I have built and maintained software for more than fifteen years, across enterprise C# systems, Angular and React front-ends, and a long tail of websites. I have inherited plenty of WordPress installations. This is not ideology. It is what the maintenance looks like from the inside.
What WordPress is good at
Credit where it is due. If you publish frequently and several non-technical people need to edit content, WordPress is hard to beat. The editing experience is familiar, the ecosystem solves almost any requirement, and finding someone to work on it later is easy. For a content-heavy publication, it is often the correct answer.
What it costs on a small business site
- Weight. A theme plus a dozen plugins loads code for features you never use, on every page, for every visitor.
- Maintenance as a standing obligation. Core, theme and plugin updates never stop, and skipping them is how sites get defaced.
- Security surface. The vast majority of compromises I have cleaned up came in through an outdated plugin, not the core.
- Fragility. An update to one plugin can break the layout of a page nobody has looked at in a year, and usually nobody notices for weeks.
- Compounding cost. The monthly maintenance retainer frequently exceeds what the site cost to build within two years.
What hand-coding buys
A hand-built site ships only what the page needs, which is why it tends to pass Core Web Vitals without a separate optimisation project. There is no plugin update treadmill and a far smaller attack surface. The markup is structured for search engines because somebody decided the structure deliberately rather than inheriting it from a theme.
The honest trade-off: you cannot install a plugin to add a feature. Changes go through a developer. For a six-page business site that changes a few times a year, that is not a real constraint. For a site publishing weekly, it is.
How to choose
- 1Will several non-technical people edit content weekly? WordPress, or a headless CMS.
- 2Is the site a permanent brochure that changes once or twice a year? Hand-coded.
- 3Is speed on mobile data a business constraint, as in healthcare, local services or paid traffic? Hand-coded.
- 4Do you need complex e-commerce out of the box today? A platform built for it, not a custom build.
The question is never which technology is better. It is which failure mode you can live with.
