Amrify vs WordPress

If you own a service business, there is a good chance you already have a WordPress site. There is also a good chance it is slower than the day it launched, that a plugin broke something last year, and that the person who built it has stopped answering emails.

None of that is because WordPress is bad software. It is because WordPress is software you have to run, and running software is a job. Most contractors did not sign up for that job.

What Actually Goes Wrong

The failure pattern is consistent, and it has nothing to do with anyone being careless.

A site launches with a dozen plugins. Each is written by a different developer on a different release schedule. WordPress updates, one plugin lags, another breaks against the new version, and the contact form quietly stops sending. Nobody notices for six weeks, because nobody receives an email saying no emails were sent.

Meanwhile every plugin adds its own CSS and JavaScript to every page. A site that opened at two seconds is now at six. On a phone, on a weak signal, standing in a driveway, six seconds is a customer tapping back to Google and calling the next company on the list.

Then there is security. WordPress runs a large share of the web, which makes it the most attractive target on the internet. The attacks are automated and impersonal. They scan for a login page and a known plugin flaw, and a roofing company in Georgia is exactly as reachable as anybody else.

The Structural Difference

	WordPress	Amrify
What you own	The content and theme, on a hosting contract you rent	The code, the content and the built site, outright
How pages are made	Assembled per visit from a database	Built once, ahead of time
Plugins	Usually 10 to 30	None
Admin login	Yes, publicly reachable	None exists
Database	Yes	None
Updates you must install	Core, plugins, themes, PHP	None; Amrify’s own updates arrive in the repo, free, for life
What an attacker targets	Login page, plugin flaws	Nothing is running to attack
Who maintains it	You, or a developer you pay	You, with Claude Code or Cursor doing the edits

The last two rows matter more than the rest. Both kinds of site can end up as something you stop touching. The difference is what neglect costs. A neglected static site loads exactly as fast in year three as on launch day. A neglected WordPress site gets slower, then breaks, then gets exploited.

Speed, Measured Rather Than Claimed

We print no table of WordPress scores here. The trade pages give typical ranges as planning figures; your own number is the one that matters, and it takes four minutes to get.

Put your own site into the free website grader. Google’s own PageSpeed test runs against your URL on a simulated phone; the grader reports the four Lighthouse scores and checks the page for structured data, a sitemap, an SSL certificate that is not about to expire and an llms.txt. About thirty seconds, no account, no email. Then run one of ours:

• expressmounting.com
• glassinc.net
• bestalpharettaroofer.com

Or use the comparison tool to line your site up against the two competitors ranking above you, which is the comparison that costs you money. If you would rather run PageSpeed Insights yourself, the numbers will match; the grader is Google’s test, not ours.

Those are live production sites we operate on this exact system. Whatever difference you measure is the difference you would actually get, because no demo trickery is available to us: the page you would receive is the same kind of page those are. No template leaves CI with a score under 100 on any of the four audits; the gate blocks the release.

Speed is not vanity. Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking input, so a slow site ranks below a fast one saying the same things. And nobody reads your copy at all if the page has not painted yet.

What It Costs to Keep Running

WordPress hosting looks cheap, and is, until you add what a working site actually needs. Pull last year’s invoices and fill in the left column yourself; your figures beat any range we could print.

	WordPress, per year	Amrify
Hosting	Your hosting invoice, renewing	$0: Vercel, Netlify and Cloudflare Pages host static files free, and your own AWS account is the other option
Premium plugins and theme licenses	Your renewals	Not applicable
Security scanning and backups	Your subscription, if you have one	Not applicable; there is no server state to back up
Developer time when it breaks	Whatever it cost last time	Not applicable
Template	Bought once, usually per site	$249 once, every trade included, unlimited sites

Our side, complete: $249 one-time for the boilerplate at the founding price, $399 after the first 5,000 members. That covers every trade template, unlimited sites and lifetime updates, and nothing renews. Hosting on Vercel, Netlify or Cloudflare Pages is free at the traffic a local service business sees.

The row people underestimate is developer time. It is not the amount, it is the timing. It lands the week something matters, at whatever rate the person who answers charges.

If you want to try the architecture for nothing, the free Amrify Starter is a complete site on Astro 7 and Tailwind CSS 4 with no JavaScript framework at all: the home page, a services section, blog, about and contact, plus structured data, generated social images and llms.txt, all held to the same Lighthouse 100 CI gate. Use it on as many personal or commercial sites as you like; the public repo opens at launch.

Search

WordPress can be made to rank well. Yoast and RankMath are good tools, and plenty of WordPress sites out-rank plenty of static ones. The gap here is narrower than the speed section suggests, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise.

	WordPress	Amrify
Meta tags and titles	Plugin required	Built in
Structured data	Plugin, quality varies	Generated from your content
XML sitemap	Plugin	Automatic
llms.txt for AI answer engines	Written by hand, if at all	Generated on every build
Core Web Vitals	Fights the platform	Fast by construction
Service area pages	Built by hand, one at a time	Generated from your city list, with a build gate that fails thin pages

The last row is where a service business wins or loses. A plumber covering fifteen towns needs fifteen pages, each one actually about its town, because “water heater repair Marietta” and “water heater repair Roswell” are different searches against different competitors. On WordPress that is fifteen manual builds, so most businesses do two and stop. Here the pages come from a list, thin ones fail the build before they can earn a URL, and town sixteen is one more line in that list.

Moving Without Losing Your Rankings

This is the part that frightens people, correctly, because it is the part that gets botched.

Google ranks URLs. Change your URLs without telling it where things went and you do not lose rankings gradually, you lose them in about three weeks. The fix is a 301 redirect from every old address to its new one, which tells Google the page moved permanently and to carry the credit across.

A normal migration:

1. Export the content, which for most sites is faster to copy by hand than to script
2. Download the media library
3. Map every old URL to a new one and write the redirects
4. Point the domain, then watch Search Console for a month

Step three is the job. The others are chores.

Done properly, rankings usually hold flat and then rise as the speed improvement registers. If step three worries you, the docs walk through the redirect map, and the boilerplate’s Claude Code skills have an agent generate it from your old URL list.

When to Stay on WordPress

Genuinely stay if:

• You need memberships, user accounts or a course area
• You run a large store with thousands of variable products
• A specific plugin is load-bearing for how your business operates
• Someone competent already maintains it and you are happy with that

When to Move

• The site is slow and you have quietly stopped trying to fix it
• Something breaks every few months and you pay someone each time
• You want service area pages, and building them by hand is why you never did
• You would rather nobody had to maintain anything
• Your last developer stopped replying

Proof You Can Check

We do not publish customer testimonials until we have verified ones, and there are none on this site today.

Instead, here is the fleet. Live sites running the same system, all measurable by you right now:

• Express Mounting, TV mounting across metro Atlanta
• Glass Inc, auto glass and residential glass
• Best Alpharetta Roofer, a roofing contractor
• Alexus Pressure Washing, pressure washing, exterior cleaning

Amrify’s own sites run from one shared codebase, built to run hundreds of sites, and soon thousands, and the boilerplate is that codebase. That is why it can cost $249 once: the engineering was written to run a fleet, and every site you build on it inherits the same work.

The system is built and maintained by Alex Crabinsky, a full-stack developer in Alpharetta, Georgia, with more than ten years of production web work.

Common Questions

Will I lose my Google rankings if I move off WordPress?

Not if the move is done properly. Rankings follow URLs, so every old address needs a 301 redirect to its new one. Do that and rankings typically hold, then improve as page speed rises. Skip it and traffic falls off within weeks. It is the single step people get wrong, so the docs walk through the redirect map in detail, and the bundled Claude Code skills have an agent generate it from your old URL list.

What happens to my plugins?

Most stop being necessary. Contact forms, SEO metadata, sitemaps, structured data, image compression and caching are built into the boilerplate rather than bolted on. Booking tools and live chat are the common exceptions, and those are embeds that keep working exactly as before.

Who updates the site if there is no WordPress admin?

You do, and it is a far smaller job than it sounds. Content lives in text files you can edit. For anything beyond that, the repo includes CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md and four Claude Code skills; describe the change in plain English to Claude Code or Cursor and it does the editing. There is no core, no plugins and no PHP version to keep patched, so the maintenance WordPress demands is not there to do.

Is WordPress ever still the right answer?

Yes. If you need a membership area, a large store with thousands of variable products, or a specific plugin your business already runs on, WordPress has an ecosystem nothing else matches. For a service business that needs to load fast and rank locally, it is a lot of machinery for the job.

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Your website should not need a maintenance plan to stay online. See the founding price, or read the docs and move at your own pace.