On November 6, Wes Bos posted that he finished the move. His last WordPress site left a Bluehost server he has paid $600 a year for 15 years. It now runs on EmDash.

Two days earlier he had asked, in public, whether EmDash was ready. The site is his wife’s. He needed the editing experience to stay the same, plugins included. He hosts the Syntax podcast. She is the person who has to live in the admin. That split shows up here all the time. Someone technical, or a web person, built the site. The office runs it.

What came with the site

  • 307 posts
  • 6.7 GB of photos
  • 4 custom content types
  • 5 page templates
  • 15 custom fields
  • One harder plugin, rewritten, plus a handful of simpler ones

Posts are the articles and updates. Photos are the library. Custom content types are the extra kinds of pages a real site grows: services, people, locations, a menu. Templates are the layouts those pages use. Custom fields are the boxes staff fill in. A price. A phone number. A “now hiring” line.

The plugins that did real work were rebuilt so they still do that work. A WordPress plugin file does not install on EmDash.

He said the public site is pixel-perfect, the admin is no problem for a WordPress user, and it is fast. He reported the page speed score went from 52 to 75. That score belongs to his site. A tint shop on 45th does not get a 75 because he did.

He did this move himself, with EmDash’s migration tooling. We did not.

The host bill

He said that Bluehost account used to hold dozens of sites, back when he hosted a pile of them. The $600 a year was one server left on for one site.

Your renewal might be a cheap shared-host plan, or a web person who invoices when the contact form dies. The charge you already know is the one that shows up whether anyone in Canyon opened the site or not.

Sites we build for local operators run on Cloudflare, with EmDash as the editor. Hosting is included in the build. A landing page or small multi-page site is $1,500–$3,500, usually two to three weeks. Optional Operations, if you want us as the ongoing web team, is $99–149 a month. The page is custom websites.

A local site is usually smaller than his

A clinic, a feed store, a tint shop: home, services, a gallery from jobs, a contact form, and a front-desk person who changes hours before a holiday. Less than 307 posts. The worries are the same ones his list answers.

The photos. They can come. His library was 6.7 GB. Yours might be job photos, a logo that has been uploaded four times, and last year’s banquet. A WordPress export is a moving day. You are not retyping the site into a Google Doc.

The person who edits. He said a WordPress user will be fine in the admin, and that it is fast. We still sit with the person who changes hours, photos, and offers, and we edit one real page with them. A phone number should not be a support ticket.

The plugin the business actually uses. His harder plugin was converted. A person did that work. If online booking, a member list, or a payment plugin is the business, say so on the call. Sometimes that plugin is the project. Sometimes the straight answer is to stay until that piece has a replacement. We still will not take a new WordPress job. The longer version is why we’re done building WordPress sites.

What stays on the old host

The theme’s PHP. The page-builder layers. The plugin that has been updating itself since 2019. Content and photos come over. The plugin pile does not. His post is a public version of the line we already use on a call: he rebuilt the plugins the site needed. He did not pack the WordPress plugin folder.

How a move with us goes

  1. Export the WordPress content and the media library.
  2. Load the pages, posts, and images into EmDash.
  3. Rebuild the one or two features the office uses every week. The form. The gallery. The hours block.
  4. Change one live page with the person who will own edits after we leave.
  5. Leave the old host up until you trust the new site, then turn it off.

A museum of custom PHP from 2014 is a different scope. Tell us if that is the site you have. A brochure, a blog, and a photo library is the job this post is about.

Who should wait

Wait if a plugin is the business and you need it next month, unchanged. We will say so.

Move when the pain is the renewal, the update email, or a site that crawls on a phone in the parking lot. Or when you want a new site and you do not want to inherit the update habit.

Call (806) 433-0154 or email hello@amarillologic.ai.