Why We Moved Our Website from WordPress to EmDash

In July 2023 we published a guide to website builders and called WordPress "an overall excellent choice" for most businesses. The same post warned about plugins slowing a site down, security breaches, and updates that can take a site offline. This week we moved webnetic.dev off WordPress entirely. Every page, blog post and portfolio project kept its address, and the few pages we retired now redirect. Here's what pushed us.

What EmDash is

EmDash is an open-source content management system that Cloudflare released in April 2026 and brought to version 1.0 this month. Cloudflare calls it a "spiritual successor" to WordPress. You still log in, edit pages and publish posts. The difference is underneath: it's written in TypeScript on the Astro framework, and it runs on Cloudflare's network instead of a single web server.

Plugins stay in their own box

By Cloudflare's count, 96% of WordPress security issues start in plugins. A WordPress plugin runs with the same access as the rest of the site. One bad update, or one abandoned plugin nobody patches, puts everything at risk. Keeping a site safe means updating core, the theme and every plugin each month, then checking nothing broke.

EmDash runs each plugin in its own sandbox. A plugin has to declare what it needs, such as reading content or sending an email, and it can't reach anything else. A plugin that goes bad can only damage what it was allowed to touch.

WordPress's leadership fight landed on real websites

In September 2024, WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg called the hosting company WP Engine "a cancer to WordPress." Within days, WordPress.org blocked WP Engine from its plugin directory, which cut WP Engine's customers off from plugin updates through their dashboards. In October, WordPress.org took over the directory listing for Advanced Custom Fields, a plugin WP Engine owns, and replaced it with a fork under a new name. A federal judge ordered the listing restored that December.

Our own portfolio ran on Advanced Custom Fields. None of that dispute was about our site, and we still had no way to step out of it. We don't want our clients' websites depending on how a disagreement between two companies turns out.

Pages load from Cloudflare's network

Most visits get a cached copy of the page, and the first byte of it arrives in about 70 milliseconds. When a page isn't cached, our homepage builds fresh in about 370 milliseconds. Saving an edit in the admin clears the cache, so a change shows up on the next visit without anyone purging anything by hand.

One record for the facts that matter

Before the move, the structured data on our WordPress site, the code that tells Google and AI assistants who a business is, had no phone number, no email address and no street address. Its logo link pointed at a file that no longer existed. Nobody noticed, because nothing on the visible page looked wrong.

The new site keeps our name, phone, email and address in one business record. The footer, the contact page and the structured data all read from it. Change the phone number once and it changes everywhere, including the parts only search engines read.

Built to work with AI tools

We build with AI tools, and EmDash was designed for that. It ships with its own connection for AI assistants, called an MCP server, and with instructions written for them. Our tools read the site's structure, edit content and check their work through the same channels as the admin screens. That's how we rebuilt this site, moved every post and project across, and compared each new page against the old one before switching the domain.

What this means for our clients

• New websites are built on EmDash, unless the site sells products online.
• Online stores stay on WordPress with WooCommerce. EmDash doesn't have a store system to match it yet.
• If you're on WordPress with us now, nothing changes unless you want it to. If you'd like to move, we'll migrate you the way we moved ourselves. Your addresses stay the same where possible and redirect where they can't, and we check every URL before the switch.

This isn't our first EmDash site. quickstartsites.com has run on it since mid-September, and coldcompile.dev since the week after.

Curious whether your site should make the move? Get in touch and we'll give you a straight answer, including when staying on WordPress is the better call.

Frequently asked questions

Will moving my site to EmDash hurt my Google rankings?

A move keeps its rankings when every URL either still loads or redirects to its new home. We keep existing addresses wherever we can, add a redirect for each one that changes, and check every URL before the domain switches. When we moved webnetic.dev, every URL in the old sitemaps either loaded or redirected on day one.

Can I still edit my own website?

Yes. You log in to an admin panel to edit pages and posts, and when you're signed in, an Edit button on the live page takes you straight to that page's content.

Why do online stores stay on WordPress?

WooCommerce handles products, inventory, checkout and payments, and EmDash has nothing equivalent yet. For a store, WordPress is still the right tool.

Does EmDash only run on Cloudflare?

It's built for Cloudflare's network, and that's where we host it. Because it's open source, it can also run on other hosting.