WordPress powers roughly 43% of all websites on the internet. That statistic gets cited constantly as evidence that it’s the right choice for everyone.

But 43% of the web includes hobby blogs, abandoned company sites, news publications with full-time development teams, and everything in between. The question isn’t what percentage of websites use WordPress — it’s whether WordPress serves your specific goals better than the alternative.

Here’s an honest comparison.

What WordPress actually is

WordPress started as blogging software in 2003. Over 20+ years it evolved into a general-purpose CMS (Content Management System) that can technically do almost anything with the right plugin.

“Technically can do almost anything” is both its greatest strength and its core liability.

The flexibility comes from a massive plugin ecosystem — over 59,000 plugins in the official directory. Want contact forms? There’s a plugin. SEO tools? Six different plugins competing for that job. Page builder? Pick from a dozen.

Every plugin you add is code someone else wrote, that you’re trusting to be secure, maintained, and compatible with every other plugin you’ve installed. Most plugins are fine. Some aren’t. And when they conflict, debugging the problem usually requires a developer anyway.

Where WordPress genuinely wins

You need to publish a lot of content. WordPress was built for publishing. If your business model involves a blog, a news section, a knowledge base, or any other content-heavy operation where you’re adding new articles regularly — WordPress has the best editorial workflow of any CMS. The block editor is mature, flexible, and most people can learn it without training.

You have a development team. Large organizations choose WordPress because there are thousands of WordPress developers available, the ecosystem is deep, and it integrates with nearly everything. If you’re a business with an internal team or budget for a dedicated developer, WordPress’s flexibility pays off.

You need specific plugins that don’t exist elsewhere. WooCommerce (WordPress’s e-commerce layer) is genuinely excellent for certain use cases. If you need something highly specific — a particular booking system, a membership model, an integration with an obscure industry tool — there may be a WordPress plugin that does exactly that.

Where WordPress quietly works against small service businesses

Maintenance is constant and non-trivial.

WordPress core, your theme, and every plugin need regular updates. Skip them and you accumulate security vulnerabilities — WordPress sites are disproportionately targeted by automated attacks because they’re so common and so many are running outdated versions.

If you’re running your own site, this means you’re logging in every few weeks to apply updates and hoping nothing breaks. If you’re paying someone to maintain it, that’s $50–$200/month for something a simpler site wouldn’t need at all.

Page speed requires active effort.

A fresh WordPress install with a premium theme and 12 plugins is not a fast website. Reaching the kind of performance scores that meaningfully help SEO — 90+ on Google’s PageSpeed Insights — requires deliberate optimization: caching layers, image optimization, script deferral, and sometimes switching themes entirely.

Custom-built static sites (like those built on Astro, which is what we use) serve pre-built HTML files directly — no database queries, no plugin chain, no render delay. They score in the high 90s to 100 on PageSpeed without any optimization tricks.

You’re paying for capabilities you’ll never use.

A 6-page website for a Connecticut electrician doesn’t need a database. It doesn’t need a PHP runtime. It doesn’t need the administrative overhead of a CMS. WordPress gives it all of these things anyway — and charges you (in hosting cost, maintenance time, and performance tax) for the privilege.

What a custom-built site actually means in 2025

“Custom” doesn’t mean hand-coded from scratch in a text editor over six months. Modern frameworks like Astro generate static sites that are:

  • Faster than any WordPress site you’ve seen (100 PageSpeed scores are realistic, not exceptional)
  • Secure by default (no database to attack, no login page to brute-force)
  • Deployable for free or near-free on Cloudflare Pages or Netlify
  • Maintainable — monthly dependency updates take 15 minutes

The trade-off: there’s no admin dashboard where you can log in and change your own text. If that’s important to you, it’s a real consideration. Most of my clients find that they request changes maybe twice a year and are happy to send a quick email when they need something updated.

The decision framework

Choose WordPress if:

  • You’re publishing articles, blog posts, or news content regularly (weekly or more)
  • You need a specific plugin that solves a specific problem and it doesn’t exist elsewhere
  • You already have internal WordPress expertise and want to maintain consistency

Choose a custom-built site if:

  • You’re a local service business with stable content (contractor, medical practice, law firm, fitness studio, etc.)
  • Page speed and SEO performance matter to your business
  • You want hosting that costs near-zero and requires minimal maintenance
  • You don’t want to think about plugin conflicts, security patches, and database backups

For the majority of small Connecticut service businesses I talk to — electricians, HVAC contractors, cleaning services, fitness studios, medical practices — a custom-built static site outperforms WordPress on every metric that actually matters: speed, SEO, reliability, and total cost of ownership over three years.

That said, the best website is the one that gets built and maintained. If WordPress is what gets you launched and kept up, it beats a custom site that sits half-finished on someone’s to-do list.

Have a specific project in mind? Tell me about it and I’ll give you a straight answer on what actually makes sense.

Joe Barone is the founder of Steadfast Creative Solutions in Milford, CT. He builds custom websites for small businesses across Connecticut — and occasionally rebuilds WordPress sites that grew into liabilities.