Still on WordPress or Magento?

WordPress and Magento were built for a different era. They solved real problems — but they also created new ones. Plugin sprawl. Security patches every week. Performance that degrades with every extension you install. Hosting bills that climb while your site gets slower.

I spent 15 years building on these platforms. I know them inside out. And I know exactly why businesses are leaving them.

HD CMS is what I built to replace them. A modern, headless CMS purpose-built for small and medium businesses. No plugins. No themes. No shared hosting. Just a clean, fast, bespoke website with everything you need — from £20/month.

WordPress powers millions of sites. It's also the most attacked CMS on the internet. Every plugin is a potential vulnerability. Every theme update risks breaking your layout. Every new feature means another extension, another compatibility issue, another thing to maintain.

Here's what a typical WordPress business site looks like under the hood:

• 15-30 plugins — contact forms, SEO, caching, security, backups, image optimisation, analytics, cookie consent, page builders...
• Monthly maintenance — plugin updates, WordPress core updates, PHP version compatibility checks
• Shared hosting — your site shares a server with hundreds of others, competing for resources
• PageSpeed scores in the 30s-50s — JavaScript-heavy themes and plugin bloat tank mobile performance
• Security anxiety — brute force attacks, SQL injection attempts, plugin vulnerabilities disclosed weekly

HD CMS has none of this. No plugins. No themes. No PHP. No shared hosting. No attack surface. Your site is static HTML on a CDN edge network — there's nothing to hack, nothing to update, nothing to break.

Magento is a powerful ecommerce platform. It's also massively over-engineered for most businesses. If you're not processing thousands of orders per day with complex inventory across multiple warehouses, you're paying for complexity you don't need.

The typical Magento experience for a small-to-medium business:

• £100-500+/month hosting — Magento needs dedicated servers. Shared hosting can't run it properly.
• Slow admin panel — cache clearing, index rebuilding, and 10-second page loads in the backend are the norm
• Developer dependency — even simple changes often need a developer. Magento's learning curve is steep.
• Extension costs — payment gateways, shipping modules, search — they all cost extra, often with annual licences
• Upgrade pain — major version upgrades are project-sized efforts, often requiring theme and extension rebuilds

HD Commerce is built for real businesses, not enterprise procurement processes. Stripe payments, product management, and order tracking — all included. No extensions to buy. No hosting to configure. No upgrade nightmares.

I've migrated businesses from WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Magento, and Shopify. The process is the same every time: understand your business, design something bespoke, build it properly, migrate your content, and go live.

Most sites are live within a week. Some in a day. You keep your domain, your content, your Google rankings. You lose the bloat, the plugin updates, the hosting bills, and the generic template that makes you look like everyone else.