For years, ascendnetworks.us ran on WordPress. We paid $3,000 to have it built and $30 a month to keep it alive. It looked fine. It worked, mostly. But it never did what a website is supposed to do. Bring in business.
When we finally pulled it down and looked at what we actually had, the picture was not pretty. Our security headers scored an F. Bots were hammering /wp-login.php around the clock. Google had indexed dozens of WordPress URLs including /wp-content/, /wp-admin/, and /wp-*.php that had nothing to do with our business. The site was slow, generic, and completely forgettable.
They even threw in a logo for free. You can imagine what it looked like. An A with a blue swoosh. It could have been a hair salon. When they handed over the admin credentials, we found something even better. Stock photos and leftover pages from a previous client. Industrial electrician content. Buried right there in our brand new $3,000 website. They could not even be bothered to clean it out.
What WordPress actually is
WordPress is not a custom website. It is a content management system built in PHP that powers about 40% of the internet. Which sounds impressive until you realize that also makes it the most attacked platform on the web.
Most agencies that charge you $3,000 to build a website are really just installing WordPress, buying a $59 theme like Avada or Divi, dropping in your text and photos, and calling it done. You end up with a site that looks like a thousand other sites, loads slowly, and requires constant maintenance just to stay secure.
What we built instead
We rebuilt ascendnetworks.us from scratch using Next.js. The same framework used by companies like Vercel, Linear, and Notion. No themes. No plugins. No WordPress. Every line of code written specifically for this site.
The results were immediate. Security headers went from F to A on the first deploy. The site loads in under a second. It never sleeps. It costs $0 a month to host. And it looks exactly like a technology company should look, not like a template someone bought for $59.
The real cost of WordPress
Here is what that WordPress site actually cost us. Setup fee: $3,000. Monthly hosting since September 2024: $210. Total: $3,210. Leads generated: zero.
The new site cost us time and zero dollars a month to run.
What this means for your business
If you are running a WordPress site and wondering why it is not bringing in business, your site might be part of the problem. A slow, insecure, generic-looking site tells potential clients everything they need to know about how you operate before they ever contact you.
We are a technology company. Showing up with a WordPress template was contradicting everything we were trying to say about ourselves. The new site is the product. It shows clients exactly what we can build for them before they ever fill out the contact form.
If you want to talk about what a real custom build for your business looks like, you know where to find us.