A WordPress alternative that keeps your WordPress site

Look for a WordPress alternative and you find good products: Laravel CMSs, headless services, static site generators, hosted builders. Almost all of them begin the same way. Export the content, map it to a new model, import it, rebuild the URLs, set up redirects for the ones that changed, ask every editor to reset their password, and find out what the plugins were really storing.

For a five-page brochure site that is an afternoon. For a site with ten years of posts, custom fields, a shop and a contact form whose messages someone still reads, the migration is the project, and it is the reason many teams stay on WordPress longer than they want to.

kitloom takes the other road. It is a CMS on Laravel that runs on the WordPress database as it is: wp_posts, wp_postmeta, wp_options, the terms, the users, and the tables of the plugins the site already has. Nothing is exported and nothing is converted. A new application is put in front of the same tables.

Why people leave WordPress

Usually not because of the content model. Posts, pages, terms and meta have held up for twenty years. The reasons are more often:

• The code. Hooks reaching into hooks, a functions.php nobody wants to touch, plugins that each bring their own way of doing things. A Laravel team would rather write services, Eloquent models, queues and tests.
• The plugin count. Many business sites run on dozens of plugins, each with its own updates, its own security history and its own idea of the admin.
• Hiring and tooling. A team that already writes Laravel would rather not keep a second stack for one site, and static analysis, CI and a real test suite come naturally there.
• The front end. A Vue or React front, or a site that is also an API for an app, is first-class in Laravel and an afterthought in a WordPress theme.

None of these is a reason to throw the content away.

What stays the same

Point kitloom at the database and the site keeps:

• Its content: posts, pages, attachments, revisions, categories, tags, custom taxonomies, comments.
• Its addresses: kitloom reads the permalink settings and handles a request the way WordPress does: rewrite rules, the main query, the canonical redirect, the template hierarchy. /2019/04/a-post/ is still /2019/04/a-post/.
• Its people: users sign in with the password they had, because WordPress's password hashes are read as WordPress wrote them, and their roles come along.
• Its plugins' data: ACF field groups and values, Contact Form 7 forms and Flamingo messages, WooCommerce products and orders, Rank Math's titles, sitemaps and redirects, among others. Each is read by a kitloom module in the plugin's own format. The full list is on WordPress Compatibility.
• Its settings: site name, reading settings, menus and their locations, widgets.

What changes

Everything that is code:

• No WordPress PHP. No hooks, no wp-admin, no plugins or themes from WordPress. The admin is Filament or Laravel Nova, and every module is a Composer package with an admin for each.
• Laravel all the way down. Eloquent models over the WordPress tables ($post->title, not post_title), events, queues, Horizon, Pulse, Pint, PHPStan, PHPUnit.
• Any front end. A theme in Blade, Vue or React, or none: every page also answers as JSON, so the front can be anything. See Headless & APIs.
• An AI agent runs the site, under your control. kitloom ships an MCP server. Claude, Cursor or your own agent connects to /mcp and does the work: posts and pages, media, menus, SEO and redirects, form messages, the shop's products, orders and sales, bookings, courses, translations. It acts as the user whose key it holds, through the same code as the admin. An author's key writes drafts, a read-only key only reads, and the settings that decide who gets in or what code runs on every page are locked. Nothing is deleted for good, every change is in the activity log, and revoking the key stops it at once. See Run your site from Claude or Cursor.
• Speed. On the same database the bare core answers faster than a bare WordPress, and the whole kitloom with every module faster than WordPress running three popular plugins (SEO, forms and a shop). The setup and the numbers are on Benchmarks, including where WordPress is still ahead (search).

What you give up

An alternative is only useful if its trade-offs are clear:

• WordPress plugins do not run. A plugin's data comes along when kitloom has a module for it. A plugin without a module leaves its data in the database and its shortcodes on the page as text, until a module or a replacement takes over.
• Your WordPress theme does not run. It is PHP written for WordPress. You take a bundled theme, generate one, or build one from an HTML template.
• No block editor. Blocks already in content are drawn as WordPress draws them; editors write in a visual editor, not Gutenberg.
• The move is one way. kitloom writes new arrays as JSON, which WordPress does not read. Going back means restoring your backup.
• It is WordPress-shaped. The tables are WordPress's, and a type's model extends Post. If you want a Laravel CMS with no WordPress in it at all, kitloom is not it, and What Is WordPress Here says so in detail.

Who it is for

kitloom fits when the site's content already lives in WordPress, or in that shape, and the team wants Laravel for everything around it: an agency inheriting WordPress sites, a company whose developers moved to Laravel, a WooCommerce shop that has outgrown its plugin stack, a publisher who wants an API and a modern front without a re-platforming project.

The quickest way to judge it is on your own data. Migrate from WordPress shows how to look at your site through kitloom with a read-only database user, so the live site is not touched, and how to compare the two page by page. Or open a sandbox first: Filament demo, Nova demo.