WordPress or a managed roofing website: who is actually maintaining it?
WordPress is capable of everything a roofing company needs from a website and more, and the software itself is free and open source. The catch is not capability, it is custody: you supply the hosting, you keep the core, themes and plugins updated, you deal with the security, and when the site goes down during a hail event, it is your problem. A managed site trades that flexibility for somebody else being responsible.
Two different products share the name
WordPress.org is the free, self-hosted software: you download it, you provide the hosting and the domain, and you own everything. WordPress.com is a hosted service with published monthly plans. They are frequently discussed as one thing and they are not, and the comparison a roofing company should be making is usually against self-hosted WordPress, because that is what most agencies build on.
What self-hosting actually commits you to
WordPress publishes its own server requirements: a current PHP version, a current MySQL or MariaDB, and HTTPS support. That means somebody has to choose a host, keep the stack current, run backups, keep plugins patched and notice when one of them conflicts with another after an update. On a good day this is twenty minutes a month. On a bad day it is a site that is down and a plugin author who stopped replying in 2023.
The failure we actually inherit
Almost every WordPress roofing site we take over has the same story. It was built well three or four years ago by someone competent, then that person moved on, nobody updated anything, a page builder plugin went end of life, and now the site is slow, half-broken on mobile and nobody dares touch it. The problem was never WordPress. It was that the maintenance was assigned to a roofing company.
What WordPress publishes about itself
Every line below was read on their own site or documentation on the date shown. We do not publish a competitor fact we cannot point at.
WordPress states that its software is open source and licensed under the GPL, providing four core freedoms to use, study, modify and redistribute it.
About WordPressWordPress.org, checked September 21, 2026
WordPress publishes server requirements for self-hosting, recommending a current PHP release and a current MySQL or MariaDB release, plus HTTPS support, on a server you provide.
WordPress requirementsWordPress.org, checked September 21, 2026
WordPress.com publishes hosted plans from a free tier up through Personal, Premium, Business and Commerce, with the Business tier being the one that lists developer access such as SFTP, SSH, WP-CLI and Git deployments, and states that free sites display WordPress.com ads to visitors.
WordPress.com pricingWordPress.com, checked September 21, 2026
WordPress.com states that you can install any of over 60,000 plugins from its marketplace, or upload a plugin directly to your site.
WordPress.com pricingWordPress.com, checked September 21, 2026
WordPress against a managed, custom-coded roofing site
Read the left column first. Where the other option is genuinely better, the row says so.
| WordPress | RoofingWebStudio | |
|---|---|---|
| Software cost | Free and open source, self-hosted | One monthly fee, nothing itemised |
| Hosting | You choose, buy and manage it | Included on Cloudflare, with SSL, CDN and DDoS protection |
| Updates and patching | Yours: core, theme and every plugin | Ours. You never see an update notice |
| Security | Yours, usually via another plugin | Ours, at the edge, inside the fee |
| Backups | Yours to configure and test | Ours. The site is rebuilt and redeployed from source |
| Flexibility | Effectively unlimited. This is the real strength | Anything we build, requested as a revision |
| Ownership of the build | Total. Files, database, everything | Domain and content yours, transferred free on request |
| Speed | Depends entirely on host, theme and plugin count | 90+ PageSpeed guaranteed, fixed free if a page slips |
| Service and town pages | You or your developer build each one | Built as standard, one per service and per place you work |
| Articles | You write them | Two or three researched, sourced articles a week |
| Who is accountable | Whoever built it, until they are not | Us, on a plan you can cancel with notice |
Their case
When WordPress is genuinely the right choice
It is the most-used website software on earth for good reasons.
- You have an in-house person, or a developer on retainer you trust, who will actually keep it current.
- You need something unusual: a custom integration, a members area, a complex catalogue. WordPress will do it and a managed plan will not.
- Total control matters to you more than convenience. With self-hosted WordPress you own the files and the database outright, with no vendor in between.
- You already have a well-built, well-maintained WordPress site that ranks. Do not replace something that is working.
Our case
When the managed site wins
The honest test is a single question: who is doing the work in six months?
- Nobody at your company wants to be the website person, and the last one stopped being it two years ago.
- You want the performance and uptime to be someone else's written commitment rather than your maintenance schedule.
- You want new town and service pages added on request without a quote, an hourly rate or a two-week wait.
- You want one predictable monthly figure instead of hosting, SSL, a security plugin, a page builder licence and an occasional developer invoice.
If you are staying on WordPress
We would rather tell you how to do it properly than pretend it cannot be done well. If you keep WordPress, put these four things in place and most of what goes wrong will not.
- 1Name the person responsible for updates, and put it in their actual job description rather than in a good intention.
- 2Keep the plugin count low. Every one is another thing that can go end of life on you.
- 3Pay for managed hosting with real backups and staging, rather than the cheapest shared plan.
- 4Build the service and town page structure properly. That part matters more than which software renders it.
From roofing companies we have built for
Conrad Fairchild
Estimator, office block roof maintenance company
The 'did you receive it?' calls about commercial roof assessments were a daily occurrence here. Submitters now see exactly what we will do with their request and when to expect us. A modest change with an outsized effect on our mornings.
Submission acknowledgment and follow-up for commercial roof assessments
Faris Hourani
Tendering assistant, commercial guttering and drainage firm
Our old commercial roof assessments routine was a shared inbox and crossed fingers. Every inquiry arrives with an owner, a status, and the context attached. It removed a daily friction we had simply learned to live with.
Inquiry assignment and staff handover for commercial roof assessments
Bethany Hastings
Office manager, industrial roof refurbishment firm
The old commercial roof assessments PDF made sense on a printer and nowhere else. Staff now link to the precise section instead of wishing callers luck with a long document. Nothing was taken away from the people who like paper.
Structured reference pages for commercial roof assessments
Moving off WordPress without losing your rankings
- We export the full URL list from your current site, including every post, page and category.
- At onboarding we agree what is worth keeping, what is worth rewriting and what is worth retiring.
- Every retained URL gets a permanent redirect to its new equivalent, set before launch rather than after.
- Your content comes with you. We migrate the posts worth keeping and the images worth keeping, and the domain stays yours throughout.
Questions about WordPress and a managed site
Is WordPress bad for SEO?
No. WordPress is perfectly capable of excellent technical SEO. What hurts roofing sites is usually what has been bolted onto it: a heavy page builder, a dozen plugins, cheap shared hosting and no page structure. The software is rarely the problem.
How much does WordPress really cost?
The software is free. What it costs is hosting, a theme or page builder licence, sometimes a security or backup plugin, and the time or the developer rate to keep it all current. Add those up honestly before comparing them to a managed monthly fee.
Can you take over my existing WordPress site instead of rebuilding?
Maintaining a WordPress install is not what this offer is. What we do is rebuild it as a custom-coded site, migrate the content worth keeping and redirect every old URL so you keep the ranking signals you already have.
Will I lose my blog posts?
No. Posts worth keeping are migrated with their URLs redirected, so links and indexed pages still resolve. We will tell you plainly which old posts are worth carrying over and which are doing nothing for you.
What about my plugins?
Most of them exist to patch gaps that a custom build does not have: caching, security, SEO fields, forms, image optimisation. Anything genuinely business-specific we look at individually, and we tell you before you sign if something cannot be replicated.
Is self-hosted WordPress more secure than a managed site?
It can be, in the hands of someone who patches it weekly. Unattended, it is the opposite: an out-of-date install with abandoned plugins is one of the more common ways a small business site gets defaced or used to serve spam.
Do I own my site with you the way I own WordPress?
Not identically, and it is fair to say so. With self-hosted WordPress you own the files and the database. With us you own the domain and the content, both transferred at no charge if you leave, and we run the code. That is the trade you are making.
What if I want to go back to WordPress later?
Tell us where to send the domain and we transfer it at no charge. Your content is yours to take. We are not going to make leaving difficult, because a business that is only staying because leaving is hard is not a client worth keeping.
Sources
- About WordPress, WordPress.org. Checked September 21, 2026.
- WordPress requirements, WordPress.org. Checked September 21, 2026.
- WordPress.com pricing, WordPress.com. Checked September 21, 2026.
See it built for your roofing company
A live walk-through of the site you would get, in about 30 minutes. Plans from $127 a month, the $697 build fee invoiced only after launch, domain and hosting included.
Book a demoWordPress is a trademark of the WordPress Foundation. RoofingWebStudio is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by the WordPress Foundation or Automattic Inc.