Why WordPress? Why anything else?

One of the first questions in any website project is also one of the most important: what should it be built on? WordPress runs a huge share of the web. Shopify dominates small ecommerce. Squarespace and Wix promise drag-and-drop simplicity. Webflow appeals to designers. And some sites are best hand-built with no platform at all.

There is no single right answer. But there is usually a right answer for your business, and choosing badly can mean years of slow pages, rising costs or a costly rebuild. Here’s how we think about it.

Start with what the website needs to do

Before comparing platforms, get clear on a few questions:

• Who will update it, and how often? Weekly blog posts and new products need a friendly editor. A site that changes twice a year doesn’t.
• Are you selling online? And if so, how many products, and with what complexity: variants, subscriptions, trade pricing, stock syncing?
• What does it need to connect to? Booking systems, CRM, accounting, inventory or email marketing.
• How important is speed and search? For most businesses, very, but some platforms make it much harder to get right.
• What’s the real budget over three years? Include hosting, subscriptions, plugins, apps and maintenance, not just the build.

WordPress

WordPress is flexible, familiar and backed by an enormous ecosystem of themes, plugins and developers. For content-heavy sites with lots of pages and regular publishing, it remains a strong option.

Its weakness is that flexibility. Many WordPress sites end up built on heavy multipurpose themes with dozens of plugins, which makes them slow, fragile and a security risk if they aren’t updated. A well-built WordPress site is excellent. A typical one needs ongoing care to stay that way.

Best for: content-rich sites, regular publishing, teams that already know WordPress.

Shopify

If selling products online is the heart of your business, Shopify is hard to beat. Payments, stock, shipping, taxes and security are handled for you, and it scales smoothly from a handful of products to thousands. It also integrates well with the tools most New Zealand retailers use.

The trade-offs are monthly fees, app costs that creep up, and less flexibility for content-heavy pages. But for most stores the reliability is worth it. (We cover more in Things to consider for ecommerce website design.)

Best for: online stores of almost any size.

Squarespace and Wix

These all-in-one builders make it easy to get a decent-looking site online without a developer. For a very small business on a tight budget, that can be the right call.

The limits appear as you grow: less control over speed and technical SEO, generic templates that make you look like everyone else, and content that is hard to move if you ever want to leave.

Best for: getting started quickly on a small budget.

Webflow

Webflow sits between builders and custom development. It gives designers precise control and produces clean, fast pages, with a solid editor for content updates. It’s a good fit for marketing sites where design quality matters and the content structure is fairly predictable.

Best for: design-led marketing sites with a capable team behind them.

Hand-built

For many service businesses, the best website has no platform at all. A hand-built site has no plugins to update, no bloated theme and no monthly licence. It loads almost instantly and is very hard to hack. Changes are handled by your web partner, and for sites that don’t change weekly, that often costs less than the time you’d spend in a CMS.

The trade-off is that you rely on a developer for edits. For a site that changes constantly, that’s a real cost. For most brochure sites, it’s a very good deal.

Best for: service businesses that want speed, security and low running costs.

The best platform is the one that suits how your business actually works, not the one your last web designer happened to use.

Our honest view

We aren’t tied to any platform, and we’d rather recommend the right tool than the one that suits us. As a rough guide:

1. Selling products? Start with Shopify.
2. Publishing lots of content with an in-house team? WordPress, built lean.
3. A service business that wants a fast, premium site with minimal fuss? Hand-built, with a CMS added only if you really need one.

Whatever you choose, insist on the fundamentals: you own your domain, content and accounts, the site is fast on a phone, and moving your old pages won’t cost you your Google rankings.

Not sure which way to go? We’ll give you a straight recommendation for your business, with no platform agenda. See our website design service or get in touch.