Bespoke website vs WordPress: which is right for your business?

WordPress powers something like four in ten websites, so if you’re getting quotes, at least one of them is probably a WordPress quote. We build bespoke sites instead, so you’d expect us to tell you WordPress is rubbish. It isn’t. It’s the right tool for a specific kind of business, and the wrong one for a lot of businesses that end up on it anyway.

What each one is

WordPress is a content management system. It’s software that runs on a server, stores your pages in a database, and assembles them for each visitor. You pick a theme for the look, add plugins for features, and edit everything yourself through an admin screen. That admin screen is the whole appeal: you can change a price or publish a post at 11pm without asking anyone.

A bespoke site, the way we build one, is written by hand for one business and compiled into plain, fast files. There’s no software running on the server and no database, just pages, delivered instantly. The design isn’t chosen from a theme gallery. It’s made for you.

Where WordPress wins

Credit where it’s due, because this part decides it for some businesses.

If you publish constantly, several posts a week, a news section, a big recipe library, WordPress’s editing tools earn their keep. If you need a specific feature today and there’s a plugin for it, you can have it this afternoon. And because half the world uses it, you’ll never struggle to find someone who can work on it. No lock-in to any one developer is a real advantage, and we care about that even when the platform isn’t ours.

The upfront cost is usually lower too, because the theme and plugins are doing work someone would otherwise be paid to do.

Where WordPress costs you

The price of all that convenience arrives on a schedule.

Maintenance never stops. WordPress, the theme, and every plugin need regular updates, and skipping them isn’t an option, because out-of-date WordPress sites are the single most hacked thing on the internet. Someone has to apply those updates and check nothing broke. That’s the £30 to £100 a month maintenance plan in your quote, forever.

Plugins stack up. Each one is someone else’s code on someone else’s schedule. Twenty plugins is twenty things that have to keep agreeing with each other after every update. When they stop agreeing, your site is down and the fix is a process of elimination.

It’s heavy by default. A theme built to suit everyone loads code for features you don’t use, and assembling each page from a database takes time your visitor spends waiting. You can tune a WordPress site to be quick, but it’s an ongoing fight, and slow sites lose customers quietly.

It looks like a theme. Because it is one. If the site is part of how you win work, looking like everyone else has a cost of its own.

Where bespoke wins, and what it costs

A hand-built static site flips the trade. There’s nothing to update or patch, because there’s no software running to be attacked or to break. Hosting is cheap or free. The pages load close to instantly because they were built before the visitor arrived, not while they waited. And no other business has the same design, because it wasn’t made for anyone else. The longer thinking behind that is in why we build by hand.

The costs: it’s more upfront, typically £2,000 to £7,000 against £500 to £2,000 for a template build (full breakdown here). And out of the box you don’t get an admin screen. If you need to edit content yourself, that’s solvable, a lightweight CMS can be wired in, but it’s something to raise at the quoting stage, not after.

How to choose

Ask yourself one question first: how often will you actually edit this site?

If the honest answer is “most days”, or you’re building a publication more than a business site, WordPress is a reasonable home, and you should budget properly for hosting and maintenance rather than pretending they won’t apply.

If it’s “a few times a year”, which is most small businesses, you’d be taking on WordPress’s permanent maintenance bill to get an editing screen you’ll barely open. A bespoke site costs more once and then mostly leaves you alone.

If you’re not sure which you are, describe your situation and we’ll tell you straight, including when the answer is “just use WordPress”.