For most small businesses that want a site they’ll still be using in five years, yes, WordPress is still the right choice. But not for everyone, and not for the reasons people usually give. “It powers a huge chunk of the internet” is true and mostly irrelevant to you. What matters is who owns the site, what it costs to keep healthy, and whether you’ll ever need it to do more than it does on launch day.
We build on WordPress (in Elementor) for most of our clients, and we also tell some people not to bother.
What you get with WordPress
When we say WordPress here we mean the free, open source software from WordPress.org, installed on hosting you choose. That’s different from the WordPress.com subscription service, and the names cause endless confusion. If you’re not sure which one you’ve got, read WordPress.com vs WordPress.org first.
Self-hosted WordPress gives you three things the subscription builders can’t fully match.
You own it. The files and the database are yours. If you fall out with your host, your developer or us, you can pick the whole site up and move it somewhere else. Try moving a Wix site to another platform and you’ll find you’re rebuilding it from scratch, because the design only exists inside Wix.
You’re not stuck at the edges. Need a booking system that talks to your practice software, a quote form that routes jobs by suburb, a members area, a job board, a WooCommerce shop with weird shipping rules? On WordPress there’s almost always a way, either a well-made plugin or a bit of custom work. On a closed builder you get what their app market offers, and if it’s not there you wait or you leave.
Your costs are your choice. Hosting, the theme, the page builder licence and any paid plugins are all separate line items. That’s annoying when you want one bill, but it means you can shop around for each one and nobody can triple a single subscription price on you.
What it costs you in upkeep
This is the bit WordPress fans skip, and it’s the bit that bites.
A WordPress site is software running on a server, and software needs maintaining. Core WordPress, your theme and every plugin get updates, some of them security fixes. Left alone for a year or two, a WordPress site drifts out of date, starts throwing errors when PHP is upgraded on the server, and becomes the kind of easy target that automated attacks look for. Most of the hacked sites we clean up weren’t targeted. They were just neglected.
Realistically, keeping a typical small business site healthy looks like this:
- Updates checked and applied every week or two, with a backup taken first
- Backups stored somewhere other than the web server, kept for a few weeks at least
- A quick look at the site after updates to make sure forms and key pages still work
- Hosting on a server that’s kept current, rather than the cheapest plan you could find
- An annual tidy: remove plugins you no longer use, check user accounts, renew licences
You can do this yourself in perhaps 20 to 30 minutes a fortnight once you know the routine, or pay someone to do it through a WordPress care plan. What you can’t do is ignore it. If the realistic answer is “nobody is ever going to log in and update this”, WordPress is the wrong tool, or at least the wrong tool without a maintenance arrangement.
The other trap is plugin creep. Every plugin you add is another thing to update and another thing that can conflict with the rest. A site with a sensible, well-chosen set is easy to look after. A site where three past developers each added their favourite tools is not. We’ve written more on that in how many WordPress plugins is too many.
Where Wix and Squarespace genuinely win
We’re not going to pretend the subscription builders are bad. They’re good at what they’re for.
They handle hosting, security patches and updates for you. There’s one login and one bill. The templates look tidy out of the box, and a confident owner can get a decent-looking site live over a weekend. For someone who wants to edit their own site and never think about servers, that convenience is real.
The trade-off is that you’re renting. Stop paying and the site goes. The subscription price is set by the platform and tends to climb over time. And as the business grows, the limits start to show: SEO controls that don’t go as deep as you’d like, page structures you can’t quite get right, integrations that don’t exist. We’ve done the long-hand maths on this in renting vs owning your website, and over five years the gap is often smaller than people expect, with the owned site well ahead on what you’ve got at the end of it.
When WordPress is overkill
There are businesses we’d steer away from WordPress, or at least not push towards it.
| Your situation | What we’d suggest |
|---|---|
| You need a simple page or two to prove you exist, and you’ll rarely change it | A builder like Squarespace is fine, or a one-page site |
| You’re testing an idea and might not be trading in a year | Start cheap on a builder. Rebuild properly if it works |
| You sell a small product range and want it all in one place | Shopify will usually serve you better than WooCommerce |
| Nobody will ever update the site and you won’t pay for maintenance | Avoid WordPress. A neglected install is a liability |
| Your site is mostly a link to a booking platform you already pay for | A builder or the booking platform’s own page may be enough |
Shopify is worth singling out. For a shop that’s mainly about products, payments and stock, a hosted platform built for exactly that is often the better call, and we build Shopify stores for that reason.
When WordPress is clearly the right call
The more of these that apply to you, the stronger the case:
- You rely on Google for enquiries and want proper control over pages, titles, redirects and structured data
- You have, or will have, more than a handful of service or location pages
- You want to own the site outright and be able to move hosts or developers
- You need it to connect to other tools (CRM, booking, email marketing, quoting)
- You expect the business to grow and the site to grow with it
- You’re happy to pay for maintenance or do the updates yourself
Most of the service businesses we work with tick four or five of those. A tradie who wants separate pages for each service and each town they cover is a typical example. The site we built for Richmond River Roofing in Ballina is a good example of the type: a service business on WordPress and Elementor, where new pages can be added without a rebuild.
The question to ask before you choose
Forget the platform debate for a minute and answer this: in three years, who is going to be looking after this website, and what will it need to do that it doesn’t do today?
If the answer is “nobody, and nothing”, rent a builder and don’t feel bad about it. If the answer involves growth, Google, or wanting to own what you’ve paid for, WordPress is still the safest long-term bet, provided someone is responsible for keeping it healthy.
If you’re currently paying a monthly fee for a site you’ll never own, our website ownership page explains how a one-off rebuild compares, and there’s a free review if you want a second opinion. You can also see how we approach new builds on our web design page.