One of them you rent, the other you own.
Both can work. They fail differently, they cost differently over five years, and the choice is mostly about who has to maintain the thing.
What WordPress is actually good at
Somebody else has already solved a thousand problems for you, and there is a plugin for nearly anything. If you need a membership area, a forum or a complicated shop next month, that head start is real.
It is also easy to hand to another developer, because a great many people know it. That matters more than studios like ours usually admit.
What it costs after the build
Plugins update, themes update, and the ones that stop being maintained become the way somebody gets in. That maintenance is a real recurring job whether you pay for it or do it yourself at midnight.
Add hosting that can run it, a licence or two, and the monthly figure you were quoted turns out not to have been the figure.
What a built site gives up and what it keeps
It gives up the plugin shelf. If you want a feature nobody wrote, somebody has to write it, and that is time.
What it keeps is speed and quiet. Nothing to update weekly, nothing to license, and a page that loads before the customer gives up because there is almost nothing to load.
The question that decides it
Ask who is going to look after this in two years. If the answer is a person who enjoys it, WordPress is fine and flexible. If the answer is nobody, a site with nothing to maintain is the safer thing to own.
The shops on this site are the second case. They change their own words and pictures from a phone and there is nothing else to keep alive.
Questions worth asking
Do you refuse to work on WordPress?
No. Plenty of the work here is repairing sites somebody else built, and a fair number of those are WordPress. What we will not do is bill you monthly for a platform that makes the necessary fixes impossible.
Is a built site harder to move away from?
It should not be, and ours are not: the code and every account are in your name, and a developer can read plain HTML and CSS. Being hard to leave is a business model, not a technical fact.
What about Wix or Shopify?
Shopify earns its fee if you genuinely sell online at volume, because it solves payment, stock and tax. Wix is the same trade as WordPress with less control and a bill that never stops.
Which is better for search?
Neither, inherently. What decides it is speed, structure and whether the pages answer what somebody typed. A slow WordPress site loses to a fast one, and a slow built site loses to both.
Can I edit a built site myself?
Yes, and that is a requirement rather than an extra. If changing a price means ringing us, the price stops being changed and the site starts lying about your stock.
Tell us what the site has to do in two years and we will say honestly which of the two you should be buying. Get a free audit.
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