This page is for small UK business owners trying to decide whether to spend £200-£400 on a WordPress build or several hundred more on something custom. The short answer: for most service businesses, custom wins on every measurable dimension — cost over five years, speed, security, SEO, simplicity. The long answer is below.
Quick verdict
If you're an editorial publisher posting daily, run a 500-product ecommerce store, or genuinely need contributor accounts and an editor workflow — WordPress is fine. For everyone else, custom is better.
Side-by-side
| Factor | WordPress | Custom (£650 build) |
|---|---|---|
| Up-front cost | £200-£400 (cheap template) | £650 (hand-coded, all features) |
| Monthly cost | £40-£100 (hosting + plugins + maintenance) | £0-£15 (Netlify free tier covers most builds) |
| 5-year total cost | ~£2,800-£6,400 | ~£650-£1,550 |
| Page load time | 2-5 seconds typical | Under 1 second typical |
| Core Web Vitals | Often fail without effort | Pass by default |
| Security | Most-hacked CMS on the web | Static — near-zero attack surface |
| Maintenance | Weekly plugin/core updates | None required |
| Hosting | Dedicated WP host (£15-40/mo) | Netlify / Cloudflare (free tier) |
| Content updates | Easy via Gutenberg editor | 10-15 mins via admin or request |
| SEO ceiling | Plugin-dependent | Native schema, semantic HTML, clean <head> |
| Lock-in | Tied to host + plugin ecosystem | Standard HTML/CSS/JS — portable anywhere |
The cost myth
"WordPress is free" is the line. It isn't. The software is free; the operating cost is not. A working WordPress site for a small business typically needs:
- Managed hosting: £15-40/month (shared hosting is too slow)
- Premium theme: £60-100/year
- Page builder licence (Elementor Pro etc): £60-300/year
- SEO plugin Pro tier (Yoast / Rank Math): £70-180/year
- Security plugin (Wordfence Premium / Sucuri): £100-200/year
- Backup plugin (UpdraftPlus Premium): £60/year
- Form plugin (Gravity Forms / WPForms): £40-120/year
- Maintenance retainer (if outsourced): £40-200/month
Add it up over five years: somewhere between £2,800 and £6,400 if you're outsourcing the maintenance. A custom £650 build runs on Netlify's free tier and needs no plugins to maintain. An optional £45/month maintenance plan exists for businesses that want hands-off ownership, but it's optional, not load-bearing.
Speed and Core Web Vitals
Speed isn't vanity. Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal. Slow sites rank lower, full stop. WordPress sites — even on premium hosts, even with caching plugins — typically have:
- 2-5 second LCP (Largest Contentful Paint)
- 500ms+ INP (Interaction to Next Paint)
- CLS issues from lazy-loaded ads and dynamic content
Custom static sites measured on the Chrome UX Report sit at sub-1s LCP, sub-100ms INP, zero CLS. Same content, very different ranking trajectory.
Security
WordPress powers ~43% of all websites. That's the strength — vast ecosystem, lots of help available — and the weakness — it's the single biggest target on the web. Most small-business hacks come from one of three vectors:
- Outdated plugins with known CVEs
- Brute-force attacks on /wp-login.php
- Compromised theme code
A custom static site has no admin login, no plugin layer, no database. There's almost nothing to compromise. The recovery cost when a WordPress site does get hacked — usually a £200-500 cleanup, plus reputation damage if Google flags the site as compromised — is genuinely worth thinking about.
SEO comparison
The persistent myth: "WordPress is better for SEO." It isn't. SEO is overwhelmingly about page speed, semantic HTML, schema markup, content quality, and backlinks — all of which are platform-agnostic. Practical SEO services work on either.
What's actually different:
- Schema: Custom sites can ship a clean unified JSON-LD @graph at build time. WordPress relies on plugins which often produce duplicate or conflicting schema.
- HTML cleanliness: WordPress themes accumulate cruft — inline styles, unused scripts, render-blocking resources. Custom builds emit only what's needed.
- Indexation control: Custom builds let you control every meta, canonical and noindex deliberately. WordPress's defaults sometimes index things you don't want indexed.
When WordPress wins
To be fair to WordPress, there are real cases where it's the right answer:
- You publish weekly editorial content with multiple contributors who need their own logins, drafts, and a review workflow.
- You run an ecommerce store with 50+ products, frequent inventory changes, and need WooCommerce's plugin ecosystem (though Shopify is usually better for serious ecommerce).
- Your team already knows WordPress intimately and the productivity loss of switching outweighs the technical benefits.
Verdict for small businesses
If you're a plumber, salon, consultant, accountant, gym, café, photographer, electrician, lawyer or any small service business with a website that needs 6-10 pages, a contact form, decent local SEO and to load fast on a mid-range phone — get a custom build. It's cheaper over five years, faster, more secure, ranks better, and you actually own it.
If you don't believe me, the next time you're on someone's WordPress site, open Chrome DevTools → Network tab → reload. Compare the request count, transfer size and time-to-interactive with this site. The numbers tell the story.
This isn't a "WordPress is bad" rant. WordPress is a remarkable piece of software. It's just the wrong tool for most small business websites.