When WordPress is the right answer
WordPress suits most small businesses, clubs and charities, and it is what we recommend most often. Choose it when:
- You publish often: news, events, fixtures, offers or blog posts, by several people.
- You want to sell online with a standard shop. WooCommerce handles products, stock, delivery and payments well.
- You want independence. WordPress is widely known, so you are never tied to one developer.
- Your team already knows it, which saves training and frustration.
The trade-off is upkeep. WordPress, its themes and its plugins need regular updates, and a site loaded with plugins becomes slow and fragile. Kept lean and looked after, it is excellent.
When a custom build makes sense
A site built from scratch for one business has no plugins to update and nothing it does not need. It can be very fast and very secure. It makes sense when:
- The site has unusual logic, such as a postcode checker, a calculator or a booking flow that does not fit a plugin.
- Speed is critical, for example a site with thousands of pages.
- Content rarely changes, or changes are made by us on a care plan anyway.
The trade-off is that editing usually happens through us or a simpler editor, and changes need a developer. For a business that posts once a year, that is no loss. For a club that posts daily, it is.
When it is not really a website
If what you are describing has accounts, subscriptions, dashboards or an app, you are past "website" and into a platform. That is the specialism of our sister studio, webdesigndundee.agency.
A quick rule of thumb
- Several people posting every week? WordPress.
- A shop with products, sizes and delivery? WordPress with WooCommerce.
- A handful of pages that rarely change, where speed matters? Either works; a custom build is often lighter.
- Something with logins, bookings or subscriptions at its core? A platform.