Why SailWP

The WordPress most people thought they were getting.

WordPress is brilliant. It also ships empty. We packaged the eight things every site needs, added a Co-pilot that does the work for you, and kept it free where we could.

A fresh WordPress install is not a website.

It's the foundation of one. Before you can do business, you need around eight plugins. Most of them have a free tier you outgrow within a week.

SEO plugin (Yoast, RankMath) ~€99/yr
Analytics plugin ~€79/yr
Security & 2FA ~€99/yr
Multilingual (WPML, Polylang) ~€99/yr
Page builder (Elementor Pro) ~€59/yr
Starter templates ~€49/yr
Backups (UpdraftPlus Pro) ~€79/yr
Cookie consent ~€100/yr

Around €500 a year, just to get to the starting line.

And that's only the money. The hidden cost is the weeks of evenings picking plugins, configuring them, resolving conflicts, and updating them every Tuesday for the rest of the site's life. Most small business owners don't have that time, so they hire a developer. Which is a €2,000 invoice for what should be a Saturday afternoon.

So we packaged it differently.

Three principles. Each one removes a category of work that shouldn't have existed.

Principle 01

Ship the eight things, not eight licences.

Every WordPress site needs the same eight plugins. So we built them into one free theme: SEO, analytics, 2FA, cookies, backups, multilingual, page builder, starter templates. One download, no licence keys, no annual renewals.

Principle 02

Talk to your site, don't click through it.

The Co-pilot is a chat panel in your WordPress admin. Type what you want changed ("add a pricing section", "translate to Spanish", "make the hero punchier"), and it does the work. The block editor stays available; you just don't have to use it.

Principle 03

Free where it can be. Paid where it needs to be.

The theme is free, always. It pays for itself by being good enough to recommend. The Co-pilot is €19 a month, which pays for the AI that runs behind it and the people who keep it sharp. No hidden tiers, no surprise upsells.

Smaller, faster, and still does more.

94 KB on the frontend. Less than this paragraph, less than a single Elementor widget. And it includes everything those plugins used to do.

SailWP
94 KB
Astra
~160 KB
Kadence
~220 KB
Divi
~700 KB
Elementor
~800 KB
100 Performance
100 Accessibility
100 Best Practices
100 SEO

This is the score of an actual SailWP page. Test any of ours yourself.

Run PageSpeed Insights

Is SailWP for you?

An honest answer matters more than a free download. Here's the rough split.

You'll feel at home here if

  • You run a small business, freelance, coach, teach, or sell a service
  • You want a website that helps you, not a hobby that takes up your evenings
  • You'd rather pay one predictable fee than wrangle five renewal emails
  • You sometimes need to edit your site from your phone (yes, that should be possible)
  • You've tried Squarespace and want more control, or tried WordPress and want less work
  • The block editor stresses you out more than it helps

SailWP probably isn't the right fit if

  • You run a large WooCommerce store with custom flows and integrations
  • You depend on 20+ specialised plugins (LMS, forum, directory)
  • You already have a developer who handles the stack and you're happy with that
  • You enjoy configuring plugin settings (some people do)
  • You need pixel-perfect control over every margin and prefer hand-coding

Other people who think WordPress could be better

We're not the only ones noticing. A few reads worth your time.

Do you need a CMS? Joost de Valk WordPress doesn't need a fork. It needs a spine. joostboer.com What if WordPress actually worked out of the box? WP-Admin.Club The SailWP community r/sailwp

The theme is free. The decision takes two minutes.

Download, upload, run the wizard. If it doesn't fit, switch back. WordPress carries on as before.

Download SailWP See how it works