Why Website Owners Are Switching From ExpressionEngine to WordPress

ExpressionEngine was one of the most admired developer platforms of its era. Version upgrade breaks, a contracting add-on ecosystem, and the rising cost of specialists have made it increasingly hard to justify staying on it.

What ExpressionEngine Users Are Saying

ExpressionEngine has never commanded more than a fraction of a percent of the global CMS market. At its peak it was widely respected but narrowly used. According to market tracking, it holds around 0.05% of sites with a CMS, a figure that has been falling steadily. WordPress powers 60% of the same market. The trajectory of the gap has been one-directional for over a decade.

I used EE for a couple of years but got frustrated by the 2.0 drama and by the increasing cost of extensions that in many cases should be basic functionality of the CMS.

Developer community discussion archived on douglasstridsberg.com

The move from EE3 was messy and caused a lot of problems. My experience with ExpressionEngine now is helping clients migrate their sites away and into more modern and well-supported CMS platforms.

Former EE agency developer, Capterra review

Most people would rather use Craft or WordPress. ExpressionEngine is cost-prohibitive. Requiring ExpressionEngine experts to build custom solutions costs big money.

G2 user review, Graphic Design specialist, verified

Some organizations on Reddit are reporting challenges with newer versions of ExpressionEngine, including a lack of support for older versions and issues with documentation not being kept up to date when new features are added.

BigLinden, Best Alternatives to ExpressionEngine, January 2024

The pattern is consistent. The pain points EE users describe are structural: the EE2 to EE3 upgrade broke the ecosystem at its most critical moment, and the overall developer community has migrated toward Craft CMS, WordPress, and headless platforms over the past decade. It is worth being precise here: the most widely-used structural add-ons such as Freeform and Calendar by Solspace, Structure and Matrix by Packet Tide (the company that acquired ExpressionEngine itself in 2019), and WYGWAM by EEHarbor are still actively maintained. What has thinned is the broader long-tail ecosystem and the pool of available EE developers. When the developer who built your EE site moves on, finding a qualified replacement becomes a progressively harder and more expensive problem. That reality, not add-on quality, is the primary driver behind most migrations.

Why ExpressionEngine Add-Ons Became a Liability

ExpressionEngine’s power always came from its add-on ecosystem. Matrix gave you repeatable custom field sets. Structure gave editors a proper page tree. Freeform handled every type of form. Playa and Relationships managed complex content connections between channels. These were not optional extras on most EE sites. They were structural requirements.

The EE2 to EE3 jump was the most disruptive upgrade in ExpressionEngine’s history. EE3 was a ground-up architectural rewrite built on CodeIgniter 3, which required add-on developers to rebuild their add-ons from scratch. Many did not make the transition. Since EE3, subsequent upgrades (EE4, EE5, EE6, EE7) have been more incremental, and well-maintained add-ons have generally carried forward. EE4 introduced one-click updates. EE7 explicitly states that its new development conventions do not break existing add-ons. However, the EE2 to EE3 break did cause permanent damage to the ecosystem: some add-ons were never ported, leaving sites that depended on them stranded on EE2 indefinitely, unable to upgrade without losing functionality, and unable to stay without accumulating security debt as EE2 and EE3 passed end-of-life.

ExpressionEngine Add-Ons and Their WordPress Equivalents

Every piece of structured functionality that ExpressionEngine provided through its add-on system has a WordPress equivalent that is actively maintained, better supported, and used by hundreds of thousands of sites. The table below maps the most common EE add-ons to their WordPress counterparts.

The critical difference is ecosystem scale and cost predictability. Every WordPress equivalent in the table above is maintained by teams with millions of active installs funding development. On the ExpressionEngine side, the core structural add-ons such as Freeform, Calendar, Structure, and WYGWAM are actively maintained by Solspace and Packet Tide. However, they carry annual license costs, and their commercial viability is tied to a shrinking EE user base. Add-ons outside that tier have a less reliable history, and several went through periods of abandonment or forced rewrites when EE2 transitioned to EE3. The asymmetry in ecosystem scale between WordPress and ExpressionEngine has only widened with each passing year.

What a Proper ExpressionEngine Migration Involves

ExpressionEngine stores content in a channel and entry model that is structurally different from WordPress. Channels are roughly equivalent to post types, entries are posts, and field groups map to ACF field groups. But the relationships between them, and the way add-ons like Matrix, Playa, and Structure extend them, require explicit mapping work. A proper migration reads from the EE database directly. Here is how each layer is handled.

Channel entries and content types

Every ExpressionEngine channel becomes a WordPress post type, page hierarchy, or custom post type depending on how it is used. News channels become posts. Service and landing page channels become pages. Portfolio, team member, or product channels become custom post types with ACF field groups matching the original channel fieldtypes. The entry date, author, status, and URL title are all preserved.

Matrix and Grid field data

This is where most automated EE migration tools fail silently. Matrix and Grid fields store structured repeater data in separate EE database tables. Each row in a Matrix field becomes a row in an ACF Pro Repeater or Flexible Content field. The field-by-field mapping is done explicitly so that complex data structures (image slideshows, pricing tables, team bios, course outlines) arrive in WordPress with every value intact, not flattened to a single text block or dropped.

Relationships and Playa

ExpressionEngine’s channel relationship fields (native and Playa-based) become ACF Pro Relationship fields in WordPress, maintaining the same connections between post types. Related entries are linked to their corresponding WordPress posts after migration so that no relationship reference becomes a broken link.

Members and user accounts

ExpressionEngine has its own member system with member groups, custom member fields, and front-end member data. All registered members are imported to WordPress with role mapping. EE’s “Super Admins” become WordPress administrators; “Authors” become authors. Custom member field data is preserved in WordPress user meta. As with all password migrations, EE and WordPress use incompatible hashing algorithms, so members are prompted to reset passwords on first login.

Templates to theme

ExpressionEngine templates are tag-based and live inside EE’s template manager. They cannot be directly ported to WordPress. A proper migration delivers a custom WordPress theme that replicates the visual output of the original EE templates exactly. Every section layout, header and footer variant, sidebar widget area, and page-specific template is rebuilt as a native WordPress template file with ACF-powered content blocks. The result is a site that looks identical to the original but is now editable by any WordPress developer or a content editor without EE knowledge.

SEO and URL preservation

ExpressionEngine URL structures often include the channel group in the path (e.g., /news/entry-title/). Where these can be replicated exactly in WordPress permalink settings, they are. Where the structure must change, 301 redirects are created for every old URL in the Redirection plugin. SEO meta data (titles and descriptions from EE built-in SEO fields or add-ons like NSM Better Meta or SEOEE) is migrated to Yoast SEO post meta. No page goes live without its SEO data.

What Bad ExpressionEngine Migrations Look Like

• Matrix data silently dropped. Automated tools import the basic channel entry fields but ignore Matrix and Grid table data entirely. Repeatable content blocks, image galleries, pricing rows, and structured lists simply do not appear in the imported content. Clients discover this after launch.
• Relationships broken. Playa and Relationship field references cannot be resolved by generic import tools that do not understand EE’s relational database structure. The import creates posts but breaks all the connections between them.
• EE template tags left as raw text. Some import tools pull the raw EE template code into the content field instead of the rendered output. Pages fill with {exp:channel:entries} tags instead of actual content.
• Member data abandoned. EE member accounts are skipped entirely because generic WordPress importer tools do not know how to map EE’s member_data and member_custom_data tables. All user accounts are lost.
• Custom URL structure ignored. EE sites often have carefully structured URLs that carry significant SEO value. Migration tools create posts with default WordPress slugs and implement no redirects. Inbound links and search rankings drop.
• Structure hierarchy lost. Sites using the Structure add-on have a deliberately organized page tree. Without explicit tree mapping, this hierarchy collapses and the menu structure breaks.

GDPR and Your Data

An ExpressionEngine database contains every piece of data your site has ever collected: registered member profiles, form submissions via Freeform, comments, channel entry data with associated author information, and if you run Cartthrob, full e-commerce transaction records. Migrating this to WordPress is a personal data transfer under GDPR. Every provider you consider should be able to answer these questions before they touch your database: will they sign a DPA, how are credentials transmitted, where is the data processed, when is it deleted, and what is their breach notification procedure.

gConverter is US-registered with full EU GDPR compliance. We sign a Data Processing Agreement before any access is granted. All credentials are stored in AES-256 encrypted vaults, transmitted over TLS 1.3, and deleted within 24 hours of job completion. All customer data is permanently deleted within 30 days. For GC-ExtraSecurity clients, processing happens on a dedicated Hetzner EU server in Frankfurt keeping all data inside the EEA. Read the full GDPR documentation →

What Clients Say

Went FAR above and beyond to help us work through this project. We are thrilled with the final result and they were professional, great to work with, and responsive every step of the way. Would highly recommend.

Anna P., Wilmington NC – Customer Lobby, January 2026

There were very few conversion issues on the first pass, and they cleaned it right. Very Impressive.

Stacy C., Katy TX – Customer Lobby, November 2025

The Bottom Line

ExpressionEngine earned its reputation as a serious developer tool. The channel model was genuinely ahead of its time. But the version upgrade breaks, the thinning add-on ecosystem, the high cost of specialist development, and a community that has dispersed across Craft CMS, WordPress, and headless platforms have collectively made it harder to justify with each passing year.

WordPress is where 60% of the web is, where the talent pool is deep and affordable, where the plugin ecosystem is actively maintained, and where your content editors can work without filing a developer ticket. Every channel entry, every Matrix row, every member record, and every carefully crafted URL on your ExpressionEngine site can come across cleanly.