Why custom coded static sites are better than Wordpress for small business

You might have heard about website builders WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy and how easy it is to create a website for any business in minutes.

Today, I would like to share my thoughts on why you shouldn’t use WordPress or any other website builder.

1. Too much bloat

It ships tons of unnecessary JavaScript (It’s a coding language of the web, btw.)

WordPress has a large ecosystem and a wide range of features for a wide range of use cases. This is also a huge drawback when you want to build a simple site with simple functionality.

Every single plugin you install brings its own React/Preact/jQuery bundles, causing duplicate code and increasing overhead.

2. Unoptimized Images

Most website builders don’t optimize your images & videos. Imagine you’re clicking 4k pictures worth 10-20mb in size on your iPhone and uploading directly to WordPress.

Of course, this will take a huge amount of time to load, even on 5G networks. Most customers won’t wait for that long.

3. Hosting & Managing Servers

WordPress is a CMS - Content Management System with a frontend and backend, which means you need a server to host it somewhere.

Most businesses go for cheap severs which leads to performance bottlenecks and site crashes even with little traffic peaks.

4. Too many features = Complexity.

Wordpress have bit of a learning curve. Too many settings can overwhelm a non technical person managing the website will be a task.

You might have heard this:

With great powers comes great responsibility!

4. Weak Technical SEO

People say WordPress is great for SEO, and it’s true. Many big businesses use WordPress or similar tools for a content management system, but it has one issue: “slow page load speed”, which hampers website performance score.

For small businesses with a 1-5 page site, you can’t outrank other big websites with bad performance but better SEO. But here is where a website with a performance score of above 90 and less than 3 sec page load time shines and can outrank huge sites.

You can calculate your score on the https://pagespeed.web.dev.

Final Thoughts:

You may ask, “Kundan If not worpress what should I use then?” To be honest, if you don’t have dynamic content, plus you add information once or twice a week, you should always ask your web developer to build a custom-coded static site instead of WordPress.

Most good developers can easily custom-code high-performance static sites in same time as building on wrodpress.