WordPress or Hand-Built: What It Costs to Run

Most comparisons of these two argue about which is better. That is the wrong question, and it is usually asked by somebody who only builds one of them.

The useful question is what each costs to own over three years, and how you want to work.

What you are actually choosing between

WordPress is a content management system. It runs on a server, stores your content in a database, and assembles each page when somebody asks for it. You get an admin area where you can build and change pages yourself.

Hand-built here means pages built as files and served directly, with no database assembling anything. Faster by default, because there is less happening between the request and the page.

Both can be excellent. Both can be terrible.

The build cost is not the interesting number

WordPress usually starts cheaper, because a theme does a lot of the work and the ecosystem is enormous.

That is the number people compare, and it is the one that matters least over three years.

What WordPress costs to run

Hosting, more than a static site because something has to execute on every request.

Plugin licences. A form plugin, a backup plugin, a security plugin, an SEO plugin, a caching plugin. Individually small, annually not.

Maintenance. The one that gets left out of every quote. WordPress core, the theme and every plugin need updating, and updates occasionally break things. Somebody has to do this and check nothing fell over.

You are paying for that whether you buy it or not. Either it is a monthly fee or it is your Sunday evening.

The cost of not doing it. Outdated plugins are the most common route by which small business sites get compromised. Cleaning up an infected site, and recovering from Google flagging it, costs more than several years of maintenance.

What hand-built costs to run

Hosting, usually less. Mine is NZ$250 a year and that is the whole running cost unless you want the editor, which is another NZ$150.

Nothing to update. No plugins, no core, no version compatibility. This is the whole point.

A developer for structural change. New page types, new sections, anything beyond text and images comes back to somebody. If you want to build a new page yourself at nine on a Thursday, you cannot, unless an editor was built in.

That constraint is either the main drawback or a feature, depending on the person. Plenty of trade businesses have no intention of building pages and would rather the site simply worked.

The question that actually decides it

Not speed, not price. How often will this site change, and who is going to change it?

Answer honestly rather than aspirationally. Almost every business says it will post updates and add pages. Most do not, and a content management system nobody logs into is a maintenance liability wearing the costume of a feature.

If you can name the person who will do it and what they will be doing monthly, WordPress earns its keep. If the honest answer is that it will be touched twice a year to change a phone number, you are paying for a workshop to hang one picture.

The speed argument, honestly

Hand-built is faster by default because there is less to do. That is a real advantage and it is routinely overstated.

A well-built WordPress site with a sensible theme and few plugins is fast enough that no customer would notice. A WordPress site with a page builder, four sliders and nineteen plugins is slow, and that is a choice somebody made rather than something WordPress did.

Most slow WordPress sites are slow for the same handful of reasons, and most of them are fixable without rebuilding anything.

What happens when you want to leave

Worth asking before you start, not after.

With WordPress you can export the content and the site can be moved to another host or another developer. That portability is a genuine strength and it is why so much of the web runs on it.

With a hand-built site the files are the site. If they are in a repository you own, it moves as easily. If they are on somebody's machine and nobody else can touch them, you are stuck, and that is a question to ask whoever is quoting rather than an inherent property of either approach.

Either way: the domain, the analytics and the Google Business Profile should be in your name regardless of which you choose.

Which one suits you

WordPress if: you want to add and restructure pages yourself, you expect the site to change often, somebody will keep it maintained, or you need a specific plugin that solves a real problem.

Hand-built if: you want something fast that needs almost no attention, the structure will not change often, and you are content for structural work to come back to somebody.

For most trade businesses the honest answer is the second one, because the site changes rarely and nobody wants a maintenance relationship they will forget about. That is why what I build is hand-coded by default, with an editor added when somebody genuinely wants day to day control.

But I build WordPress too, including Elementor, because for a business that genuinely wants to get in and build pages it is the better fit and pretending otherwise would be selling.

The one thing I would not do is choose on build price alone. That number is the smallest part of what the next three years cost.