You open the news to check on the platform your company runs on. The founder is out. Then he says he's back. Somewhere in the middle, your marketing team still needs to launch a campaign.
That is a strange amount of homework for a website.
The latest Automattic leadership dispute has brought WordPress back into the headlines. If you own a business or run marketing, it is a reasonable moment to ask whether your website still belongs there. Especially if you were already tired of plugin updates, slow pages, or waiting on someone to make a change.
At Scaler, we help companies work through those decisions and rebuild on platforms their teams can actually run. For many marketing websites, that means Webflow. For businesses with more specific functionality and integration needs, it can mean Next.js on Vercel with a properly configured content management system.
The useful starting point is understanding what your business needs from its website, and what it would take to move.
What happened at Automattic?
In coverage updated September 11, 2026, Search Engine Journal reported that Automattic's board had placed co-founder Matt Mullenweg on paid leave, with CFO Mark Davies appointed interim CEO. The report included Automattic's statement confirming the leave and interim appointment.
On September 11, Mullenweg claimed he was back; board confirmation remained absent from TechCrunch's updated report.
There is an important distinction here. Automattic is the company behind WordPress.com. The open-source WordPress project is separate. SEJ also reported that WordPress Executive Director Mary Hubbard said the project's leadership and direction remained unchanged. A leadership dispute at Automattic does not, by itself, mean your WordPress website has stopped working or become insecure.
This account reflects reporting reviewed September 12, 2026. The leadership situation is developing.
We covered an earlier round of uncertainty in WordPress Blocks WP Engine: What You Need to Know. That article describes the situation in October 2024. Treat it as historical context, not a statement that the same update restrictions apply today.
For a business owner, the bigger issue is how much uncertainty you are willing to carry around a system you depend on.
Your website already has a job
Your website needs to explain what you do, help the right people find you, and make it easy for them to take the next step. Your team needs to be able to keep it current.
Consider a familiar situation: a product launch is ready, the sales team has its materials, and the landing page is waiting on a developer because an old page builder no longer plays nicely with the rest of the site. Nothing is technically down. The business is still losing time.
Add a handful of plugin renewals, a maintenance bill nobody can quite explain, and a form that needs checking after every update. The platform decision starts looking less theoretical.
This is the same problem we explore in The Hidden Cost of an Underperforming Website. A site can be expensive long before the hosting invoice arrives.
When moving away from WordPress makes sense
WordPress can still be a good fit. A well-maintained site with a capable team, reliable hosting, and a clear purpose does not need rebuilding because of a headline.
But a WordPress migration deserves a serious look when several of these sound familiar:
- Routine changes take too long. Your marketers cannot publish the pages and content they need without a developer queue.
- Maintenance keeps crowding out improvements. The budget goes toward keeping things working, while the changes that could help sales keep slipping.
- Too much depends on one person or plugin. Nobody can explain a critical integration, or the person who built it is no longer available.
- Your content has outgrown its structure. Product information, resources, and service pages are difficult to manage consistently.
- You cannot get a clear answer about ownership. Access, backups, exports, and responsibility for fixing problems are scattered across vendors.
Write down what each problem costs in time, money, or missed opportunities. That gives you something useful to compare against the cost of a move.
Already recognizing your site? Talk to Scaler about a WordPress migration assessment. Bring the URL and the things your team keeps working around.
Webflow vs. WordPress: when your marketing team needs more control
For many companies, the appeal of migrating from WordPress to Webflow is straightforward: the people responsible for the website can do more of the work themselves.
Webflow brings visual site building, a CMS, and managed hosting into one platform. Webflow handles its platform patches and infrastructure security, reducing the customer-managed WordPress theme and plugin maintenance that a comparable build might require.
That can be a strong fit for a B2B marketing site with service pages, case studies, resource libraries, and a team that needs to publish regularly. Scaler can build the design system and content structure around the way that team works.
We have written about a real example in AI Builds It. Webflow Keeps It Running. NPCC had a custom content system attached to WordPress that was no longer being maintained. Our team used a migration script to organize and move more than a thousand items into Webflow. The lasting value was giving the organization a usable system on the other side.
Webflow still needs thoughtful implementation. Third-party scripts, forms, integrations, access permissions, plan limits, and bandwidth all deserve attention. Before choosing it, we need to know whether its content model and available features fit your site.
Our Webflow security case study shows the kind of additional engineering a particular client can need. Its HTTP Observatory result measured header hardening. It was never a promise that a platform makes every site secure automatically.
The right platform depends on what your team needs to publish, connect, and maintain.
WordPress to Next.js on Vercel: when you need a more custom system
Sometimes the website needs to do more than a standard marketing build can comfortably support. Think of an interactive product selector, a customer portal, or content assembled from several business systems.
Next.js is a framework for building web applications. Vercel provides a platform for deploying them. They play different roles, and neither is a direct replacement for a marketer's CMS on its own.
A complete migration needs an editing experience too. Scaler can pair the frontend with a CMS such as Sanity, structure the content, and build the previews and publishing workflow your team will use. A marketer should be able to change an approved headline or publish an article without opening a code editor.
The advantage is control over the experience and how it connects to other systems. The tradeoff is a codebase that someone must own. Framework updates, dependencies, monitoring, application security, hosting usage, and CMS costs all remain part of the operating plan.
Simply putting a new frontend in front of WordPress is a different project. A headless WordPress setup can improve the presentation layer while retaining the WordPress backend and its maintenance needs. If the goal is to leave that dependency behind, the content and publishing system need a migration plan as well.
Both routes involve vendors and ongoing costs. The goal is a dependency structure you understand, with clear access, export options, and someone accountable for keeping it healthy.
How to migrate from WordPress while protecting your SEO
The part that makes people hesitate is usually reasonable: you have spent years building search visibility, and you do not want a new website to erase it.
A careful migration starts with what is already working. Google's site-move guidance emphasizes URL mapping, redirects, and monitoring. It also explains that ranking fluctuations can occur while Google processes a move. Anyone guaranteeing zero impact is skipping that part of the conversation.
Here is what we would scope before moving your site:
- Inventory the site. Capture pages, media, downloads, content types, forms, and integrations. Record which pages attract relevant traffic and generate enquiries.
- Map the content and URLs. Keep useful URLs where possible. Where a URL changes, give it a relevant destination and a permanent redirect. Do not send every old page to the homepage.
- Carry over the search essentials. Review titles, descriptions, canonical URLs, indexability, internal links, structured data, image text, and any language variants.
- Test the journeys that matter. Check mobile layouts, navigation, downloads, analytics, consent behavior, and forms through to their intended destination.
- Plan the launch and recovery. Agree on content freezes, final content transfers, DNS changes, backups, and what triggers a rollback.
- Watch what happens afterward. Monitor indexing, redirects, errors, traffic, and enquiries against the baseline, then address the gaps.
Every valuable page needs a deliberate destination.
The migration is also a chance to make the website easier to understand. Clearer page relationships help visitors find the next useful piece of information. Our article on content architecture for the RAG era explores why that structure matters for machine retrieval as well.
What does a WordPress migration cost?
A twenty-page marketing site and a site with thousands of resources, custom search, and customer accounts are very different projects. A page count alone will not tell you the cost.
The biggest variables are the condition of your content, the functionality that must be rebuilt, the integrations, the SEO work, and whether the project includes a new design and messaging. A WooCommerce store adds separate questions about products, customers, orders, payments, and subscriptions.
Compare the full cost of staying with the full cost of moving. Include internal time, maintenance, subscriptions, hosting usage, and the support each option will need after launch. Keep estimated lost revenue separate from measured costs so the business case stays honest.
Our perspective in How Much Should a Website Cost? applies here too: scope and business value need to lead the conversation. We would rather give you a scoped recommendation than a low starting number that leaves half the work out.
WordPress migration FAQ
Does the Automattic dispute mean I need to leave WordPress?
No. Review whether your site is maintained, editable, and serving the business. The news is a reason to assess your options; the decision should follow the problems and requirements you actually have.
Can I move to Webflow without keeping my WordPress plugins?
Yes, but their functions need to be accounted for. Some can be replaced by platform features, some need integrations, and others need a different solution. We would map those requirements before selecting the destination.
Can my team still edit a Next.js website?
Yes, when the project includes a suitable CMS and a designed publishing workflow. That experience has to be part of the build and tested with the people who will use it.
Can a migration preserve my rankings and avoid downtime?
Preserving useful content, mapping redirects, testing the new site, and planning the cutover reduce risk. Neither rankings nor uninterrupted availability can be guaranteed. The plan should include monitoring and recovery.
Let's figure out what comes next
You should be able to spend your website budget on making the business better. If too much of it goes toward working around the platform, it is time to look at the alternatives.
Scaler brings strategy, design, development, and search into that conversation. We can assess the current site, recommend a platform, and scope the content migration, integrations, SEO work, launch, and ongoing support together.
Send us your website and tell us what your team is tired of dealing with. We will start there.
