Why We Move Logistics Websites Off WordPress, and What We Move Them To

Most transport and logistics websites we audit are WordPress sites built somewhere between 2016 and 2022. They were fine when they went live. Then the plugins piled up, the page builder slowed everything down, and the only person who could change a phone number on the contact page was a developer who charged by the hour.

We moved our own site off WordPress this year. We now do the same for every client, new and existing. This is why, and what the new stack looks like from the owner’s seat.

The four complaints we hear on every call

The dev bill for every change. A new depot address, a price list, a driver recruitment banner. Each one is an email to a developer, a wait, and an invoice. Owners stop asking, and the site slowly goes stale.

Plugin updates. A typical WordPress site runs twenty to forty plugins. Each one needs updating, each update can break something, and skipping them is worse. Someone has to own that, and usually nobody does.

Plugin hacks. Patchstack’s 2026 security report counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities across the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, up 42% on the year before. 91% of them were in plugins. 46% had no fix available when they were made public, and roughly half of the high impact ones were being exploited within 24 hours. A logistics site that nobody has updated since the last developer left is sitting in that queue.

It happened to us. When we audited our own WordPress site before the move, Search Console showed a page on haul.agency advertising a pirated WooCommerce plugin, for a shopping cart we never ran. It had been injected through a plugin hole, it was earning Google clicks under our name, and we only found it because we went looking. If it can happen to a marketing agency’s own site, it can happen to a carrier’s.

Slow pages and the clunkiness of it all. Page builders, theme bloat, a database query for every visit, a cheap shared host. The result is a site that takes four or five seconds to show anything on a phone in a depot car park. Across the whole web, only 48% of mobile sites passed Google’s Core Web Vitals in 2025. Heavy WordPress builds are a big reason why.

What we build instead

We build static sites. The page is generated once, when we publish, and served as finished HTML from a global network. There is no database answering every visitor, no PHP running on a server, no admin login to brute force and no plugin catalogue to patch.

The stack is three well known tools:

• Astro builds the site. It takes the content and the design and produces plain, fast pages. Our own homepage scores in the high nineties to 100 on Google’s Lighthouse performance test on mobile, with the image heavy hero included.
• GitHub holds the code and the content. Every change is recorded. If something is wrong, we roll back to the version from an hour ago, not from last month’s backup.
• Netlify hosts it. Global delivery, automatic SSL, forms that email you, and instant rollbacks. For a brochure site the hosting bill is usually zero.

That is it. No theme licence, no page builder subscription, no security plugin, no caching plugin, no backup plugin.

What changes for you as the owner

Changes are quick, and they are versioned. A text edit on a static site is a small change to a file, checked, and live in a couple of minutes. Because we run content management for most of our clients month to month, those changes are part of the retainer, not a separate dev invoice.

Nothing to update. There is no WordPress core, no plugins, no theme. The attack surface that Patchstack is counting simply is not there. A static site can still be built badly, but it cannot be hacked through a form plugin you forgot about.

It loads fast everywhere. Freight buyers check carriers on their phone between calls. A page that appears in under a second on a mobile connection is a different first impression to one that spins.

Your rankings come with you. This is the part people worry about. We audit the existing site in Google Search Console first, list every URL that earns impressions, and keep or redirect each one. Your posts, your case studies and your service pages keep their addresses or get a permanent redirect. Nothing that ranks today gets lost in the move.

How a move actually runs

1. Audit. We crawl the current site, pull sixteen months of Search Console data and list every page, every redirect it needs and every piece of content worth keeping.
2. Rebuild. We design and build the new site on the stack above, with proper titles, schema and sitemaps from day one. You review it on a private preview link that search engines cannot see.
3. Content move. Posts, case studies and images come across, cleaned up on the way. Dead services get redirected to the nearest live one.
4. Cutover. We point your domain at the new site, lift the search block, submit the sitemap and keep the old WordPress site switched off but intact for thirty days in case anything needs checking.
5. Run it. From then on, changes come through us, fast, with a record of every one.

For most logistics companies this is a three to six week job, and the biggest delay is usually waiting on photos.

Is it right for every logistics site?

Nearly. If your site is a brochure, a services list, case studies and a blog, which describes almost every carrier, forwarder, warehouse and customs broker we work with, a static site is the right call. If you run a customer portal, live tracking or a booking system inside the site, those pieces need an application behind them, and we scope that separately.

Questions owners ask us

Can I still edit the site myself? Yes, through a simple editor on the content files, and most owners prefer to send us the change instead. Either way the edit is recorded and reversible.

What happens to my blog posts? They move with you, on the same addresses. The two or three that earn you traffic get a refresh while we are in there.

Will my Google rankings drop? Not when the redirects are done properly. In our experience a faster site with cleaner titles and schema goes the other way. Arrow Transport’s website traffic rose 472% in the twelve months after their rebuild.

What does hosting cost? Usually nothing for a brochure site on Netlify’s free tier. The only ongoing costs are your domain and whatever content work you have us doing.

If your current site is slow, patched together, or you have stopped asking for changes because of what they cost, apply to partner with HAUL and we will start with the audit.