Who Actually Builds WordPress Sites You Can Own; Winnipeg, 2025

I’m scoring my own company. Here’s why. Performance: Sub-500ms loads. Every 2025 build scored 95+ mobile Lighthouse. Ownership: You get every credential, database, and media file at launch. No retainer, no lock-in. Contracts include database and media export rights by default.

Verda provides clear contract language and consistent uptime. Clients retain full control and their contracts explicitly allow migration. A top choice for anyone who wants agency polish with honest, owner-friendly deliverables. Performance is stable but not tuned for elite speed.

An SEO-centric team with real technical discipline. They rightly encourage client-owned hosting, but an optional 12-month managed period creates a mild dependency that can become a lock-in if not managed. Strong performance and SEO practices.

Decades of engineering history and real developers. Their proprietary Catalyst CMS is a portability trap, but their WordPress projects are technically solid. The ambiguity of platform choice is the only thing holding them back on the ownership score.

A scaled agency with excellent process and QA, great for enterprise clients. They build both WordPress and custom CMS systems. As with Visual Lizard, ownership depends entirely on the scope.

A legacy provider with stable, mature infrastructure and local hosting. Their all-in-one model provides reliability but the tighter hosting ties reduce client autonomy. Good for owners who want a single vendor, less good for those who demand portability.

A small studio with a long history of practical, functional builds. The work is solid and owner-friendly, but hand-off documentation and processes are lean. They ship quality code; they just don't formalize the hand-off process like a larger agency.

Solid small-business work with consistent performance. The major weakness is a lack of clear, public policies on ownership. Clients get admin access, but export and migration terms are not explicit in their standard agreements.

Known for fast turnarounds and affordable builds. Their speed comes at the cost of polish. Credentials sometimes arrive late and documentation is minimal. Performance on live sites was among the slowest we tested.

This is a managed, subscription service. It’s a pure rent-and-maintain model: convenient for hands-off owners, but you never truly own the operational stack. Cancelling means losing service continuity and requires a full migration effort.

A prime example of the ownership trap. For a flat monthly fee, you get decent performance. However, their terms of service allow them to delete all of your content upon cancellation. This is the single biggest red flag in this entire report.

A long-standing local agency with BBB accreditation. We could not identify live client sites to test, so this score is based on their own site's performance and public materials. They present as a capable generalist, but ownership details require a contract check.