How your website is built matters as much as how it looks. The three most common build paths — WordPress, headless and fully custom — each suit different goals, teams and budgets. Here's how to choose without the hype.
WordPress
Still powers about 40% of the web for a reason. A mature plugin ecosystem, familiar admin, and a huge talent pool make it easy to maintain. The catch: performance requires careful tuning, and the plugin stack can become a liability. Best for content-heavy sites where the team is comfortable inside the CMS.
Headless
A modern front-end — usually React or Next.js — talking to a separate content backend like Sanity or Contentful. You get near-perfect performance scores, complete design freedom and content that's truly portable. More to set up, but it scales cleanly and puts developers in full control of every interaction.
Fully custom
Maximum control and performance with zero platform overhead. Right for bespoke experiences, complex interactions or products that don't fit a template. Needs a capable team and a clear brief — but the result is lean, fast and built exactly to spec.
How to choose
Match the build to who will maintain it and where you're headed in 18 months. A good web design and development studio will recommend the approach that fits your goals — not the one that's easiest for them. If a studio only ever builds one way, that's a red flag.
The performance comparison
If page speed and Core Web Vitals matter to you — and for SEO and conversion they should — the performance ranking is clear: fully custom or headless beats WordPress, especially plugin-heavy WordPress. A custom or headless build will routinely score 90+ on PageSpeed Insights. A typical WordPress site with a page builder scores 35–55. The gap is architectural: custom and headless sites load only the code your specific website needs; WordPress template sites load the code every possible feature might need.
The maintenance comparison
WordPress requires ongoing maintenance: WordPress core updates, plugin updates, theme updates, and periodic security patches. Each update can break something; each new plugin adds a potential vulnerability. The maintenance burden is real and ongoing — typically three to five hours per month for a moderately complex site. A custom or headless website with a minimal codebase has far lower maintenance overhead, because there are fewer moving parts to keep updated and fewer attack surfaces to secure.
CMS options across all three approaches
A common misconception: headless and custom websites don't have a CMS. They do — just a better one. Headless CMS options like Sanity, Contentful and Prismic offer structured content editing that's significantly more flexible than WordPress's page editor, handles content relationships properly, and serves content through an API that can power multiple channels (website, app, email). The editing experience is often better than WordPress — and the performance is incomparably better.
The 18-month question
The single most useful question when choosing a build approach: where will this website need to be in 18 months? If you'll be adding new pages regularly with a non-technical team, a good CMS (headless or WordPress) is essential. If you need to integrate with a custom API, product platform or data source, headless or custom gives you full flexibility. If you're planning to internationalise, headless handles multilingual content modeling far more cleanly than WordPress. Choose for the trajectory, not the current state.