control without code
Complete. Anything CSS can do, the Designer can do
Bounded by the theme, or by whichever page builder is installed
Server-side code
None. No PHP, Python or Ruby, ever
Anything you can write. This is a real WordPress advantage
CMS ceiling
20,000 items, 40 Collections, three levels of nesting
No hard ceiling. It slows down long before it stops
Getting out later
Static HTML, CSS and JS export. CMS, forms and search do not come
The whole database and file tree. It runs anywhere. Also a real advantage
The number that decides it
Five years, side by
side
Webflow’s column is its published price list. WordPress’s column is a real stack — managed hosting, eight plugin licences and a maintenance retainer — priced from a 2026 cost index rather than guessed at.
Over five years
Webflow
WordPress
Platform or hosting
Webflow Premium at $25/mo annual · Kinsta Single at $30/mo annual
$1,500
$1,800
Domain and SSL
$75
$75
Premium plugin licences
Eight licences, renewed annually
$0 — none exist
$3,325
Security, backups, CDN, caching
In the plan
In the line above
Maintenance service
$59 a month
Not needed — nothing to patch
$3,540
Five-year total
$1,575
$8,740
What this table does not include, on either side: the cost of somebody actually changing the site. That is the largest line in both columns and it depends entirely on how the site is built, not on which platform it is built with. A Webflow site assembled badly needs a developer for every headline, and then you have swapped a plugin bill for an invoice from us. Figures: Webflow published plans, May 2026. Kinsta published plans. WordPress plugin, maintenance and hosting costs from a published 2026 cost index — sources listed at the foot of this page.
Security
The core is not the problem
Most comparison pages use these numbers to say WordPress is insecure. That is not what they say. They say the plugin ecosystem is where the risk lives — which matters, because the plugin ecosystem is also the reason most people choose WordPress.
11,334
New vulnerabilities found in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025 — up 42% on 2024
91%
Of them were in plugins. A further 9% were in themes
6
Were in WordPress core itself. The core is not the problem here
46%
Had no patch available on the day they were disclosed
Webflow’s version of this risk is different, not absent. There is no plugin layer, so this whole category of vulnerability does not apply. But you are dependent on one company: when Webflow retires a feature — as it did with User Accounts and Logic — you rebuild on somebody else’s terms, on their timetable. Pick the risk you would rather manage.
The section that costs us work
Six reasons to stay put
If any one of these describes you, do not migrate, and do not let us talk you into it. Every one of them is a hard edge in Webflow rather than a matter of taste.
01
Logins and gating
Webflow retired its built-in User Accounts and Logic features, so memberships now mean bolting on a third-party tool such as Memberstack and paying for it separately. If gated content is central to your site, WordPress does this without a second vendor.
02
Your shop is a real shop
Webflow Ecommerce caps products at 50 variants, and it cannot be combined with localization at all — if you need multilingual and a shop, that is a hard stop, not a workaround. WooCommerce is uglier and far more capable.
03
Something needs server-side code
Webflow runs no PHP, Python or Ruby. If your site talks to an internal system, prices something on the fly, or does anything a static page plus an API call cannot, WordPress is the shorter road and we will say so.
04
More than ten languages
Webflow’s localization add-on caps at three locales on Essential and ten on Advanced, and it routes locales with 302 redirects with no native way to make them 301. For a large multilingual site that is a genuine SEO problem.
05
The CMS ceiling
20,000 items and 40 Collections is a lot, and most marketing sites never approach it. But if you are planning programmatic pages in the tens of thousands, the honest answer is that part of your site does not belong in Webflow.
06
You already have a good WordPress developer
And they are staying. A site that works, maintained by somebody who understands it, beats a migration every single time. We would rather tell you that now than invoice you for finding it out.
And if none of those apply
What a move looks like
The part everyone is afraid of is the traffic, and rightly. Here is the order we do it in.
01
Every URL gets mapped before anything is built
We crawl what you have, list every indexed URL, and write the 301 map first. The redirect plan is the deliverable that protects your traffic, and it exists before a single page is designed.
02
Posts and pages move into the CMS as structured content
Not pasted in as rich text. Categories, authors, dates and images become fields, so the blog is still a blog afterwards rather than two hundred orphaned pages.
03
The old site stays up until the new one is proven
You see it on a staging URL, we test the redirect map against the live URL list, and the switch happens when it passes — not on a date somebody promised.
Questions
Fair questions
01
Will rankings drop?
02
Can we keep our blog posts?
03
What about forms?
04
Can we get the code out again later?
05
Is it cheaper?
06
WordPress runs a third of the web. Is that not safer?
READY TO MOVE?
Send the URL
We will tell you how many indexed pages you have, what the redirect map looks like, and whether moving is worth it. Including when the answer is no.