Why we no longer
build
WordPress.
An honest reckoning. No hatred for WordPress as a tool — but a critical assessment of why it's the wrong choice for 80% of small and medium businesses. And what works instead.
// The starting point
// The hidden costs
// The alternatives
// When WordPress does make sense
What most tradespeople's sites look like.
Before businesses come to us, 70% have a WordPress site. Built between 2012 and 2019, often by a local "IT person" or a tiny agency. The Lighthouse score is usually between 25 and 45. Load time 4–8 seconds. The site has 15 to 40 plugins installed, half of which need security updates. There's no Schema.org. The contact form works, but enquiries barely come in anyway — because the site is stuck at position 30+ in the rankings.
This isn't a bad one-off, it's the norm.
What WordPress promises.
The pitch for WordPress has been the same for 15 years: "cheap, flexible, self-maintained". Each of these promises is worth a closer look:
Cheap
The entry price is low (€50–200/year hosting, a few hours of setup). The total cost over 3 years looks different: plugin licences (often €100–500/year in total), maintenance, updates, regular security audits, performance optimisation — realistically €1,500–3,000/year on top if you're serious. Skimp on that and the bill arrives at the latest with the first hack or speed problem.
Flexible
Yes — but in a problematic way. Every plugin is a dependency risk. With 20 plugins you have 20 potential security holes. Every theme update can break the layout. "Flexible" in practice often means "fragile".
Self-maintained
In theory. In practice: very few of the clients who bought that promise really maintain their site themselves. The site ages, plugins go un-updated, the design eventually looks dated.
The true costs.
Let's work it out for a 10-person trades business:
WordPress site over 3 years
- Setup/theme: €2,000
- Premium plugins (Yoast, WPML, Elementor Pro, Gravity Forms, Wordfence): €600/year = €1,800 over 3 years
- Hosting (usable performance): €240/year = €720
- Maintenance (realistically at least 4 hrs/quarter at €80): €1,280/year = €3,840
- One larger intervention a year (plugin conflict, relaunch, security): €800/year = €2,400
- Total over 3 years: €10,760
Static custom site over 3 years
- Development: €4,000
- Cloudflare Pages hosting: €0
- Maintenance retainer (1 hr/month): €80/month = €960/year = €2,880
- No plugin costs, no security panic, no speed optimisation needed
- Total over 3 years: €6,880
After 3 years the custom site is €3,880 cheaper — and on top of that performs markedly better in SEO, UX and security.
What we build instead.
For 80% of projects: static sites
Hand-coded HTML/CSS/JS or Astro-based. Deployed to Cloudflare Pages or Vercel. Load time under 1 second, Lighthouse 90+, zero ongoing security worries. The client edits text through a headless CMS (Sanity, Payload) or sends us changes monthly on the retainer.
For content-heavy sites: headless CMS + frontend
If a client wants to regularly maintain blog articles, case studies, newsroom entries themselves, we couple a headless CMS (Sanity or Payload) to the frontend. Editing comfort like WordPress, performance like static.
For e-commerce: Shopify or Shopware
For real shops we advise against WooCommerce. Shopify for small to medium shops, Shopware 6 for German requirements or heavy customisation.
When WordPress does make sense.
We're not dogmatic. There are cases where WordPress is the right tool:
- Very content-heavy publishers with several editors: the WordPress backend is still top-class for editorial teams.
- When the client is already deep in WordPress and secondary users know the system.
- Membership portals with an LMS (learning management) or a complex forum — WordPress is proven here and there are good plugins.
- Projects with strict budget limits under €2,500 — then a well-built WordPress is sometimes the most pragmatic solution.
Outside these cases? Most small businesses benefit from a leaner, faster, more secure solution.
The time is right.
In 2012 WordPress was a good choice for almost every project — the alternatives were rare, the ecosystem was best-in-class. In 2026 the world is different. Cloudflare Pages, Vercel, Astro, headless CMS, static sites with edge delivery — all of it is mature, cheap and capable. For most trades, medical and Mittelstand sites, WordPress is like a delivery van for the trip to the letterbox: overkill for the task, too slow for serious goals, too expensive to run.
We don't build WordPress any more — because we can deliver better results for our clients when we don't.