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
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
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

That last row matters 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 could print a table of WordPress scores here. Every comparison page does, and the numbers are usually invented, so here is a better use of four minutes.

Open Google PageSpeed Insights and run your own site. Note the mobile score, not desktop. Then run one of ours:

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

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.

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.

	WordPress, per year	Amrify
Hosting	$120 to $600	$0 on Vercel, Netlify or Cloudflare Pages
Premium plugins	$200 to $600	Not applicable
Security and backups	$100 to $300	Not applicable
Developer time when it breaks	$300 to $1,500	Not applicable
Template	Bought once	$249 once, every trade included

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.

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
Core Web Vitals	Fights the platform	Fast by construction
Service area pages	Built by hand, one at a time	Generated from your city list

The last row is where a service business wins or loses. If you serve fifteen towns you want fifteen pages that genuinely discuss each one, 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 they come from a list, and adding a sixteenth town later is one more entry in it.

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 AI prompts have Claude Code or Cursor 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. We had some, they turned out to be fabricated, and we took them down rather than leave them up.

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

• Express Mounting, TV mounting, Atlanta
• Glass Inc, auto and residential glass
• Best Alpharetta Roofer, roofing
• Alexus Pressure Washing, exterior cleaning

Thirty sites run from one shared codebase, and the boilerplate is that codebase. That is why it costs $249 rather than $5,000: the engineering was written once and every site you build on it inherits it. An agency doing the same work by hand cannot get near that number, which is why they charge what they charge.

Built and maintained by Alex Crabinsky, a full-stack developer with over ten years building production websites.

Common Questions

Will I lose my rankings?

Not if every old URL gets a 301 redirect to its new one. That is the whole answer, and it is why the redirect map is the part worth paying attention to.

What about my plugins?

Most stop being needed, because forms, SEO, sitemaps, structured data and image handling are built in. Booking tools and live chat are embeds and keep working.

Who updates it?

Nobody has to. There is no core, no plugins and no PHP to patch. If you want content changed, edit a text file, or ask Claude Code or Cursor to do it using the prompts that ship in the box.

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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.