The index of our WordPress-tagged posts. Below: why WordPress is still the safest choice for a blog you plan to keep for years, and what we ship for clients who treat blogging as a business asset.
WordPress was built as a blogging platform in 2003 and never lost the muscle memory. Twenty-plus years later it still powers more blogs than any other CMS, including TechCrunch, the TED Blog, Variety, BBC America's blog, and most of the writers we know who quit Substack to own their stack again.
This page is the index of our WordPress posts. You'll find migrations from Wix, Ghost and Webflow, plugin teardowns, real performance benchmarks from production sites, and the operational stuff (backups, updates, editorial workflow) that decides whether a blog survives its second year. We publish from agency experience. Every post links back to a project, a client, or a number we measured ourselves.
If you came looking for "how to start a blog in 2026", we're not the right page. The internet has 4,000 of those guides and most are affiliate posts for the same three hosting providers. What we do cover: how to keep a blog fast after it accumulates 200 plugins of cruft, when to hire help, when to migrate off, and what's actually different about Gutenberg in WordPress 7.
An agency's deep dive into Squarespace alternatives in 2026. The three ceilings people hit, what we move sites to by situation, Squarespace vs WordPress honestly, and what migrates.
An agency's take on Shopify alternatives in 2026. The transaction-fee math nobody runs, what we move stores to by situation, WooCommerce vs Shopify honestly, and when to stay put.
An agency's honest take on Wix alternatives in 2026. Why you can't export a Wix site, what we move clients to by situation, the real three-year cost, and when to just stay put.
A headless CMS comparison from a WordPress shop: Strapi, Sanity, Contentful and headless WordPress, and whether you actually need headless at all.
How much does WordPress cost? The software is free; a site is not. Real 2026 numbers for hosting, plugins and a build, from an agency that quotes them.
The best WordPress caching plugin depends on your host. We rank WP Rocket, LiteSpeed Cache, FlyingPress and the free options by real before-and-after speed.
We rank WordPress backup plugins by the test that counts: did the restore work when the site went down. UpdraftPlus, BlogVault, Duplicator, compared honestly.
Elementor vs Gutenberg, decided by an agency that maintains both. The real trade-off isn't design versus speed, it's how much you'll pay to leave.
The WordPress white screen of death is PHP hitting a fatal error and dying quietly. Where the blank page shows up tells you what broke. Here's the triage we use.
WordPress security best practices for 2026: what actually gets sites hacked, the five fixes that stop most attacks, and the popular security steps you can skip.
Why WordPress for a serious blog
Content ownership is the first reason. You can export every post to Markdown and walk to another CMS in a single command. The editorial workflow is the second — real role separation, scheduling, draft revisions, all built in and ready for a team larger than two writers. The third is more boring and more important: the post-archive structure rewards consistent publishing in Google Search Console. Internal linking by tag, author, and date is default behaviour, not a plugin install. Substack and Ghost have caught up on UI. Neither has caught up on portability.
Where WordPress falls short for blogs
Out-of-the-box page speed on a default install is mediocre. A fresh 2026 WordPress with a popular theme runs 1.8s LCP on a clean staging build before any tuning. Most of the speed wins come from a CDN, image optimization, and caching, none of which ship by default. The other weakness is comment spam: the comment system invites bot abuse from day one. Our default for client blogs is to disable WP-native comments and route engagement through a moderated channel (Disqus when anonymity matters, Webmentions if you publish to the open web, plain "email me" for editorial blogs).
What our blog clients usually pay
A typical engagement looks like this: a one-time setup of $2,800-$4,500 (theme tune, plugin sweep, schema, editorial roles, RankMath SEO, image pipeline) followed by a maintenance retainer of $300-$650/month covering security updates, backup verification, performance audits, and content QA. For clients who also want ghostwriting or editorial assistance, that's a separate scope billed against a content retainer. We don't bundle content into hosting fees. Those should be priced separately so you can swap either side without renegotiating the whole arrangement.
Migration in: from Wix, Ghost, Substack, Webflow
We migrate roughly one blog a month, usually from a SaaS platform whose features stalled or whose pricing went sideways. Ghost is the easiest (clean Markdown export). Substack is slightly painful (HTML export with subscriber CSV, but custom domain DNS handled cleanly). Wix is genuinely awful and pricing reflects that. Posts in this index include migration teardowns of each — full step-by-step, not the glossy "we made it look easy" copy.
What you'll read here
Posts on this index lean operational rather than inspirational. Comparisons (WordPress vs. Wix, vs. Ghost, vs. Webflow) include real production benchmarks. Plugin reviews list autoload weight and resource impact, not just features. Editorial-workflow posts come from our actual client documentation, redacted but kept honest. We don't publish the same "Top 10 WordPress Tips for 2026" article every other agency runs in March; there's no link-juice in writing what already exists.
Cross-platform comparison: best CMS for a blog covers WordPress against Ghost and Substack with our short list of when each one fits.
Looking to add ecommerce to a WordPress blog? WordPress for ecommerce covers the WooCommerce setup, plugins, and the typical 2-4 week build path.
WordPress.org (self-hosted) for any project that's a business asset. You own the data, you control the plugins, and you can move it without permission. WordPress.com is fine for a personal hobby site. Most of our clients start on .com and move to .org once their content has commercial value, so we get a steady stream of those migrations every month.
A clean 2026 install with a popular theme is around 1.8s LCP on staging before tuning. After our standard setup pass (CDN, WebP image pipeline, caching plugin tuned per template, font preloading) most blogs land at 0.9-1.3s LCP and pass Core Web Vitals on every key URL. Speed isn't the hardest part of WordPress; staying fast after 18 months of plugin sprawl is.
For a hobby blog, no — auto-updates and a backup plugin will get you through. For anything where downtime or compromise costs money, yes. Most of our clients pay $300-$650/month for managed maintenance. The work is unglamorous: weekly plugin update review, monthly backup verification, quarterly performance check, and a 24-hour SLA on the things that go genuinely wrong.
Yes, comfortably. We have clients on Cloudways and Kinsta plans in the $80-$300/month range serving 1-3M visits per month with full Core Web Vitals compliance. The trick is rejecting plugins that scale-block (looking at you, real-time analytics plugins), aggressive object caching, and a CDN tuned for HTML, not just static assets. Most of the "WordPress doesn't scale" stories trace to specific bad plugin choices, not the platform.
Safe to publish, yes. Worth publishing, mostly no. Google's March 2024 Helpful Content update kept demoting low-effort AI content even when human-edited, and that hasn't reversed in 2026. Where we use AI on client blogs: outline brainstorming, fact-check passes, and rewrites of existing drafts. Where we don't: full first drafts of anything we expect to rank. The economics of paying us to fix AI slop don't work in your favour.
7-14 days for a blog under 200 posts, including content port, redirects, theme rebuild, and plugin matching. Wix doesn't expose a clean export so the import side is custom-scripted every time. Pricing typically starts at $2,500 for a small blog migration. Larger or more bespoke moves (custom collections, member areas, paid subscriptions) get scoped separately.
Our default stack: RankMath (SEO and schema), WP Rocket or LiteSpeed Cache (caching), Wordfence (security), UpdraftPlus or BlogVault (backups), and Stream (audit log on multi-author sites). Plus Polylang Pro for any blog with translation needs. We deliberately keep the default count low — every plugin we add has to justify its weight on staging benchmarks before it goes live.
A $14/month Cloudways plan, the default 2026 theme, RankMath free, BlogVault free tier, and a domain. Total first-year cost around $250 if you set it up yourself. We've helped people start at this level and grow into a $30k/year content operation; we've also seen six-figure setups produce nothing because the editorial side never got built. The blog stack matters less than the publishing rhythm.
