WordPress vs. custom-coded: which website do you actually need?

Every website conversation eventually runs into this question, usually phrased as "should we just get something custom built?" The honest answer is: probably not, and here's how to check.

Start with what the website has to do

A WordPress site — our Basic plan — covers the large majority of small business needs well: a professional design, clear pages for what you offer, a contact or enquiry flow, and someone else handling hosting, SSL, and core updates. If your site's job is to explain your business and get people to reach out, this is the right layer, and it's the cheapest to build and the cheapest to keep running.

Add WooCommerce — our Business plan — the moment "get people to reach out" becomes "let people buy directly." Product pages, categories, a secure checkout, and order management on top of the same WordPress foundation. Still off-the-shelf, still maintainable by a generalist, still fast to launch.

Custom-coded software — Premium — is for the businesses whose requirements don't fit a template anymore: a booking system with rules specific to your operation, an internal tool your team uses daily, an integration between two systems that don't normally talk to each other. If you can describe your website mostly in terms of pages, you don't need this tier. If you're describing workflows — approvals, calculations, data moving between systems — you probably do.

The real cost difference isn't the build

It's what happens after. A WordPress site is maintained by thousands of plugins and a huge community, so hosting, updates, and security patches are routine and cheap. Custom software is maintained by whoever wrote it (or whoever you hire next), so every year it exists is a year of bespoke maintenance cost. That's not a reason to avoid custom builds — some businesses genuinely need the flexibility — but it's the cost that gets forgotten when people ask for "something custom" out of instinct rather than necessity.

A quick gut check

• Can you list your website's job in five bullet points, all of them "show this," "collect that," or "sell this"? → WordPress, likely Basic or Business.
• Does your business run on a process a generic plugin can't replicate — even after you've genuinely looked? → Premium is worth the conversation.

If you're not sure which side you're on, that's a normal place to start — get in touch and we'll tell you honestly, even if the answer is the cheaper plan.