The three questions
What people who run a website really want to know comes down to three questions: what does it cost, do I have to understand it, and do I know where I stand? Most systems answer two. WordPress gives you a low start and the freedom to do anything — and asks for the other two in return.
| WordPress | loam | |
|---|---|---|
| What does it cost? | Cheap to start; then a premium theme, Elementor Pro and premium plugins, each with its own yearly licence, and hours whenever an update gets stuck. | On loam you pay for the design once, up front — made by hand, so not the cheapest start. After that: one licence per site for updates, and the subscription of your own agent. No theme or plugin licences, no bill because an update got stuck. |
| Do I have to understand it? | Everything is possible, so there is a lot to understand: the dashboard, the updates, which plugin works with which — or someone to pay who does. | Nothing to understand: you say what you want, your agent knows how your site works, and you see the whole site as it would be before you say yes. |
| Do I know where I stand? | Licences run out at different moments, and a site can get stuck: WordPress moves on to a newer, safer PHP, but your site cannot follow because one plugin cannot. | You know where you stand: no plugin can hold an update back, the engine follows the PHP versions PHP itself supports, security fixes are free for five years per line — and without a licence your site simply keeps running. |
Built around the agent, not added to it
This year WordPress got an agent: an official plugin that lets an assistant work on a self-hosted site, and on WordPress.com agents can now write posts and pages. That is a door added to a house built for a dashboard. Behind it, the dashboard, the database and the plugins stay as they were — and the agent itself comes in through a plugin, so through the very stack that has to be kept up.
loam was built the other way round. The agent is the front door, and there is no dashboard behind it. Everything your site is goes through that one door — the words, the design, the images and the guide that says how your site speaks — and every change through it is a draft first, checked against the whole site before it goes live.
And every loam site is its own connection. Your agent talks to your site itself — its own address, its own keys — not to a central service that holds the accounts of many sites. You decide who and which agent gets in, and nobody stands in between.
Less to keep up, fewer holes
A WordPress site is a stack: the core, a theme, Elementor, a handful of plugins and a database. Each has its own updates and its own way in — and often its own yearly licence. A premium theme runs out, Elementor Pro runs out, a plugin's licence runs out: the site keeps working, but the updates stop, and a part of it slowly ages. Or the site gets stuck: WordPress moves on to a newer PHP, as it should, but your site cannot follow because one plugin cannot. A plugin lives as long as its maker keeps it up: a maker who stops, a price that goes up — and a part of your site that stops with it.
Most of all, a site that was built and then left alone — made and forgotten — ages in place: every month an older theme, older plugins, more ways in. On loam you are the maker. No plugins, no theme licences, no login page, no database: what a plugin would do lives in your own design, under your own control. What remains to keep up is the engine itself, in one signed step — and a site left alone keeps working as it was, with far less that can age.
Freedom in what you make
A page builder decides what you can build: its widgets, its sections, its markup. On loam the design is plain templates and a stylesheet, made by hand for your site alone. Nothing is a template you picked from a store, and nothing limits what a page can become — your agent works within your design, not within a builder's.
What moves with you
- Your content. Pages, posts and images move over — your agent reads the old site and stages every page as a draft, so you see the whole new site before anything changes.
- Your addresses. Each old address is kept on its new page and forwards to it by itself, date and category paths included — search engines follow, and so do your old links.
- Your words for them. Titles and descriptions come along, and are a good moment to read again.
What stays behind: the dashboard, the plugins — what they did lands in your design, or turns out not to be needed — and the theme. The design is made again, by hand: part of the route, and the moment your site gets a form of its own.