WordPress or custom: a decision aid

WordPress or a hand built website: which is right?

The answer hangs on a single question: how often do you change the content yourself? Anyone maintaining posts, dates or offers weekly needs an interface for it, and WordPress is the most widespread one. Anyone who sets the site up once and then changes a line twice a year is paying with WordPress for an engine they never start, and maintaining it regardless.

Everything else usually raised in this debate is secondary. Both routes can be fast, both can be accessible, both can rank well. The difference lies in operation, and operation costs money and attention.

What does WordPress cost over three years?

With me €3,664: €1,900 for the setup and 36 months at €49 for maintenance. That flat fee covers the regular updates to core, theme and extensions, the backup, monitoring of availability and a response time of one business day. All amounts are VAT-exempt as a small business pursuant to § 6 Abs 1 Z 27 UStG (Austrian VAT Act).

This maintenance is not an add on business but the precondition. A WordPress installation consists of the core, a theme and typically ten to twenty extensions, all of which are maintained individually. If it goes untouched for a year, it is not a security risk in theory but in practice: automated attacks look for exactly those outdated version numbers.

What does a hand built website cost over three years?

Between roughly €950 and €2,654, depending on whether a maintenance contract comes with it. The lower bound is the case without ongoing support: €890 for the build plus around €20 per year for the domain, because a statically delivered site sits within the free tier at the common providers. The upper bound is the same build plus €49 support per month, so €2,654 over three years.

The difference from WordPress is not the build price but the question of whether doing nothing is dangerous. A static site without a database and without a login screen has no attack surface created by a missing update. Anyone taking the support anyway is buying changes, monitoring and a contact person, not the defense of a risk they built in themselves.

From what company size is which route worth it?

For one person businesses and small teams up to around five people, WordPress is rarely worth it. At that size there is almost never anybody who maintains content regularly; the site is filled during the build and barely touched afterwards. That is exactly when the business pays three years of maintenance for an editing interface that got used twice.

From around ten people the picture flips, as soon as there is a role that includes communication: marketing, office management, inside sales. There, content arises continually, such as job ads, references and news, and access through an interface saves more time than the maintenance costs. The third case is independent of size: anyone running a shop needs a system, and then the discussion is no longer WordPress versus hand built but which shop system to choose; what a shop costs with me is on the online shop page.

What about speed?

A hand built static site is usually faster, but the gap is smaller than WordPress critics claim. The difference does not come from WordPress itself but from the way WordPress is mostly deployed: a purchased theme with a thousand settings, a visual page builder and fifteen extensions load scripts on every page that 95 percent of visitors never need.

For search engine assessment, the Core Web Vitals count: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1. Those values are achievable with WordPress too, given a lean theme and a cache. They are not achievable with a page builder on 5 euro hosting, and that is the combination sold most often in the market.

What about accessibility?

With WordPress it hangs on the theme, with a hand built site on your own decisions. A purchased theme brings its own contrasts, controls and heading structure, and if there are errors in there, they come back after every update. That is the practical reason why fixing things after the fact turns out more expensive with WordPress than with a new build.

For businesses that fall under the Barrierefreiheitsgesetz (BaFG), the Austrian act implementing the European Accessibility Act, that is a hard selection criterion: have them show you that the proposed theme has been tested before it is bought. Who is affected and who is not is covered in Accessibility law: who is actually affected.

How do you get out of a dependency again?

By settling before the order who owns what. With WordPress the starting position is comparatively good: content and database can be exported, another provider can take over. It gets difficult when the layout sits in a proprietary page builder whose license belongs to the previous provider, because then the export is a pile of unusable shortcodes.

With a hand built site everything hangs on whether you get the source code. In my projects handing over the source code is part of the delivery, including a walkthrough. That is the point at which I would compare offers before looking at the price: a site you cannot take with you is a rental with a one-off deposit.

What does the market in Carinthia say?

15 of the 24 providers reviewed sell essentially the same thing: WordPress plus local SEO for SMEs, in some cases described word for word. That figure comes from my own survey of 24 August 2026, in which I opened and reviewed 24 Carinthian provider websites.

That is not a verdict on quality but a market observation with a practical consequence: if you obtain three quotes, there is a high probability you get WordPress three times, even when your use case needs no editing interface. So ask actively why this system is being proposed, and what the proposal would cost without an editing interface.

What do I recommend in practice?

WordPress where there is ongoing editorial work, a hand built site in all other cases. I offer both and earn more on WordPress from €1,900 than on a hand built website from €890, which is why it matters to me that the recommendation hangs on your use case and not on my margin.

The most honest test takes two minutes: write down what you would have changed on your website in the last twelve months if it had been easy. If there are more than ten entries, take WordPress. If there are two, take the hand built site and let the changes run within the maintenance contract. What both routes cost in total is covered in What a website in Carinthia costs in 2026. The website check measures from the outside where your current installation stands on load time and mandatory disclosures, before you decide on a route.