Why doesn't LevelUp Digital build websites in WordPress?

We do not build or maintain full websites in WordPress. It is a real boundary, not a preference we bend on for the right project. We will turn down a website build rather than take on a WordPress site. Here is the honest reasoning.

The security math

In Sucuri's 2023 Hacked Website Report, WordPress accounted for 95.5% of the infections their incident response team cleaned, out of 39,594 sites. Sucuri says plainly in the same report that this reflects market share rather than relative security, and they are right to say it: WordPress is roughly 62.8% of the CMS market.

We think that caveat is fair and we are repeating it on purpose. But look at the gap. 62.8% of the market, 95.5% of the cleanups. That gap is the part worth paying attention to.

The reason is the plugin ecosystem. A typical WordPress site runs a stack of third-party plugins, each written by a different developer, each on its own update schedule, each with its own security posture. One abandoned plugin is a door. Keeping that stack patched is ongoing work that somebody has to own and pay for, forever.

The SEO tooling is thinner than people think

Most WordPress sites lean on Yoast for SEO. Yoast will check whether you wrote a meta description and whether your keyword shows up enough times. That is a checklist, and a useful one for a beginner. It is not a strategy, and it will not tell you much about why you are not ranking. Real SEO work on WordPress means adding more plugins or doing it by hand.

The part nobody says out loud

A lot of agencies choose WordPress specifically because it is hard for clients to edit. If you cannot change your own homepage headline, you have to call the agency. That is a retainer with extra steps.

We do not work that way. We want you to be able to run your own website. We will give you all the advice in the world and we will support you as long as you want us, but you should not be married to us to change a phone number. If every one of us got hit by a bus tomorrow, your website should keep working and your team should still be able to update it.

What we build on instead

HubSpot CMS is our primary platform, and we are a Platinum HubSpot Solutions Partner. Hosting, security and the CMS are one managed thing rather than a stack you maintain. Your website, your CRM, your forms and your reporting are the same system, so a form fill is a contact record with a source attached instead of an email you have to re-key. And the editor is genuinely usable by a marketing coordinator, which is the whole point. See how we build on HubSpot CMS.

When WordPress is still fine

We are not arguing that WordPress cannot work. Plenty of good sites run on it. Our position is about what we are willing to own and maintain.

Where we will work with it is as a limited component behind a HubSpot-fronted setup. A store, or one specific piece of functionality, sitting behind a HubSpot site that handles the marketing pages. That is a reasonable architecture and we have no problem with it.

If you are on WordPress today and wondering what a move would look like, book a discovery call and we will walk you through it, including what it would cost and whether it is worth doing right now.