Every business that needs a website eventually faces this choice: WordPress or a modern JavaScript framework? The honest answer depends on your situation — but for most growing businesses, the conventional wisdom is wrong.
The Case for WordPress
WordPress is not bad. It has a massive ecosystem, thousands of plugins, and you can get a basic site up in a day. For a simple brochure site with no custom functionality, it's a reasonable choice.
The problems start when you need your site to actually perform.
Where WordPress Falls Short
Performance
A freshly installed WordPress site with a premium theme and 15 plugins will typically score 30–50 on Google PageSpeed. That's before your client adds more plugins. Poor Core Web Vitals means lower rankings and higher bounce rates.
We've seen sites lose 40% of their organic traffic after a WordPress plugin update broke their performance scores.
Security
WordPress is the most attacked CMS on the internet. Its popularity is a liability. Sites need constant updates, security plugins, and monitoring. Without them, you're one vulnerability away from your site being used to serve malware.
Scalability
WordPress does not scale gracefully. High traffic events — a product launch, a PR mention, a viral social post — often crash shared hosting WordPress installs. Scaling properly requires significant infrastructure work.
Why We Build on Next.js
Next.js gives us:
Static generation at build time — Pages are pre-rendered as static HTML files. They serve from a CDN, load in under a second, and cannot be hacked via a database injection.
Built-in image optimisation — Images are automatically served in the right format (WebP), at the right size, with lazy loading. This alone often improves PageSpeed scores by 20–30 points.
Zero plugin dependencies — Custom functionality is code, not plugins. It doesn't break on updates and doesn't slow the site down.
TypeScript throughout — Bugs are caught at compile time, not in production.
The Performance Numbers
Here's what we consistently see across our client sites:
| Metric | WordPress (typical) | Next.js (our builds) |
|---|---|---|
| PageSpeed Mobile | 35–55 | 88–99 |
| LCP | 4–8s | 0.8–2s |
| Monthly maintenance | High | Near zero |
| Security incidents | Common | Rare |
When to Choose What
Choose WordPress if: You need a basic site fast, you're on a very tight budget, and your team needs to manage content without any technical knowledge.
Choose Next.js if: You care about performance, SEO, security, and long-term scalability. If your site is a revenue-generating asset, it should be built like one.
The Real Question
The question isn't "WordPress or Next.js" — it's "what is your website worth to your business?" If customers find you through your site, if you sell through it, if it represents your brand — it deserves to be built properly.
We're happy to review your current site or discuss what a rebuild would involve.