Year 1, Year 3, Year 5: What Happens to Sites That Don't Migrate

Year 1: Manageable

Your WordPress site works. Updates come regularly. Your developer handles plugin patches. Hosting costs are predictable. Security scans come back mostly clean. You tell yourself: 'It's fine.'

What you don't see: 4,200 new CVEs were filed against WordPress this year. Your 27 plugins each released 3-8 updates. Your developer spent 420 hours on maintenance. Your hosting costs quietly increased 15% because PHP 8.x requires more compute.

Year 3: Painful

Three of your plugins haven't been updated in 18 months. The developers abandoned them. Two plugins now conflict with PHP 8.3. Your theme breaks on mobile after a WordPress core update. Your developer spends 40% of their time on maintenance instead of features.

Your security audit reveals 14 known vulnerabilities in abandoned plugins. You can't remove them — your site depends on their functionality. You can't update them — nobody maintains them. You're stuck.

Your competitor launched a new site on Astro. It loads in 0.8 seconds. Yours loads in 4.2 seconds. Their hosting bill is $20/month. Yours is $350/month. They shipped 12 new features. You shipped 3 — the rest of the roadmap was lost to maintenance.

Year 5: Crippling

Your WordPress version is now two major versions behind because updating breaks 6 plugins. PHP 8.1 reached end-of-life — your hosting provider is charging a premium for legacy PHP support. Two more plugins were abandoned. Your developer quit — they wanted to work with modern tools.

Hiring a replacement is hard. Junior developers don't learn WordPress anymore. Senior WordPress developers command premium rates because supply is shrinking. You're paying $120,000 for a skill set that's depreciating.

AI agents can't parse your site. Your content is invisible to the AI-powered search and discovery layer that your competitors' sites are optimized for. Organic traffic has declined 35% in two years — not because your content is worse, but because your framework can't serve it in a machine-readable format.

A security breach hits. An abandoned plugin with a known critical CVE was exploited. Customer data was exposed. The incident response costs $47,000. The reputation damage is harder to quantify but the sales team feels it.

Year 5 Total Cost of Inaction

$100,000 - $250,000

Cumulative maintenance cost (5 years)

Modeled estimate: 5-year sum of annual costs from True Cost analysis with 10% annual escalation for legacy maintenance.

$200,000 - $475,000

Opportunity cost (features not built)

Modeled estimate: maintenance developer hours valued at $95K/yr salary (Source: BLS). Opportunity cost is inherently an estimate.

$15,000 - $40,000

Migration cost if done in Year 1

Modeled estimate based on published web development agency rates ($100-200/hr). Varies significantly by site complexity.

$40,000 - $120,000

Migration cost if done in Year 5

Modeled estimate. The 3x multiplier is an industry rule of thumb, not a measured figure. Actual costs depend on accumulated technical debt.

The Math Is Simple

Migrate in Year 1: spend $15,000-$40,000 once, save $85,000-$210,000 over 5 years. Migrate in Year 5: spend $40,000-$120,000 after already spending $100,000-$250,000. Every year of delay costs more than the year before.

This isn't speculation. These are the cost curves organizations experience. The only variable is whether you act on year 1 math or year 5 math.