How your website is built affects what it costs to run, how easily your team can update it, and what it can connect to. We build three kinds: websites on WordPress, a system your team can edit themselves; online shops on WooCommerce, which adds a shop to WordPress; and custom software, made to measure. Because we have no reason to push one over another, clients often ask us which they should choose. There is no single answer for everyone, but there is a sensible way to decide.
Start with how your business will use the site
Before comparing options, answer three questions. Who will update the site, and how often? What does it need to connect to: your CRM (customer list), invoicing, stock, bookings, other systems you use in-house? And what happens to your business if the site is slow, or offline for an hour?
When WordPress is the right choice
- Several people in your team publish content every week and need an editor that feels familiar.
- The site is mainly pages, articles and forms, with a few simple connections to other tools.
- You want plenty of developers to choose from if someone else ever needs to look after it.
The cost to plan for is upkeep. Each plugin (an add-on that gives WordPress a new feature) is more code that must be kept up to date and trusted. A WordPress site with a short list of well-chosen plugins, updates handled for you and good hosting is a perfectly professional choice. One with dozens of overlapping plugins is a problem waiting to happen.
When WooCommerce is the right choice
- You sell online and want your shop's data and your customer relationships to stay fully yours.
- You need more freedom with prices, product types or checkout than ready-made shop platforms allow.
- Your orders need to flow into your invoicing, stock or management software in a particular way.
WooCommerce shares WordPress's strengths and its upkeep, with more at stake: an update that breaks the checkout costs you sales. It needs hosting set up for online shops, a backup before updates, and checks that warn someone if the checkout itself stops working.
When a ready-made shop platform is the honest answer
If you sell standard products, need few connections to other systems and want as little technical responsibility as possible, a ready-made shop platform such as Shopify can be the right call, and we will tell you so. You give up some control and pay the platform's fees, but someone else takes care of the updates and the servers behind it.
When software built for you is worth the cost
- Your site is really a working tool: a client area, a booking system with its own rules, a product builder where customers choose their options, or dashboards.
- The way your business works is specific enough that you would be fighting a standard website system to make it fit.
- Speed, security or connections to other systems are central to the business, not just nice to have.
- You are building a product to sell, such as software your customers pay for by subscription.
We build these on established open-source building blocks, widely used and supported for the long term. Custom does not have to mean starting from nothing. The building blocks provide the foundations, and the custom work goes into what makes your business different.
Often the answer is a combination
Many good solutions mix approaches. A WooCommerce shop can pass each order to n8n, a tool that connects your apps and does routine tasks automatically. From there, n8n updates your invoicing and your CRM. A WordPress site can keep the editor your team knows, while custom-built pages are what visitors see. A custom client area can sit beside a WordPress marketing site under the same web address. The right question is not which platform wins, but which piece should handle each part of how your business works.
A quick way to decide
- Mostly pages and articles, updated often, with few connections to other systems: WordPress.
- Selling online, with connections or pricing rules you need to control: WooCommerce.
- Selling standard products, with as little technical involvement as possible: a ready-made shop platform.
- Your own business rules, a client area or a product of your own: custom software.
- More than one of the above: a combination, with your tools connected so they talk to each other and routine work happens on its own.
If you are thinking about rebuilding your site or moving to something new, tell us what it has to do for your business. We will recommend an approach and explain what it means for cost, upkeep and the systems around it.