WordPress Alternatives for Business

Every WordPress site runs the same gauntlet. Plugin vulnerabilities. Core update compatibility breaks. Theme conflicts. The constant patching cycle that agencies charge $1,500-4,000 monthly to manage.

That's money spent keeping your site from breaking, not making it better.

WordPress serves pages through PHP on every request. Even with aggressive caching plugins like WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache, you're fighting the architecture. A typical WordPress site ships 100KB+ of JavaScript before a single plugin loads.

Compare that to what I build: a SvelteKit site ships around 42KB baseline. That's not a small difference. That's the difference between a 2.8 second Time to Interactive and 1.2 seconds.

Need a contact form? Plugin. SEO tools? Plugin. Image optimization? Plugin. Performance monitoring? Plugin.

Each plugin is maintained by different developers with different quality standards. Some abandon their projects. Others introduce security holes. All of them add JavaScript that slows your site.

Webflow's CMS has a hard limit: you can only nest one collection list inside another, and that nested list maxes out at 5 items.

What does that mean in practice? If your "Services" page lists categories, and each category has features, and each feature has testimonials... the sixth item simply won't show. Your content disappears.

The workarounds involve third-party JavaScript libraries that inject content after page load. This causes layout shifts that hurt your Core Web Vitals scores and makes pages feel sluggish.

Webflow's business plan costs around $39/month. Reasonable.

But the moment you need SSO for your team, exceed bandwidth limits, or want more than 10,000 CMS items, you're forced into Enterprise. Community reports put those contracts at $40,000-65,000 per year.

That's not a typo. And because Webflow is proprietary, you have zero leverage. You can't migrate your CMS elsewhere without rebuilding from scratch.

Export your Webflow code and you lose the CMS entirely. The visual editor doesn't generate clean, portable code. It generates Webflow-specific markup that breaks the moment you try to host it elsewhere.

When a Next.js page loads, the server sends rendered HTML. Fast first paint. Then the browser downloads the React runtime (30-40KB gzipped), parses it, builds a Virtual DOM, and "hydrates" the page by attaching event listeners.

During hydration, your page looks loaded but doesn't respond to clicks. On mobile devices or slow connections, this can feel like the site is broken for 2-3 seconds.

That's the React tax. Every Next.js site pays it.

A baseline Next.js application ships approximately 120KB of JavaScript before you write a single line of custom code. Add authentication, state management, and a few UI components, and you're looking at 300-500KB.

Google measures this. Users feel this. Conversions reflect this.

Next.js 13 introduced the App Router and React Server Components. Now developers must track which components render on the server versus the client. Hydration errors multiply. Debugging becomes detective work.

When you build a SvelteKit application, the framework analyzes your code and generates optimized vanilla JavaScript. There's no Virtual DOM to ship. No runtime to download. No hydration phase that blocks interaction.

The browser receives exactly the code it needs to make your site work. Nothing extra.

Real-world migrations show this impact: applications moving from Next.js to SvelteKit see Time to Interactive drop from 2.8 seconds to 1.2 seconds. That's a 57% improvement from the same functionality, same content, different architecture.

A baseline SvelteKit site ships around 42KB of JavaScript. A Next.js equivalent ships 120KB+. As you add features, Next.js bundles grow linearly with React's overhead. SvelteKit bundles grow only with your actual application logic.

My stack runs on the Bun runtime instead of Node.js. The difference isn't marginal.

Bun handles approximately 52,000 requests per second in benchmarks. Node.js plateaus around 13,000. That's 4x throughput from a runtime change alone.

Combined with Turso's embedded database replicas (instant reads, no network latency for queries), my clients' sites respond faster than anything built on traditional stacks.

Cold starts under 50ms. Time to First Byte that makes caching almost unnecessary.

My CMS lives in the same codebase as the frontend. No API calls across the internet. No separate admin domain. No sync issues between systems.

Content editors get a clean interface. Developers get full control. Changes deploy instantly.

Need to add a new content type? It's a schema change and a component. Want to integrate your CRM? It's a form handler. Need analytics beyond Google? The data layer accepts any provider.

No plugin marketplace. No feature limits. No arbitrary pricing tiers.

Blog management with proper SEO fields. Landing page builders with conversion tracking. Form handlers that integrate with any email platform. A/B testing infrastructure baked in.