WordPress or a custom website: which fits your business?

WordPress or custom? The short answer

WordPress fits when you want to change content often yourself and your site does what most sites do: show services, publish news, bring in enquiries. Custom fits when your site has to do something specific, when the content rarely changes or when you want as few parts as possible that need maintenance. Neither is "better". We build both. The choice depends on who manages the site and what it has to do.

Below we compare the two on six points. A short decision guide follows.

First: what exactly do we mean?

WordPress is an existing system for managing websites. The software itself is free and open source. A site gets its look from a theme and its extra features from plugins: a form, a calendar, a webshop. You log in to an admin area and change text and photos yourself.

Custom means the site is programmed specifically for your business. It contains only what you need. If you want to edit content yourself on a custom site, an admin area (a CMS) is built alongside it. Without a CMS, the agency makes the changes for you.

1. Who edits the content?

This question carries the most weight. A chip shop with a menu that changes every season, or a barber who adjusts prices and offers every month, wants to do that without phoning anyone. With WordPress that ability is there by default. With custom it has to be built in.

The two can go together well. For Frituur 8 we built a custom site with a CMS in which the owner updates the menu and the opening hours directly. If your content changes only a few times a year, an admin area is often unnecessary and you are better off letting your agency make the changes.

2. Plugins and maintenance

The strength of WordPress is also the point to watch. There is a plugin for almost everything, so a new feature is quickly added. But WordPress itself, the theme and every plugin receive updates, and those have to be applied and checked. Leave that undone and you run a security risk. That is no reason to avoid WordPress. It is a reason to agree on maintenance from day one.

Custom has fewer moving parts, but it is not maintenance-free. The server and the software libraries in use have to stay current there too. The difference: you need someone who knows the code.

3. Speed

A custom site loads only what it needs, which makes it easy to keep fast. The Nikan Taxi site is built that way: static, without WordPress and without a plugin layer, with customers in mind who book a ride on their phone.

A WordPress site can be fast too. It depends on the theme, the number of plugins, the images and the hosting. A light theme with a handful of plugins behaves very differently from a heavy theme with dozens of plugins. So do not ask "is WordPress slow?" but "how will this site be built and hosted?".

4. Flexibility

Within what themes and plugins provide, WordPress is very flexible: you add a page or a blog post yourself. If you want something no plugin quite does, you look for a workaround or custom code is written on top after all.

Custom turns that around. Everything is possible, but everything has to be built. A booking form that asks for a pick-up address, date and time, or a price calculation that depends on the situation, is ordinary work on a custom site. Adding an extra page, on the other hand, takes a developer unless there is a CMS.

5. How the costs run

We quote no market prices here, because we do not have any. The shape of the costs does differ:

• At build time. WordPress is often quicker to set up when an existing theme and existing plugins are enough. With custom every feature is built, so the price follows directly from what you ask for.
• Every year. With both you pay for hosting, maintenance and your domain name. With WordPress, licences for paid themes or plugins may come on top.
• When things change. With an admin area you make small changes yourself. Without one, you pay for them in your agency's time.

Our own website packages have a fixed price, from €950 excluding VAT, with the first year of hosting included. From year two, Hosting & Care costs €150 per year. A CMS for managing content yourself is not a standard part of those packages and is quoted on request. The details are on the pricing page.

6. Lock-in

Every choice makes you dependent on something.

• WordPress: many agencies and freelancers know it, so changing partner is generally feasible. You do depend on the makers of your theme and plugins. If a plugin is discontinued, a replacement has to be found.
• Custom: you do not depend on plugins, but you do depend on whoever understands the code. That risk stays small if the site is built with common technology and you hold the code, the content and the logins.

With every quote, for WordPress or custom, ask these three questions: who owns the site and the content, in whose name is the domain registered, and what do I take with me if I leave?

Decision guide: which fits your business?

WordPress is the obvious choice if:

• you or an employee change content every week or every month;
• you want to publish a blog or news;
• your site needs features that exist as a plugin;
• you want to be able to change agency easily later.

Custom is the obvious choice if:

• your content rarely changes, or you would rather outsource the changes;
• speed on a phone matters a great deal, as for a locksmith who wants to receive emergency calls;
• you need a form, calculation or integration that does not fit a standard structure;
• you want as few parts as possible that need updates.

Still unsure? Write down what you would have liked to change on your site over the past few months. If the list is long, that points to an admin area. If it is short, you do not need to pay for one.

What the choice does not solve

Technology alone does not decide whether customers find you. Clear pages per service, correct details and a well-kept Google Business Profile do that. If you want to sell online, more is involved. We explain that in How much does a webshop cost?. And if you already have a site that no longer does the job, starting from scratch is not always necessary: see our page on website redesign.

The next step

Note three things: who will manage the site, how often the content changes and which feature you absolutely need. With those three answers we can tell you which route fits and why. Read what website development involves or get in touch.