When WordPress Makes Sense (And When It Doesn't)

We get asked about WordPress a lot. Usually the question is some version of "should we use WordPress?" and the honest answer is: it depends on what you're building and who's going to maintain it.

We've built WordPress sites, inherited WordPress sites, and helped clients move off WordPress when they'd outgrown it. That experience has given us a pretty clear sense of where it works well and where it starts to hold you back.

Where WordPress earns its reputation

WordPress powers over 40% of the web for a reason. For content-heavy sites, blogs, and small business websites, it's genuinely hard to beat. Your team can update content without calling a developer. There's a plugin for almost anything. And finding someone to help with WordPress is easy because so many developers know it.

The admin interface is familiar to most people who've worked on a website before. Adding a page, writing a blog post, uploading images, it all works the way you'd expect. For organisations where multiple people need to contribute content, that low barrier to entry matters a lot.

The plugin ecosystem is another real strength. Need a contact form? There's a plugin. Need an events calendar, an SEO toolkit, or a membership system? Plugins for all of them. You can get a lot of functionality without writing custom code, which keeps initial costs down.

If you need a site up quickly, you're working with a tight budget, and your main job is publishing content, WordPress is a strong choice. We've seen small organisations get a lot of value out of a well-built WordPress site that they can manage themselves.

Where it starts to show cracks

The trouble usually starts when a WordPress site grows beyond what it was designed to do. A few plugins turn into twenty. Page speed drops. Updates start breaking things. The site that was easy to manage becomes a maintenance headache.

We've taken over sites where nobody could explain what half the plugins did, but nobody wanted to remove them in case something broke. That kind of technical debt builds up quietly and becomes expensive to untangle.

Security is the other big one. WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world, which also makes it the biggest target. Keeping WordPress, its plugins, and its themes all patched and up to date is real, ongoing work. We've seen sites get compromised because a single plugin fell behind on updates. It's not that WordPress is inherently insecure, but it requires vigilance that many teams don't budget for.

Performance can also be a challenge. WordPress generates pages dynamically by default, which means every visitor triggers a database query. For a small site with modest traffic that's fine, but as your site grows, you need caching layers, CDN configuration, and potentially managed hosting to keep things fast. All of that adds complexity and cost.

And if you want anything genuinely custom, you're working in PHP. That's fine if you have developers who know PHP, but it limits your options compared to modern frameworks where you can build exactly the experience you want.

When we'd recommend something else

For most of the projects we take on, we'll suggest a different approach. If the site needs to be fast, flexible, and built around a specific user experience, we tend to reach for a modern framework like Next.js paired with a headless CMS like Prismic. We've written more about how that works in our post on headless CMS.

This gives you the same easy content editing, better performance, tighter security (there's no database or admin panel to attack), and much more flexibility in how the front end works. The pages are pre-built and served from a CDN, so they load fast everywhere without needing caching plugins or managed hosting.

We've used this approach for projects like the Elder Rights Advocacy site, where accessibility and page speed were critical, and Yoga Vastu, where we needed a custom video platform that went well beyond what WordPress could handle. In both cases, the client gets a clean editing experience in Prismic while we have full control over the front end.

The trade-off is that the initial build takes more development time. You're not installing a theme and customising it. You're building a front end from scratch. That costs more upfront, but you end up with something that's faster, more secure, and easier to maintain long term.

How to think about the choice

It comes down to a few practical questions:

• How much custom functionality do you need? If the answer is "a blog and some pages," WordPress is fine. If you need custom workflows, integrations, or a tailored user experience, you'll outgrow it. Take a look at our services to see the kind of work we do.
• Who's maintaining the site day to day? If it's a non-technical team making content updates, both WordPress and a headless CMS work well. But if nobody is keeping WordPress updated and patched, that's a risk.
• How important is performance? If your audience is on slow connections, or if page speed directly affects conversions, a static site served from a CDN will outperform WordPress out of the box.
• What's your budget for ongoing maintenance? WordPress is cheaper to build but needs regular attention. A headless CMS site costs more upfront but is generally cheaper to maintain.

There's no universally right answer. We've recommended WordPress for projects where it genuinely was the best fit, and we've helped clients migrate away from it when they needed something more. The important thing is making the choice based on your actual needs rather than defaulting to what's most familiar.

If you're weighing up your options, we're happy to talk through the specifics.