--- title: Should your membership site leave WordPress? — MemberPress.ai Blog description: Sites with logins, payments and members are where WordPress is investing. How to tell whether yours should stay, and when plain pages make more sense. image: https://memberpress.ai/images/blog/field-notes-should-your-membership-site-leave-wordpress.jpg url: https://memberpress.ai/blog/field-notes/field-notes-should-your-membership-site-leave-wordpress/ --- [Blog](https://memberpress.ai/blog/) · [Field Notes](https://memberpress.ai/blog/field-notes/) # Should your membership site leave WordPress? [![](https://memberpress.ai/images/team/seth-shoultes.jpg) Seth Senior Product Manager, MemberPress.ai](https://memberpress.ai/about/#seth) · October 13, 2026 Sites with logins, payments and members are where WordPress is investing. How to tell whether yours should stay, and when plain pages make more sense. [Video](https://pub-0d3b698f9f4b4d78b4b87cc06192a2b1.r2.dev/field-notes-should-your-membership-site-leave-wordpress.mp4) [Watch on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQErfbTpB0w) Probably not. If your site has members, courses, a shop or anything people log in to, WordPress is the right home for it, and that is where WordPress itself is putting its effort. A simple brochure site is a different story. It may be better off as a few plain, fast pages. Here’s how I’d tell the two apart. ## The question you keep hearing Someone tells you an AI built their whole website in an afternoon, with no plugins and no updates. Then you open your own dashboard, see the update notices and the plugin list, and wonder if you’re doing this the hard way. It’s a fair question. It’s just not the place to start. The better question is what your site has to do. ## What a membership site does that a brochure site doesn’t A brochure site shows the same pages to everyone. A membership site knows who is visiting. It signs members in, takes their payments, shows each person what their membership includes, and handles renewals month after month. That’s real software, not a page layout. MemberPress does that work on WordPress, and rebuilding it by hand would leave you owning code you never wanted to own. Opal’s companion post, [Where will WordPress be in 10 years?](https://opalagent.app/blog/where-will-wordpress-be-in-10-years/), says the same: memberships, courses and stores are the sites that should stay. ## Where WordPress is heading You don’t have to take my word for the direction. WordPress publishes it. - **It’s still shipping, steadily.** The [WordPress.org roadmap](https://wordpress.org/about/roadmap/) sets a goal to “deliver three major releases in 2026,” and lists WordPress 7.2 for December 10, 2026. - **It’s building for people who work on a site together.** The same roadmap says the current phase of work is “centered on collaborative editing and workflows.” [WordPress 7.1](https://wordpress.org/news/2026/08/mary-lou/) added notes with mentions, “built for the back-and-forth that happens when people review content together.” - **It’s making room for AI on your own site.** [WordPress 6.9](https://wordpress.org/news/2025/12/gene/) added a way for site actions to run “from PHP and REST endpoints to AI agents,” and [WordPress 7.0](https://wordpress.org/news/2026/05/armstrong/) describes itself as “laying the foundation for AI across the WordPress experience.” To me, that reads like a project investing in sites that do real work: sites with accounts, content and people looking after them. A site with members is exactly that kind of site. ## The honest part: some sites should go Staying has a cost, and it’s fair to say so. A WordPress site still needs looking after. The [latest WordPress security release](https://wordpress.org/news/2026/10/wordpress-7-1-3-maintenance-and-security-release/) says, “it is recommended that you update your sites immediately.” For a site that only shows a handful of pages, that upkeep may not be worth it. If you also run one of those, say a brochure site for a side business, plain pages might suit it better. Opal offers that move as a service at [opalagent.app](https://opalagent.app/blog/where-will-wordpress-be-in-10-years/). She copies the site page for page, keeps its search rankings and redirects every old address. Before you decide, she’ll look at the site and tell you whether she’d move it. Some sites should switch. Plenty shouldn’t. We’re not going to tell you every site belongs on WordPress, and we’re not going to tell you to leave. It depends on what the site has to do. ## What staying looks like now For a long time, staying on WordPress meant staying in wp-admin. Every new idea turned into another afternoon of settings, and the week went to configuring instead of leading your members. That’s the part MemberPress.ai takes off your plate. Tell Opal, the assistant in MemberPress.ai, what you sell, and she sets up your membership levels and your Join, Checkout, Login and Account pages in the shape MemberPress needs. Once the site is running, she reads your members, revenue and churn, and tells you where the money is going and what to change. You can work with her from wp-admin, or connect your own Claude or ChatGPT to your site and work from there. It runs on a site you own, and your password never leaves your site. You say what you want once, and Opal handles the rest. ## Where that leaves you If your site has members, keep it, and keep it on WordPress. You own it, WordPress is still investing in sites like yours, and you don’t have to run it by hand anymore. The time you get back goes where it should: to your members. ## Worth knowing ### Is WordPress going away? No. WordPress.org's roadmap plans three major releases in 2026, and lists WordPress 7.2 for December 10, 2026. Recent releases have added tools for teams working together and groundwork for AI on your own site. ### Should I move my membership site to a static site? We wouldn't. A membership needs logins, payments, member-only content and renewals. MemberPress does that work on WordPress, and rebuilding it by hand would leave you owning code you don't want to own. ### I also run a simple brochure site. What about that one? That one may be better as plain, fast pages with no plugins to renew or patch. Opal offers that move as a service at opalagent.app: she copies the site page for page, keeps its search rankings and redirects every old address. She'll also tell you if your site should stay where it is. ### Do I need MemberPress already to use MemberPress.ai? Yes. MemberPress needs to be installed and active on your site first. Then you install the free MemberPress.ai Plugin, click Connect and approve once. Your password never leaves your site. See it on your own site ## Get your membership to its first paying member. Connect your site and tell Opal what you sell. She sets up your Join and Checkout pages and tells you what’s left before anyone can pay, like connecting your own Stripe or PayPal. Your password never leaves your site. [Connect your site→](https://memberpress.ai/connect/)