WordPress vs custom website development

What WordPress is genuinely good at

A large share of the web runs on it for good reasons. Your team can edit pages without a developer. There is a plugin for most common needs. Finding someone to work on it later is easy, which matters more than people expect when an agency relationship ends.

For a site that is mostly pages, posts and forms, it is usually the sensible answer, and the arguments against it are often arguments against how a particular site was built rather than against the platform.

Where it starts to cost you

The usual problem is not WordPress. It is the page builder layered on top of it.

Page builders make editing easy by loading a large amount of code on every page, whether or not that page uses any of it. On a site we audited recently, 121 pages each carried uncompressed JavaScript, oversized stylesheets and a flag for too many separate script files. Ten pages timed out entirely during the crawl. The content was fine. The payload was not.

The second cost is plugins. Every one is code someone else maintains, and each is a thing that can break, conflict or stop being updated.

What custom actually means

Custom does not mean writing everything from nothing. It usually means a modern framework that builds the site into fast static files, with content coming from wherever it makes sense to keep it.

The result is a site that loads quickly because there is very little to load, and one where nothing is on the page unless somebody put it there.

What you give up going custom

Being honest about this matters. You give up the enormous plugin ecosystem, so anything unusual gets built rather than installed. You need someone who works in that framework, which is a smaller pool than WordPress developers.

And if nobody sets up a content editor properly, you end up needing a developer for changes your team used to make themselves. That is a real risk and it is worth asking about directly.

How to decide

A rough rule that holds up more often than not.

• Mostly pages, posts and forms, edited often by non-technical staff: WordPress, built lean, without a heavy page builder
• Speed is a business problem, or the site is heavily trafficked: custom
• The site has to connect to systems you already run, or carries applications rather than inquiries: custom, usually
• You need it live in weeks with a small budget: WordPress

The version most people actually want

A custom front end for speed, with a content system your team can use. You get pages that load fast and content that does not require a developer, which is what people usually mean when they say they want a custom site.

Whichever direction you go, the platform decision and the performance decision are the same decision. Make it before the design starts, not after.