WordPress or a custom website: which one you need

Most small business websites should be on WordPress. That sentence costs us a project, and it is still the honest starting point for "WordPress or custom".

The question people are really asking is whether the cheaper, familiar option will hold up, or whether they will regret it in two years. Both answers exist. Which one applies depends on what the site has to do, not on how serious the business is.

When WordPress is the right answer

If the site's job is to explain what you do, show your work and take enquiries, WordPress does that well. Pages, a blog, a contact form, a gallery. The parts are mature, thousands of people can work on it, and when your developer leaves, the next one can pick it up without reading a stranger's code.

It also means you can edit your own pages. That matters more than it sounds. A site that needs a developer to change a phone number does not get changed, and goes stale.

For a brochure site, a custom build buys you very little that the visitor can see. We would rather tell you that before you pay for it. Our website cost post covers what a site like this should cost.

Where WordPress starts to fight you

The trouble is rarely WordPress itself. It is the pile of plugins added to make it do things it was not built for.

Logic that is specific to your business. Quotes that depend on six inputs, a customer login with different views per account, pricing that changes by region. Each one can be forced into a plugin. Each plugin is another thing that can break when another updates.

Integration with your own systems. If the site has to read from your inventory or write into your CRM, you are now building software, and the plugin route becomes a slow way to do it. Integrations are where projects go wrong whichever platform you choose.

Speed under load. A site with many plugins is usually a slow site. Slow sites lose visitors before the page finishes drawing.

Security work nobody owns. WordPress is targeted heavily because it is common. It is not insecure by nature. But it needs updates applied, regularly, by someone responsible. A site nobody maintains is the usual way it gets hacked. See what maintenance costs.

A plugin is a small loan. One is fine. Twenty is a debt nobody remembers taking on.

What custom actually buys you

A custom site is built for exactly what you need and carries nothing else. It is usually faster, has fewer moving parts to attack, and does the unusual thing without a workaround.

What it costs is more money at the start, and a dependency. Without a content editor built in, every change goes back to whoever built it, unless you pay for an admin panel as well. Ask what happens if that person disappears. If the answer is "you are stuck", walk away, from us too.

A test you can run

Write down what the site must do that a standard site does not. Be strict. "Look professional" does not count.

If the list is empty, or has one item, use WordPress and put the saved money into good writing and photography. If it has three or more items that touch your own data or your own process, you are probably describing software, not a website, and a custom build starts to make sense.

In between, there is a common middle path: WordPress for the pages people read, and a separate small application for the one thing that is not standard. It costs less than rebuilding everything, and it keeps the part you edit easy to edit.

What we would do

If you asked us to build a brochure site, we would suggest WordPress or a similar editable platform and keep the budget small. If you asked for a custom build on the strength of a single unusual feature, we would ask to see that feature first, and quite possibly propose a plugin.

The web development service exists for the cases where the list above is long. It should not be the default answer to a short one. If you are unsure which you have, send us the list and we will say which side it falls on, even when the answer is "you do not need us".