Moving away from WordPress after more than ten years inside it

Until 30 September 2026, octooai.com ran on WordPress. Now it is a static site built with Astro, an open-source framework for websites, written largely by AI coding agents under my direction. I still recommend WordPress for many sites, and at the end I say which ones.

Ten years on the inside

I started building for the open web in 2008: plugins, themes, communities. In 2011 I founded ThemeKraft, a company focused on WordPress, ran it as CEO for many years and contributed to BuddyPress, the community plugin for WordPress. At WordCamp Europe 2018 in Belgrade I talked about user-generated content, the idea BuddyPress is built around, and I still see it that way.

Themes and plugins carried my work for years. When I call WordPress the right tool for its time, I mean it.

Is WordPress dead? What it got right, and still does

WordPress has one advantage that rarely makes the feature lists. When thousands of sites run the same code, somebody out there understands it: you can hire for it, and the error message on your screen has usually been answered somewhere already.

WordPress still runs about 40% of all websites, according to W3Techs, and in 2026 it built an AI interface into its core. So, is WordPress dead because of AI? No. What AI changes is the price of the alternative.

Custom website vs WordPress: the assumption that changed

Custom software used to lose to WordPress on upkeep. Every purpose-built system needed someone who understood it, and when that person left, the knowledge left too. A standard CMS was the insurance: code a whole industry could read. I made that trade for clients myself.

AI coding agents move the cost. An agent can now work through an unfamiliar codebase, document and test it, update it and build the next feature. That often makes it cheap enough to build the system around the business instead of bending the business to the CMS.

The other reason: whose platform is it?

Cheaper upkeep made leaving possible. The wish to leave grew over more than a decade of publishing through wordpress.org, a chapter that closed for me when I sold ThemeKraft’s plugins and themes. The deal there is simple: the directory gives you reach, and its rules and the people who run it decide what it lists.

Custom Community, a free theme I put into the directory in 2010, became a featured theme and passed half a million downloads. In 2015 a new rule moved every theme option into the Customizer, the WordPress settings screen with a live preview, existing themes included. We rebuilt our theme early, and I wrote on our blog that the change nearly destroyed our business. One team meeting had changed the economics of a product a company lived on.

Between 2022 and 2023 our form plugin BuddyForms was closed three times: once over an email problem with my account, twice after security reports. A closed plugin gets no downloads and no updates from wordpress.org, so the more than 2,000 sites running it got nothing from there. In January 2023 our fix shipped on the day of the closure, then waited weeks for a full review of the whole plugin. In my view a finished security fix should reach users first.

In 2024 the same question played out in public: during a legal dispute with Automattic, wordpress.org cut off the host WP Engine, and in December a US court ordered it reversed.

If you build on wordpress.org today, use the reach and own what the directory can switch off: your update channel, your line to your users, your code. Cheaper building makes that affordable now, even for a small company.

What moving away from WordPress looked like here

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The new octooai.com is static HTML built with Astro, plus one small script for the contact form: no theme, no plugins, no database, no admin screen. AI coding agents write and test the code. They deploy when I say so, I sign off on everything that cannot be undone, and every deploy can be rolled back. WordPress itself went into an archive folder, not the bin. Astro vs WordPress compares the two in detail.

WordPress to Astro migration: a 301 or a 410 for every old URL

This part is easy to skip, and it is where a migration quietly throws away the old site’s search history.

Google’s advice for a site move is plain: map the old URLs to new ones, use permanent redirects, keep them for at least a year and submit the new sitemap in Search Console. Our rule: an old URL gets a 301 redirect only if a new page really does the job the old one did. Everything else gets 410 Gone.

We use 410 instead of 404 because it says what we mean: this page existed, and it was removed on purpose.

When I would still choose WordPress

Leaving has a price: there is no editor any more, so every change to a page is a change to a file. That works for me because agents do most of the typing. For a business where five people edit pages every day, it would be a step backwards.

Watch the fourth row. Until a business gets there, keeping WordPress is usually the cheaper and calmer choice. How we build the alternative is on the Autonomous Web page.