WordPress or custom website: which one fits your business?

WordPress or a custom website is the first choice in almost every website quote. WordPress is free, open-source software for managing a website's content. W3Techs counts it on 40.1% of all websites and on 58.6% of the sites whose system it can detect (8 October 2026). A custom website is built in code for your business, without a content management system underneath.

In practice, quotes for a business website fall into three routes:

• WordPress with a theme: a ready-made design, adjusted to your brand and extended with plugins for forms, SEO, speed and backups. The quickest and usually the cheapest route to a working site.
• WordPress with a custom theme: the design is made for you and coded as a WordPress theme. It looks like your brand, not like a template, but the site still runs WordPress and usually a set of plugins.
• A custom website: built in code for your business, with no WordPress and no plugins. You get the pages you need and nothing else to update. This is how we build websites.

Each route wins on something else. WordPress is cheap to start and lets anyone edit pages; a custom website has fewer parts to keep up to date and is fast without tuning. The marks compare the routes with each other, not with a perfect website.

If you or your team publish something every week, such as blog posts, news, events or new pages, the WordPress editor is worth a lot and the upkeep is its price. If your site mostly needs to be correct, fast and easy to find, and changes a few times a month, you pay every month for an editor you hardly use.

WordPress itself is free. What you pay for is the build, the hosting, the licences of paid themes and plugins, and someone to keep it all up to date. A custom website has no licences; its build and hosting are priced by whoever makes and runs it.

Add hosting and a maintenance plan, and the running costs of a WordPress site soon pass its build price. Here is the total for one business website of about eight pages, over three years.

The build explains only part of the gap. Over three years, a WordPress site pays more for its upkeep than for its build: €3,090 on the freelancer route and €5,430 on the agency route, against €900 for a custom site hosted with us. The difference is work. Every plugin is a licence, an update and one more thing that can break.

WordPress core is well maintained and rarely the problem. The risk is in what is added to it. Patchstack, which tracks WordPress security, counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, 42% more than in 2024: 91% in plugins, 9% in themes and just six in WordPress core. For 46% of them, no fix was available when they were made public.

That does not make WordPress unsafe. It makes upkeep non-negotiable. A WordPress site is as safe as its least maintained plugin, so someone has to apply updates within days, check that nothing broke, and remove plugins that are no longer needed. That is what a maintenance plan pays for.

A custom website has less to attack: no plugins, no admin login at an address every bot knows, and often no database behind its pages. It is not maintenance-free. Its code depends on frameworks and libraries that also get security updates, and someone must apply them. The difference is the number of parts, not zero.

Speed follows the same pattern. In the 2025 Web Almanac, about 45% of WordPress sites passed Google's Core Web Vitals on mobile, among the lowest of the content management systems measured. That says more about heavy themes, page builders and cheap hosting than about WordPress itself: a lean WordPress site can be fast. A custom site starts lean, because a page loads nothing it does not use.

We build custom websites, so read this chapter knowing that. WordPress is the better choice more often than agencies like ours admit, and three questions settle most cases.

For a webshop the same logic holds, with payment fees and platform plans added. Our guide to what a webshop costs compares Shopify, WooCommerce and a custom shop over three years.

If you leave WordPress, the risk is not the new site but losing what the old one earned: its addresses in Google, its content and your email. A careful move takes five steps.

1. 1

   List every address

   Save the sitemap or crawl the site, so every page, post and image Google knows is on the list.

2. 2

   Export the content

   WordPress exports posts, pages and media under Tools, Export. Keep a full backup of the old site as well.

3. 3

   Keep addresses, or redirect them

   Use the same URLs where you can. Where an address changes, a permanent 301 redirect points it to the new page.

4. 4

   Leave email alone

   Email runs on its own DNS records. Change only the records for the website, then test that mail still arrives.

5. 5

   Check after launch

   Test every form, submit the new sitemap in Google Search Console and watch its reports for missing pages in the weeks after.

We rebuild WordPress sites as custom websites without plugins, at a fixed price from €1,200 for a business website, and host them from €25 a month with updates, monitoring and small changes included; see managed hosting. You own the code once it is paid. Web & app development shows how we build, and the contact form for Web & app development is the quickest way to a fixed price.