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.
How to speed up WordPress in 2026: the optimization checklist in priority order. Measure first, then hosting, caching, images, plugins, and Core Web Vitals.
How to back up WordPress properly: the 3-2-1 strategy we use on client sites, why host backups aren't enough on their own, and how to test a restore before you need it.
How to migrate WordPress without downtime: the zero-downtime sequence we use on real client moves, from lowering DNS TTL to the serialized-data search-replace trap.
How to install WordPress in 2026 the practical way: pick the right method first (one-click, manual FTP, or local), then follow the steps. Honest agency guidance.
How to start a WordPress blog the way an agency would set it up: WordPress.com vs .org decided clearly, the real multi-year cost, and the six steps that actually matter.
WordPress or Medium in 2026? Why it is not either/or: own a WordPress site, syndicate to Medium with a canonical, and keep your SEO, brand, and audience.
WordPress or Ghost for your blog in 2026? An agency that builds both on newsletters, memberships, the real speed story, cost, and when each platform wins.
Webflow or WordPress in 2026? An agency that migrates both directions on when each platform actually wins, the new Webflow pricing, and what a move really costs.
WooCommerce vs Shopify with real total cost of ownership numbers, SKU-complexity break-even, SEO control, the lock-in question, and a decision matrix. From an agency that ships and migrates both.
WordPress vs Drupal compared on real production numbers: hiring pool, content modelling, multilingual, performance benchmarks, cost to build, and when to pick which. From a shop that ships both.
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.
