WordPress developer in Berlin for startups whose site grew plugin by plugin

Why startup sites outgrow WordPress

A startup’s WordPress site grows with the company, one plugin at a time: a form plugin for the first leads, a page builder for the launch, a plugin for the job board, another for the cookie notice. Each came with a reason, and the people who installed them have often moved on.

Each plugin is code from another vendor that runs on your server, and the paid version is no safer. Patchstack found 76 percent of the vulnerabilities in premium plugins and themes exploitable, and premium components had three times more known exploited vulnerabilities than free ones (Patchstack, February 2026).

Some plugins are no longer maintained. The WordPress plugin directory marks a plugin that its author has not tested with the last three major WordPress releases: “It may no longer be maintained or supported.” Such a plugin keeps running on your site until someone removes it.

Speed suffers too. Many plugins load their scripts and styles on each page, including pages that do not use them. Google measures the result as Core Web Vitals, and a sign-up page that loads slowly on a phone loses visitors before they see the form.

What the move changes for your team

The new site has no WordPress plugins. Their functions stay, built into the site or handed to a service your team can name, and the plugin inventory below shows where each one went.

The target system depends on what your site does. Pages, posts and a blog become a static site in Astro. A site with accounts, payments or product data runs on Symfony, Laravel or Node.js with a database, and the marketing pages can sit next to it.

Your team changes texts and adds pages through its own AI agent, which works in a repository under rules: the agent drafts a change, and the build publishes it after a person approves. If marketing wants an editing screen, a content editor on top of the new site adds one.

The plugin inventory

The inventory is the first document of a migration: one row per plugin, what it does and where that function goes. You can fill in the first two columns yourself from the Plugins screen of your WordPress admin.

Plugin on your site	What it does	Where the function goes
Page builder	Layout of landing pages	Components with fixed fields that your team or its agent fills
Contact or demo form	Collects leads	A form service or a small backend that sends the entry to your CRM or inbox
SEO plugin	Titles, descriptions, sitemap	Fields in the source of each page; the build writes the sitemap
Caching plugin	Speeds up pages that PHP builds on each visit	Not needed for static HTML; on a framework, the server or a CDN caches
Security plugin	Blocks login attempts and known attacks	A static site has no login page; a framework gets its updates and a firewall at the host
Cookie notice	Asks for consent to tracking	The inventory lists each script that sets cookies or loads from another server; your data protection officer decides what needs consent
Redirect plugin	Forwards old addresses	Forwarding rules on the web server
Newsletter sign-up	Adds contacts to a list	The form of your newsletter provider, or a small backend
Jobs plugin	Lists open positions	Pages built from a data file, or links to your applicant system

Paid plugins and themes get two more columns: the account the license is registered to and its renewal date. Cancel them after the switch, not before.

Who I am

I am Michael Wutzke, an IT architect for data platforms in Frankfurt with more than twenty years in IT and media. Among other roles I was CIO at the Frankfurt-based company Blocksize Capital, a fintech startup, where growth and marketing were part of the role. I moved this site off WordPress with Claude as coding agent. Details: Background.