Creating a website for your business is something so important especially when you want to scale your business and take it to the next level. Once you decide you will create a website to bring your business into the digital world you start asking yourself some questions like how much will it cost me to build a website ? or should I build my website from scratch with a custom design or just use a ready to use a platform like WordPress, WebCommander, Shopify, Wix, WebFlow... So what is the best choice between WordPress vs custom website ? That is exactly what we will cover in this article.
This is the battle of WordPress vs custom website and that is exactly what we will be covering in this article, we will dive deeply and explain when you should use WordPress to build your website and when you should build a custom-built website design.
The following titles explain how our blog will be structured
WordPress is a great ready to use and free platform that helps us build and design beautiful websites and blogs without writing a single line of code.
This platform does not require any expertise on web development or programming to build beautifully designed websites, if you have just some basic web knowledge then you are ready to use WordPress.
This platform is one of the most popular and the most used platforms to build websites, 15% of all websites are built using this great platform and the numbers continue to rise.
One of the main elements of WordPress are plugins.
Plugins will help you customize your website based on your need, it helps add many options that are not provided by WordPress such as creating complicated forms, improve the search engine optimization (SEO) of your website, use prebuilt components on your website and much more.
WordPress will save your time and energy especially if you are using a prebuilt theme to build your website, these themes are so beautiful and they are developed by expert designers and developers, the most exciting part is that you can buy them with really a cheap price ($20 - $70).
If you want to buy any kind of theme you can visit this website Themeforest
To answer this question we have to dive into more detailed concepts such as security, website hosting, domain names, and much more, you can visit our blog where we covered all of these concepts How much does it cost to create a WordPress website
Plugins are apps that allow you to add functionalities and features to your WordPress website exactly like mobile apps in your phone.
WordPress is a platform that is built in a way that developers and programmers can modify its functionalities, and using these plugins we can override the existing features or create new ones.
Themes are pre-built templates that we can use to build our website, so for instance if we want a big slider in the top of the home page and we don’t want to create it from scratch we can bring it from a pre-built template or theme. So themes provide a lot of functionalities and features and designed sections that we can directly use in our website, if you want to buy a theme you can visit the following website themeforest
Generally the custom built websites are great when we need something that can not be provided by WordPress like big complex websites with unique and heavy functionalities. To build this kind of website you need to find an expert web designer who will design and build your website.
This web design company will use programming languages and advanced frameworks to build the website, some of these languages and the frameworks are : Python, PHP, JavaScript, Go, Angular, Node js, Reactjs.
A website that was developed using WordPress can have a lot of functionalities and features especially with the use of plugins and themes, for example we can build chat systems, e-commerce sites, secured payment modules and much more. However, even with these high quality modules the website that we build at the end is still limited when compared to a custom-built website.
A custom-built website is a website that can have complex and non limited features and functionalities that we can not build using WordPress like for example if you need to build a customized and complex stock management system, you might not find a WordPress module that will help you with that.
Let’s start with the advantages of using WordPress to build your website
The first advantage is that WordPress is less expensive compared to building a website from scratch, first WordPress is a free to install platform so you will not pay to get WordPress installed in your computer, you also can build your website on your own and you don’t need to hire a developer to do that for you, at the end what you will be paying for is just the hosting of the website which is the thing that does not cost a lot ($10 per month).
As we mentioned in the previous section WordPress is a platform that gives you full freedom to choose whatever theme you want to use, so you don’t need to develop your website from scratch.
Making a website mobile friendly became a very important factor to succeed in your business, most of WordPress themes and templates are responsive.
Optimizing your website for search engine crawlers is so important to get more traffic to your website and get more clients for your business, so WordPress will help you to make your website optimized for search engines so easily using some plugins.
Now let’s talk a little bit about the disadvantages of using WordPress to build your website
It might be a little bit difficult to go over themes and templates and make some major changes into them especially if you don’t have any experience with WordPress.
When using WordPress it is absolutely necessary to install some plugins to make the build of your website much easier, so the more plugins you install the more compatibility problems you will have.
Security is a big challenge for every website owner because once you have a website you need to protect your data from hackers and spammers.
Let’s start with the advantages of using custom-built website
Building a custom website is so helpful in improving your brand because you will be building a unique custom design that no one has on the internet.
A custom built website is much easier to redesign compared with a WordPress website because WordPress uses themes and templates so it’s so difficult to redesign a theme.
A custom built website can be as complex as you want because you have all the control over it. However, the WordPress website does not give you the right to scale or build complex systems.
Now let’s talk a little bit about the disadvantages of using custom built website
Websites built from scratch are generally more expensive than WordPress websites because WordPress websites do not require any professional expertise unlike custom-built websites that require more expertise and more effort.
When you create a website from scratch you don’t have plugins or apps that help you add ready to use functionalities and features unlike WordPress that provide you tons of plugins which will save your time.
At the end of this battle, both methods are good and useful, what make a difference is your budget and your needs in terms of design and functionality, as we mentioned earlier every method has its advantages and disadvantages, so if you are just starting your business and you don’t have enough budget to build a custom heavy website it’s absolutely fine to start with WordPress and later on change it to custom-built website.
Search engine optimization is simply the process that brings your website through 100's of clients and leads. Without SEO your site will never be able to attract users organically.
WordPress has a ton of plugins that will help you optimize your website for search engines like for example Yoast, it’s one of the best tools for search engine optimization.
Custom-built websites give you actually more control over your website, so it will be much easier for you to make your website optimized for search engine crawlers, and you can build your site from top to bottom as an SEO friendly website.
The speed of a website is one of the most important factors of success. 70% of visitors leave a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, so your website needs to be as fast as possible.
WordPress is a little bit slow and if you want your WordPress website to be faster you have to choose the right performance plugin and the right hosting, otherwise your website will lose many clients without any logical reason.
Custom-built websites are controllable and it is developed based on your needs and your standards, so you can make it as fast as you want. You just need to tell the developer you hired to make it like that.
Here we come to the main question of our blog WordPress vs custom website.
Actually, we can not tell exactly what is the best between a WordPress website and a custom-built website because, in the end, it all comes down to your needs and your budget.
WordPress websites are great for small businesses and startups, because it’s much cheaper and easy to set up so you won’t waste your time getting the website you want and the best thing is that you have an unlimited number of themes that you can choose from.
WordPress websites are really good for small and medium businesses, but it gets hard when you try to super customize the website or you try to implement heavy complex functionalities and features, so custom built websites are good for companies with bigger budgets and need a fully customized website with big functionalities.
In the end Ihope you like my article, and you found the answer to whether you will go with WordPress or not.
If you are curious about the price that a website can cost, you can read our article
How much does it cost to create a WordPress website
If you need to design you website you can visit our portfolio here
Thanks for reading, and best of luck with your new website ?
