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Outgrowing WordPress: CMS Strategy for What Comes Next
Jun 09, 2025 • 7 Minute Read • Elizabeth Spranzani, Chief Technology Officer
WordPress powers 40% of the web. But for teams moving fast in 2025, that number says more about the past than the future.
Many organizations are overwhelmed right now by noise, operational demands, and the relentless pace of change. Budgets are tightening, yet expectations continue to rise. Teams are being asked to do more with less. Also, the pressure is real to keep up with emerging technologies like AI while delivering against evolving customer expectations and the swelling menu of platforms, tools, and frameworks claiming to "do it all."
As a result, many teams are pausing to question long-held ideas and beliefs, especially around how digital experiences are built and maintained.
With AI integration becoming essential and no-code/low-code platforms promising faster delivery with minimal developer input, it’s worth asking: Are we still investing in the right places? And are we still building websites the way we should?
If you manage your site on WordPress, these questions may feel especially urgent. WordPress remains the most widely used CMS, but the landscape is shifting. Platforms like Webflow are emerging as compelling alternatives for teams looking to simplify workflows and development and accelerate launches.
At a glance, WordPress, with its open-source foundation and no licensing fees, might seem like the budget-friendly option. But when you factor in ongoing maintenance, plugin overhead, security concerns, and developer dependencies, the true cost adds up.
So the real question becomes: Is WordPress still the smartest choice to help your business move faster to deliver better experiences while aligning with your budget?
Here are 4 signs it's time to consider new options:
- You spend more time maintaining your platform than using it. Constant plugin updates, conflicts, security patches, and code fixes are eating into your team’s productivity.
- Your non-technical teams are blocked. If marketers or designers have to wait days or weeks for developer support just to update a page or test a new layout, that’s a red flag.
- Your customers' experience doesn’t match your ambition. WordPress is capable of a lot, but only with the right investments in design, development, and content strategy. If you’re cutting corners just to keep up, it might be time to simplify.
- You hear, “We could move faster if…” in every meeting. If internal teams are feeling the drag when you're launching a new page, testing a campaign, or making design tweaks, it may be time to reassess the bottlenecks in your current setup.
What once felt like "free" is proving costly in time, resources, and opportunity.
Let’s explore how we got here and what today’s leading CMS platforms—like WordPress and Webflow—can (and can’t) offer teams navigating these demands.
The Bigger Picture: Too Many Tools, Too Little Strategy
Digital leaders are facing real tension between platform abundance and platform fatigue.
On the one hand, AI is offering up never-before-seen opportunities to automate, streamline, and speed up everything from copywriting to code development. Platforms are positioning themselves as plug-and-play solutions for everything. The language is everywhere: “low code, no-code,” “fully composable,” “instant deployment,” “AI-enhanced.”
On the other hand, that abundance is paralyzing. Most organizations don’t have a clear framework for assessing which platforms make sense for their needs. They’re trying to piece together a strategy while also maintaining existing systems, meeting content demands, keeping up with competitors, and managing legacy tech.
That's why many teams are now zooming out to reassess foundation questions, starting with their CMS.
WordPress: Popular, But Costly
WordPress was originally launched in 2003 as a blogging tool with the simple goal of creating an elegant, user-friendly publishing platform for anyone to share content on the web. Over time, it grew, introducing themes, widgets, and plugins, becoming a more customizable CMS. Developers built anything, from simple marketing sites to ecommerce stores, intranets, and more. It was free, flexible, and supported by a massive developer community for over two decades. Today, for many teams, it still checks a lot of boxes.
But here’s the problem in 2025: With great flexibility comes complexity.
Managing a WordPress site often means:
- A sprawling ecosystem of plugins, each with its own costs, updates, and potential security vulnerabilities
- Design themes that can break with core updates
- Custom code that gets layered on over time, creating technical debt
And unless you’re paying for a managed hosting provider, then infrastructure and tuning site performance become your responsibility.
As a result, organizations, especially those that don't have software experts, quietly and painstakingly spend a disproportionate amount of time and resources just keeping things running.
In a world where speed, simplicity, and autonomy are becoming competitive advantages, that burden matters.
Webflow: Built for Today's Teams
Webflow, founded in 2013, represents a shift in how websites can be built and managed, particularly for organizations that prioritize design, responsiveness, and rapid iteration.
Who Should Consider Webflow?
For teams that want speed, creative control, and few dependencies, Webflow is hard to ignore. But it may not be perfect for every use case.
Some customizations can be more complex than with an open-source CMS, as they require JavaScript or microservices instead of traditional server-side code, and the plugin ecosystem is also more limited
However, most of the web ecosystem is shifting toward modern, modular architecture, referred to as MACH: Microservices, API-first, Cloud-native, and Headless. This approach is replacing traditional server-based systems with flexible, scalable stacks.
Agencies and marketing teams rethinking how their digital foundation is set benefit from Webflow when:
- They need sites launched quickly.
- They want to control layout and design without developer bottlenecks.
- They prioritize visual polish and design fidelity.
- They want to move past spending money on technical debt and development and instead focus marketing dollars on more valuable activities.
Finally, in many cases, Webflow can be a stepping stone to a larger composable architecture, with APIs and integrations into headless commerce, DAM, or CDP later on.
What Makes Webflow Different?
Webflow was created to empower designers to build high-quality websites without needing to write code. It combines a visual design interface (similar to tools like Figma or Sketch) with production-ready HTML, CSS, and JavaScript under the hood. You design visually, and Webflow handles the technical translation.
If you've historically relied heavily on developers for every change, Webflow is a game-changer.
But it’s not just a design tool or visual builder. Webflow now includes:
- A fully functional CMS and hosting platform. That means you can build, manage, and launch websites in one place, without third-party plugins or complex dev environments.
- A new AI assistant that understands brand and design rules. This assistant can create components that adhere to brand style guides, reducing the need for manual handoff between design and development.
- Built-in personalization and A/B testing powered by Optimize. This product now positions the platform as a complete Web Experience Platform (WXP), lowering the barrier to implementing UX enhancements that would otherwise require more tools, resources, and integration.
- Seamless third-party integrations for composable architecture. Gain access to AI-driven sitemap creation and a vast library of pre-designed components to get your early-stage UX strategy off the ground sooner.
Also, Webflow has invested in infrastructure, security, and scalability to better serve the needs of enterprise organizations.
Is Open Source Really Free?
While WordPress's open-source nature eliminates licensing fees, it often incurs hidden expenses that offset initial savings with plugins, hosting infrastructure, and custom development.
Meanwhile, platforms like Webflow bundle infrastructure, features, and support into a single predictable agreement. Managing fewer vendors saves time and reduces the risk of delayed launches.
Platform Stability and Ecosystem Concerns
WordPress's recent public disputes between Automattic (WordPress.com) and WP Engine have also introduced governance concerns, especially for teams relying on essential tools like Advanced Custom Fields (ACF). Questions around control, security, and long-term stability have become fundamental considerations for digital leaders betting their strategy on the platform.
Most recently, Matt Mullenweg discussed in a WordPress Slack chat the possibility of limiting future WordPress releases to one per year if the community didn't force WP Engine to drop its lawsuit.
It raises the question: Is this really a platform that serious organizations want to depend on to power their company's website?
SaaS composable architecture and AI are driving rapid innovation and accelerating feature releases across platforms. In contrast, WordPress is essentially moving in the opposite direction.
It's Not Just About WordPress. It's About Your Model.
Choosing a CMS is more than picking a platform; it’s about aligning your technology with how your team works and what your organization is trying to achieve.
As the landscape shifts, AI, composability, and low-code tools redefine what’s possible with modern CMS platforms. Some tools now promise to generate production-ready code from simple prompts. Others suggest layouts, write copy, or let you mix and match microservices, content repositories, personalization engines, and front-end frameworks.
These capabilities—once reserved for large enterprises—are becoming increasingly accessible to teams of all sizes.
But accessibility and the possibility of these platforms don’t equal simplicity.
Many organizations looking to “go composable” or “adopt AI” quickly find themselves overwhelmed without a clear strategy or the right internal capabilities to support these shifts.
That’s why the core questions still matter most:
- What are you trying to deliver to your customers?
- What kind of internal team do you have?
- Where do you need flexibility, and where do you need speed?
- Do you need ownership over your codebase, or freedom from it?
Your CMS should support your operating model, not dictate it.
Final Thoughts: Rethink What a CMS Should Do for You
It’s tempting to stay the course. But in today’s world, your CMS strategy is your business strategy. Your platform should accelerate your goals, not slow them down.
Whether that means switching from WordPress, decoupling your front end, or simply rethinking your current approach, now is the time to make strategic, intentional decisions.
At Verndale, we help organizations navigate this process.
We bring a proven platform evaluation framework and proprietary content migration tools to help teams shift quickly, with clarity, control, and confidence.
So ask yourself: if you were starting from scratch today, would you choose the same CMS?