WordPress powers roughly 4 in 10 websites, so suggesting anything else sounds like consultant-speak for 'pay me more.' Sometimes it is. But having inherited and rescued plenty of WordPress sites, we think the real comparison is less about the price tag and more about the total cost of ownership. Here it is, both directions.

The case for WordPress

  • Cheapest path to launch — themes and page builders make a functional site fast
  • Any freelancer can work on it — the talent pool is enormous
  • Mature plugin ecosystem — comments, forms, basic e-commerce all exist off-the-shelf
  • Best for: content-heavy sites edited daily by non-technical teams, on a tight budget

The costs that show up later

  • Security — WordPress and its plugins are the most attacked software on the web; skip an update, inherit a hacked site
  • Speed — theme + page builder + 20 plugins routinely produces multi-second load times Google punishes
  • Maintenance treadmill — updates, plugin conflicts, and backups are a monthly chore or a monthly invoice
  • Plugin lock-in — that $49/year plugin renews forever, times fifteen plugins

What a modern custom site changes

A custom-coded static site (the way we build: React + Tailwind, served from a global CDN) has no plugins to update, no database to hack, loads in milliseconds, and hosts for $0–5/month. Content editing still works — a lightweight CMS covers text, photos, and blog posts. The trade-off is honest: a higher one-time build cost, and design changes go through a developer instead of a page builder.

WordPress is cheap to launch and expensive to own. Custom is the reverse. Pick based on which decade of costs you care about.

Our rule of thumb

  • Blog-first site, daily publishing, in-house editors → WordPress is defensible
  • Business site whose job is to rank and convert → custom static wins on speed, security, and running cost
  • Web application with logins and payments → custom, no contest; WordPress plugins buckle here
  • Already on WordPress and it works → stay until a redesign is due anyway, then compare honestly

We quote custom sites fixed-price ($600–$1,500 for most business websites, live in about a week). If you're deciding between a WordPress refresh and a rebuild, send us your current site — we'll give you a straight recommendation, including 'keep WordPress' when that's the truth.