← Blog · · Costs and hiring · 10 min read
Yes, for content-heavy sites with several editors. For most small business sites, there are faster options that need far less looking after. Here's why.
If you’ve done any research into getting a website, WordPress has probably come up again and again. Articles recommend it. Friends recommend it. So why don’t I usually use it?
It’s a fair question. And honestly, the answer isn’t “WordPress is bad.” It’s more complicated than that.
Yes, WordPress is still worth using in 2026. For some businesses. If you publish a lot of content, have several people editing the site, or rely on a feature that a plugin already does well, it’s a sensible choice. Lots of developers know it, so you’re never stuck with one person.
But for a typical small business site, the kind with five to ten pages that needs to look professional and bring in enquiries, I don’t think it’s the best option any more. You’re taking on a lot of software (and a lot of updates) for a site that doesn’t need it. A modern framework will usually be faster and cheaper to look after. And if you’re building it yourself on a small budget, Squarespace is often the better bet.
WordPress runs just under 40% of all websites. That’s an astonishing number. It’s been the dominant platform for well over a decade, and there’s a reason for that.
But that dominance has also created some problems.
Because WordPress is so popular, it’s become the number one target for hackers. It’s not that WordPress itself is insecure. It’s that if you’re a hacker and you find one vulnerability, you’ve potentially got access to a huge chunk of the internet. The return on investment is obvious.
This means WordPress sites require constant vigilance. Updates every week. Security plugins. Monitoring. It’s not difficult work, but it is ongoing work. And if you forget, or if a plugin you’re using hasn’t been updated, you’re at risk.
I’m not here to bash WordPress. For certain situations, it’s genuinely the right choice:
You want to manage everything yourself. WordPress’s admin panel is familiar to millions of people. If you’ve used it before, or if you have staff who have, there’s almost no learning curve. You can update content, add pages, write blog posts. All without touching any code.
You run a content-heavy site with several editors. If you publish news or articles every week and three or four people need to log in and do it, WordPress handles that well. User roles, drafts, scheduled posts, revisions. It’s had over twenty years to get this right.
You need something very specific that a plugin already does. There are over 60,000 plugins for WordPress. Whatever weird, niche functionality you need, someone’s probably built it. Paying for a good plugin is often cheaper than paying a developer to build the same thing from scratch.
Your team (or your developer) already knows it. Familiarity counts for a lot. If your office manager has used WordPress for years and your developer specialises in it, switching for the sake of it would be daft.
You’re on an extremely tight budget and have time to learn. WordPress itself is free. Hosting can be cheap. If you’re willing to put in the hours to learn the system and maintain it yourself, you can get a functional website for very little money upfront.
Notice what isn’t on that list: “I need a website and everyone says WordPress.” That’s how most people end up on it. It’s also the weakest reason of the lot.
“WordPress is free” is technically true. The software costs nothing. Running a business website on it doesn’t.
I’m talking about the free software from WordPress.org that you install on your own hosting here, not WordPress.com, which is a paid hosted service more like Squarespace. Here’s roughly what a self-hosted business site costs in the UK:
| What | Typical cost |
|---|---|
| Hosting | £5-£25/month |
| Premium theme | £40-£80 one-off |
| Plugins (forms, SEO, security, backups) | £0-£200/year |
| Maintenance plan | £20-£100/month, or your own time |
| Cleaning up a hacked site | £300-£800 |
Premium plugins catch people out. A lot of the good ones are annual subscriptions now, so the bill comes back every year whether you’ve used the extra features or not.
Then there’s developer time. Sooner or later a plugin update clashes with your theme, or the contact form quietly stops sending, and someone has to be paid by the hour to work out why. I’ve broken down what websites cost in the UK if you want to compare the other options.
None of this makes WordPress expensive, exactly. It just means “free” is the wrong word.
Here’s what those “WordPress is great!” articles don’t mention:
Plugin bloat is real. Most WordPress sites I’ve inherited have 20-30 plugins installed. Each one adds weight. Each one is a potential security risk. Each one needs updating.
Updates aren’t optional, and they aren’t risk-free. Plugins are written by thousands of different developers, and some of them get abandoned. When an abandoned plugin has a security hole, nobody’s coming to fix it, and the bots scanning for that hole don’t care that you’re a small business. Or the opposite happens. You click “Update All”, two plugins don’t get on, and half your homepage disappears. Updates should go on one at a time, with a backup taken first. Most people don’t do that.
Speed requires effort. Out of the box, WordPress is not fast. Getting good performance means caching plugins, image optimisation, potentially a CDN, database optimisation… It’s all solvable, but it’s work. And slow sites lose visitors. Modern alternatives are fast by default.
The “full site editing” transition is messy. WordPress has been moving toward block-based editing (Gutenberg) for years now. It’s still not quite there.
For most of the sites I build now, I use modern tools that didn’t exist (or weren’t mature enough) even a few years ago.
Headless CMS platforms like Prepr.io and Keystatic. These separate where you manage content from how it’s displayed. The editing experience is clean and focused.
Static site generators and modern frameworks. Sites built this way don’t need a database running every time someone visits. They’re just files served directly. Faster, more secure, cheaper to host.
The worry I hear most is “but then I can’t edit it myself.” You can. With something like Keystatic you still log into an admin panel, change your text, upload a photo and save. There just isn’t a database and a pile of plugins sitting underneath it.
The Restorative Engagement Forum is a restorative practice training organisation. Their WordPress site had gone stale. Years of plugins, theme patches and content nobody was maintaining. It was slow to update, so it had stopped reflecting the work they actually do.
What makes this one interesting is that it’s exactly the kind of site people assume needs WordPress. Training courses with dates and pricing, news, case studies, a team page, downloadable resources for practitioners. Someone logs in regularly to add training dates and upload new material. That’s a proper content site, not a brochure.
I rebuilt it in Astro with Keystatic as the CMS. Seven content collections, each with only the fields that matter: training courses have their levels, durations and pricing, case studies have sector tags, and so on.
It went live in early 2026, and their team has managed the content themselves since launch. Every change is version-controlled, so nothing gets lost and anything can be rolled back. For a non-profit without IT staff, that safety net matters. The site loads faster too, and it scores 100 on all four of Google’s Lighthouse checks.
Squarespace or Wix if you’re building it yourself on a small budget. You’ll pay around £12-£30 a month and there’s nothing to update. The catch is you’re renting. Customisation stops where the template stops, and if they put their prices up, you pay. If your budget is under £500, I’d point you here before I’d point you at DIY WordPress. If you’re mainly selling products, look at Shopify too.
A modern framework with a headless CMS if you want a fast, secure site that someone else builds and looks after. This is what I do, so take my enthusiasm with a pinch of salt. But for most small businesses it’s the best balance. My monthly plans start at £70 a month with no upfront cost. The £150 Professional plan includes a CMS, and custom builds start from £250 a month.
WordPress if you’re in one of the situations I listed earlier. Just go in knowing it needs looking after, and budget for that from day one.
WordPress is probably right for you if:
Something else is probably a better fit if:
Ticked a few in each? Look at which ones you’d actually miss. That usually settles it.
Most small businesses I work with just want a professional site that works, brings in enquiries, and doesn’t need babysitting. For them, the modern approach wins. On a five-page site that mostly needs to bring in enquiries, WordPress means paying, in money or time, to maintain software you barely use.
If I were running a busy magazine-style site with a team of writers, I’d look at WordPress seriously. That’s where it earns its keep.
And if you’re already on WordPress and it’s working? Keep it. Make sure someone’s applying the updates and taking backups. Moving platforms just because it’s fashionable is a waste of your money.
Very. Roughly two in five websites run on it, and nearly six in ten of the sites that use a known content management system (CMS). It isn’t going anywhere. Popular just doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for every site.
It’s fine. Plugins like Yoast handle the basics, such as page titles and descriptions, and plenty of WordPress sites rank well. But no platform ranks you on its own. Your content and your page speed matter far more. A slow WordPress site weighed down with plugins can hold you back. A fast one won’t.
Only if it’s causing you problems. If it’s slow, hard to update, keeps breaking or nobody’s maintaining it, a move is worth thinking about. I’ve written about the signs it’s time to replace your website if you’re on the fence. If it’s fast, secure and your team is happy using it, leave it alone.
If you’re weighing up whether to go with WordPress or something more modern for your business site, I’m happy to talk through the options. Sometimes WordPress genuinely is the right call. Sometimes it’s not. The only way to know is to look at your specific situation. Get in touch and we’ll figure it out together.
Other posts on the same ground.
