WordPress

WordPress powers a large share of the web for a practical reason: the editing experience is familiar, the hosting is inexpensive, and most of what a marketing site needs has been solved already.

How we build on it

From components, in a custom theme, rather than with a page builder. Builders are fast to start and expensive to leave, the markup is heavy, the licence is annual, and the layout cannot move to another theme. A component-built site can be edited by your team, extended by any developer, and measured against performance budgets that a builder makes very hard to hit.

Where it stops being the right answer

When the thing you need is an application rather than a site. If the requirement involves complex permissions, multi-step workflows or calculations that genuinely belong in code, bending WordPress into that shape produces something slow to run and expensive to maintain. That is a custom software conversation.

What a WordPress build costs to own

The purchase price of a WordPress site is rarely the number that matters. What matters is the maintenance bill it commits you to: every plugin is a dependency you inherit, every page builder is a licence you keep paying and a layout you cannot take with you, and every shortcut taken at build time is taken again at every update.

Building from components in a custom theme costs a little more to start and very much less to keep. The markup stays light enough to hit a performance budget, the content stays editable by the client, and any competent developer can pick it up.

WordPress, in practice

• A custom theme built from components, with no page builder anywhere in it
• Plugins counted as dependencies and kept to what the job needs
• Core Web Vitals measured before launch rather than optimised after

See website development for how a build runs, and WordPress versus a custom CMS for when it is the wrong answer. The block editor handbook documents the editing model itself.

How this work usually starts

A WordPress project starts with what has to be editable and by whom. That decides where structure lives in fields and where it lives in the block editor, and getting it right is the difference between a client who maintains their own site and a client who files a ticket to change a heading.

Two decisions set what a WordPress site costs to own: how much lives in fields the client can edit, and how many plugins the build depends on. Both are made in the first week and paid for every month afterwards.