WordPress or custom website? Which solution fits your company better?
When companies plan a new website, the decision often quickly falls on WordPress. After all, it is the best-known content management system (CMS), powering roughly 40 to 43% of all websites worldwide depending on the source – and among websites that run on any identifiable CMS at all, its share is actually above 60%.
But not every company needs a CMS. The decisive question therefore is not: „What is better – WordPress or a custom-developed website?“, but rather: „Which solution fits the requirements of my company?“
That's where my development process begins. Before I decide on a technology, I first analyze the company:
- How often are contents changed?
- Who maintains the website?
- Are booking systems or custom features needed?
- Is the provision of information in the foreground or are new contents regularly published?
The answers to these questions determine which technical solution is sensible. For many small and medium-sized enterprises, the website is mainly a digital business card: It informs about services, builds trust and enables easy contact. In such cases, a custom-developed website is often the more efficient solution.
What is a Content-Management-System (CMS)?
A Content-Management-System allows you to manage the content of a website without programming knowledge. Pages, images or blog posts can be created, edited and published through an administration area.
WordPress is the most well-known CMS, but not the only one. Other systems like Drupal or Joomla follow the same approach: content should be able to be maintained independently of the developer. This is particularly advantageous for companies that regularly publish new content or collaborate with multiple people on their website.
Why WordPress is so successful
WordPress has solved a real problem. In the past, even small changes had to be made directly in the source code or files had to be uploaded manually. With WordPress, content could finally be edited and published conveniently in the browser.
Today, the system can be extended almost arbitrarily through themes and plugins. Whether it's a contact form, booking system, online store or member area – for many requirements, ready-made solutions already exist; the WordPress directory alone lists nearly 60,000 free plugins. This flexibility makes WordPress a good choice for millions of websites, particularly for large editorial sites with many authors or complex membership platforms.
The more important question is not the technology
Often, it is discussed which solution offers more features. However, in practice this is rarely decisive. Much more important is how the website is used in daily life.
An online magazine with daily articles clearly benefits from a CMS. A tax advisor, architect or craftsman, whose content changes only rarely, has quite different requirements.
Nevertheless, both projects are often implemented with the same technical foundation – often out of habit and not because it is actually the best solution for the company.
Maintenance and Security: An Often-Underestimated Factor
One point that often gets short shrift in this decision is the ongoing effort after launch. WordPress itself is considered comparatively secure – the core system logged only two reported vulnerabilities in 2025, for instance. The risk sits almost entirely in the plugin and theme ecosystem: according to current security reports, more than 90% of newly discovered WordPress vulnerabilities originate in plugins, and a typical live site runs around 20 to 30 active plugins at once. Every single extension is one more building block that needs to be maintained, updated, and, in the worst case, secured.
In practice, this translates into ongoing costs — whether in time or money. Depending on whether maintenance is handled in-house or outsourced to an agency, costs roughly range from around fifty to several hundred euros a month, and in-house maintenance adds the time spent on updates, backups, and security checks. A custom-developed website doesn't have this problem in the same form: without a large ecosystem of third-party plugins, there's simply less attack surface and fewer components that need regular updates. That doesn't mean a custom website is maintenance-free — but the ongoing effort is typically noticeably lower.
Why I develop many websites individually
In my first WordPress projects, I noticed that a large part of the work did not go into the actual website, but into the adaptation of themes, plugins and their interaction.
This is not a weakness of WordPress. The system was deliberately developed flexibly, so it can cover as many different use cases as possible. This flexibility inevitably brings additional complexity along, though – and it shows up measurably in load speed too: according to current analyses, only around a third of mobile WordPress websites fully pass Google's Core Web Vitals check, often because of too many scripts, uncompressed images, or an overloaded page builder.
Many local companies do not need this complexity at all. A typical business website must primarily answer some basic questions:
- Who are you?
- What services do you offer?
- Why should customers choose your company?
- How can you be contacted?
If visitors can quickly find this information and contact you easily, the website already fulfills its most important purpose.
Therefore, I often develop websites individually. Instead of building on a general system and adapting it to the requirements, the website is created directly from the actual needs of the company. In fairness, the trade-off: development typically takes longer and costs more per project than a standard WordPress setup, because nothing comes off the shelf. That upfront extra effort has to be weighed against the lower maintenance burden over the years — which option pays off more depends on how long the website is meant to stay in service.
What does an individually developed website mean?
An website 'from code' does not automatically mean a complicated or particularly technical solution. It is rather specifically developed for a company and contains only the functions that are actually needed.
If there is no booking function, none will be developed. If no user accounts are needed, they will not exist either. This keeps the technical structure lean and tailored to the respective use case.
There are no limitations by pre-made themes or layouts when it comes to design. Structure, user guidance, and mobile presentation can be specifically developed for the company from the beginning.
The goal is not to provide as many functions as possible, but to develop a website that is fast, clear, and reliable in fulfilling its purpose.