Centring things in CSS in 2026
WordPress runs roughly 43% of all websites. People in our industry love to roll their eyes at this. We don't, particularly. WordPress is genuinely the right answer for a class of project — and genuinely the wrong answer for a different one. The honest version of "should we use WordPress" is "what kind of site are we building".
Where WordPress still wins
1. Marketing sites the client wants to edit
If the client will write blog posts, swap homepage copy, add pages and event listings — WordPress's editor is good, the workflow is familiar to non-technical staff, and the cost of training is roughly nothing. A custom CMS with the same UX would cost a multiple to build, and the client would still want to call it "the WordPress".
2. Brochure sites with a small budget
A clean, fast, accessible WordPress site can be live in a week on a £2k budget. The same site built with a static-site generator and a headless CMS costs about three times that, even though the end result is technically nicer. Sometimes "cheap and good enough" is the right answer.
3. WooCommerce for small e-commerce
For up to a few hundred SKUs and £100k a year in revenue, WooCommerce is excellent. Past that, the maintenance and upgrade pain accumulates, and Shopify or a custom build start to look better.
Where WordPress is the wrong tool
1. Anything with multi-step business workflow
Approvals, role-aware permissions, scheduled tasks, integrations with three other systems, audit trails. WordPress can be made to do these things via plugins, but the result is fragile and security-headachy. A purpose-built app in Laravel or similar is faster to build, faster to run, and easier to evolve.
2. Anything regulated
If your sector has regulators that can fine you (charities commission, FCA, ICO with teeth, healthcare), the plugin ecosystem is a liability. Each plugin is third-party code with its own update cadence, its own security history, and its own definition of "GDPR compliant". You don't want a free plugin in the audit trail of a safeguarding system.
3. Anything where downtime is expensive
WordPress has a deserved reputation for breaking on update — particularly when several plugins each ship updates that subtly fight each other. For a marketing site, an hour of downtime once a quarter is annoying. For an operations system that 50 people use to do their day job, it's unacceptable.
The four things we reach for instead
- Astro — for fast, static, content-led sites. Excellent SEO out of the box. Use a headless CMS (Strapi, Sanity) if the client needs to edit.
- Laravel + Livewire — for any custom application. This site is built like this. Boring, productive, easy to hire for.
- Statamic — when you genuinely want a CMS that the client will use, but you also want code you can read.
- Shopify — for any e-commerce above small-shop scale.
The honest test
If your project is mostly content, has predictable workflows, and one or two non-technical people will run it, WordPress is fine. If it has any meaningful business logic, integrations, or compliance dimension — pick something else. The cost of getting this wrong is usually three years of paying someone to keep a tower of plugins from collapsing.
If you're trying to decide for a specific project, we are happy to give you a half-hour of unbiased opinion. We don't sell WordPress builds, so we have no axe to grind either way.