WordPress, Wix or something else? Choosing a platform for a business website

"What will it be built on?" is usually the first technical question a business owner asks, and it is a reasonable one. The answer determines what the site costs to run, how exposed it is to being hacked, how easily you can change it, and how trapped you are if you fall out with whoever built it.

It is also a question the industry answers badly, because most suppliers only sell one thing. Ask a WordPress agency and you will get WordPress. Ask a Squarespace designer and you will get Squarespace. This article is an attempt at the answer we would give a friend, including the cases where the platform we use is the wrong choice.

First, be clear about what you are buying

Every website involves three separable things, and platforms bundle them differently:

Hosting — the machine or network that serves your pages. Content management — how you edit words and images without a developer. The front end — the HTML, CSS and JavaScript a visitor actually receives.

Confusion between these is where most bad decisions come from. "WordPress is slow" is not really true; WordPress on cheap shared hosting with twenty plugins and an unoptimised theme is slow. "Static sites cannot be edited" is not true either. Judge a platform on the combination you will actually end up with, not on the marketing.

The realistic options

Website builders: Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy

What they are good at. Getting something presentable online quickly, without a developer, for a predictable monthly fee. Hosting, certificates, backups and updates are all somebody else's problem. For a brand-new business that needs a presence this week and has no budget, a builder is a perfectly sensible starting point, and anyone who sneers at that is not thinking commercially.

Where they bite. Three things, in ascending order of seriousness.

Performance is largely out of your hands. Builders ship a generous amount of JavaScript to make the drag-and-drop editor's output work in a browser, and there is a limit to how fast a page can be as a result. On a mid-range Android phone this is very noticeable.

Fine control is limited. You will eventually want something the editor cannot express — a particular layout, a specific form behaviour, a structured-data addition — and the answer will be no.

Most importantly, you cannot leave with your website. You can export your text and images, and that is all. The design, the templates and the URL structure stay behind. After five years of investment, that is a genuinely uncomfortable position, and it is why builders can raise prices with confidence.

Real cost. £15–£50 a month, plus your time. Cheap until you need something specific, at which point the ceiling is hard.

WordPress

What it is good at. WordPress runs a very large share of the web, and for good reason. The editing experience is familiar, there is a plugin for nearly everything, and you can find somebody to work on it in any town in Britain. If you need a slightly unusual feature — an events calendar, a membership area, a directory — there is probably a mature plugin, and buying it is cheaper than building it.

Where it bites. WordPress is a database-driven application that executes code on every request, extended by plugins written to wildly varying standards. That combination has consequences.

Security requires ongoing attention. The overwhelming majority of compromised small business websites we are asked to clean up are WordPress sites with an out-of-date plugin, an abandoned theme, or an administrator password that was reused elsewhere. This is not a criticism of WordPress core, which is maintained carefully; it is the plugin surface and the fact that there is a public login form to attack. If you run WordPress, somebody has to own patching. If nobody does, it is a question of when rather than whether.

Performance takes deliberate work. Achieving good Core Web Vitals is entirely possible, but it means good hosting, a caching layer, image optimisation and restraint about plugins. The default configuration on budget hosting will not do it.

Cost drifts. The licence is free; the reality is hosting, premium plugin renewals, a page builder subscription, a security service and somebody's time each month.

When we would recommend it. If you need a specific mature plugin, if you have an in-house person who already knows WordPress, or if you want the largest possible pool of future suppliers. Those are good reasons and we will say so — even though we do not build on it.

Real cost. £10–£60 a month hosting, £100–£400 a year in plugin renewals, plus maintenance. Budget a realistic figure for maintenance and it is a sound platform; skip it and it becomes a liability.

Statically generated sites: what we build

What it is. Pages are generated as plain HTML files when the site is built, then served from a global network close to the visitor. Content is stored as Markdown files in a Git repository with a friendly editor on top — you sign in, edit, save, and a rebuild publishes the change a minute or two later.

What it is good at.

Speed. There is no database query, no template rendering and no plugin chain between request and response. A cached HTML file is about as fast as the web gets, and it stays fast under load.

Security. There is no database to inject into, no public login form to brute-force, no plugin ecosystem, and nothing executing on request. Most published exploits simply have nothing to aim at. The remaining dynamic surface — the contact form — is narrow and can be defended properly.

Running cost. Static files sit comfortably within the free tier of platforms like Vercel or Netlify for a typical business site. Many of our clients pay nothing at all for hosting.

Portability. The code is in your repository. The content is Markdown, readable in any text editor. Nothing is locked to a proprietary builder.

Where it bites. Two honest limitations.

Content changes are not instant. A rebuild takes a minute or two, which surprises people used to hitting Update and refreshing. For a business site this is irrelevant; for a newsroom publishing thirty times a day it would be annoying.

It needs a developer for structural work. Adding a paragraph or a page is easy; adding a new kind of page means a code change. There is no plugin directory to shop in, so genuinely unusual functionality is a build rather than a purchase — which is more expensive up front and considerably cheaper to own.

When we would not recommend it. If you need a large e-commerce catalogue, a booking system with live availability, a members' area, or anything closer to an application than a website. Those are real requirements and a different architecture serves them better. We would tell you so rather than force the shape.

Real cost. £0–£20 a month hosting for a typical business site, plus maintenance if you want somebody accountable for it.

Shopify

Worth a line: if your primary business is selling physical products online, use Shopify. Stock, payments, tax, shipping and fraud are genuinely hard, and a hosted commerce platform has solved them. We would rather integrate with Shopify than rebuild it badly.

Total cost of ownership, honestly

Comparing build prices is the wrong comparison. Over five years, a typical brochure site looks roughly like this:

	Builder	WordPress	Static
Build	£0–£2,000	£2,000–£8,000	£3,000–£9,000
Hosting, 5 years	£900–£3,000	£600–£3,600	£0–£1,200
Licences, 5 years	Included	£500–£2,000	£0
Maintenance, 5 years	Minimal	£1,800–£6,000	£1,200–£3,600
Exit position	Content only	Portable	Fully portable

The figures are ranges because scope varies enormously, and any supplier quoting a precise number without seeing your requirements is guessing. The point is the shape: builders are cheapest to start and worst to leave; WordPress has the widest range depending entirely on discipline; static sites cost more up front and less to keep.

Six questions that will decide it for you

How often will content change, and who by? Weekly editing by a non-technical person favours a hosted CMS or a Git-backed editor. Once a quarter, and almost anything works.

Do you need a specific piece of functionality? Live availability, memberships, a large catalogue — check that first, because it eliminates options quickly.

Who will own maintenance? If the answer is honestly "nobody", choose the platform with the smallest maintenance burden. This single question rules out unmanaged WordPress for most small businesses.

How much does an hour of downtime cost you? For a firm whose enquiries all arrive through the website, robustness is worth paying for.

What is your exit plan? Assume you will change supplier at some point. What do you take with you?

How fast does it need to be? If most of your traffic arrives on phones from search, performance is a commercial requirement rather than a nicety.

What we do and do not build

We build statically generated sites with Next.js and a Git-backed editor, because for the businesses we work with — local firms, trades, professional practices, SMEs — that combination gives the best mix of speed, security, running cost and portability. You can read the detail on our website development page.

We do not build WordPress sites, and we will say so in the first conversation if that is what you need. We do not build marketplaces, booking platforms or large e-commerce catalogues either. Being told what a supplier is not good at is more useful than being told they can do everything.

If you are weighing up options and would like an opinion with no sales attached, tell us what you are trying to achieve or call 01420 446331. We will tell you which of the routes above we would take in your position, even when the answer is not us.