There is no best answer to this, which is why the debate never ends. There is a right answer for a specific business, and it comes down to two boring questions: who updates the site, and do you take money through it. Almost everything else follows from those.
Start with who edits it
If your content changes weekly — new pages, posts, offers, prices — and you do not want to raise a ticket every time, you need a content management system. That convenience is worth real money.
If the site changes twice a year, a CMS is overhead you are paying for permanently in performance, maintenance and security surface, in exchange for a convenience you use almost never. Be honest about which of these you are, based on the last twelve months rather than your intentions for the next twelve.
A coded build
Built from scratch, no page builder. This is the fastest of the three and the most flexible, because nothing is carrying weight you did not ask for.
It is the right choice when performance genuinely matters, when you need custom functionality no plugin covers, or when the design does something unusual enough that a template would fight you. The trade-off is real and worth stating plainly: content changes need a developer.
WordPress
The right choice when content changes often, several people publish, and you want that control in-house rather than in somebody’s support queue.
The honest trade-offs: page builders add page weight, and you have to actively manage it rather than assume it. Every plugin is both a maintenance obligation and a security surface. Neither is a reason to avoid WordPress — they are reasons to budget for upkeep instead of treating the site as finished at launch.
The platform decision is really a decision about who is responsible for the site in eighteen months.
Shopify or WooCommerce
If you sell physical products, this is the branch you are on, and the main question is which.
Shopify handles payments, tax, inventory and checkout as a managed problem. Rebuilding that yourself is rarely justified — checkout in particular is a solved problem with a lot of edge cases and real financial consequences for getting it wrong. WooCommerce makes more sense when you are already on WordPress, content is central to how you sell, and you want the store and the content tightly integrated.
The questions that actually decide it
Answer these four honestly and the platform usually picks itself:
- Who updates the site, and how often did that genuinely happen last year?
- Do you take payments directly through the site?
- Is there functionality no existing plugin or app covers?
- What is your realistic appetite for ongoing maintenance — and who is doing it?
The mistake to avoid
Choosing the platform before establishing the requirements, and then reverse-engineering reasons. It happens constantly, usually because somebody had a bad experience once or read something.
The most expensive version is choosing a fully custom build for prestige, and then discovering the team cannot update their own pricing page without booking developer time. A site that is technically excellent and practically frozen is not a good outcome, however fast it loads.
The right build is the one your team can still operate a year after handover, without needing the people who built it. Every other consideration is secondary to that, including the ones that are more fun to argue about.
