WordPress vs Custom Website – What’s Better? (Pros & Cons)

Do you want to know the difference between WordPress vs custom website? Or wondering which approach is best for building your first website? If yes, then here we go!

WordPress is an open-source website builder that lets you build any website. It comes with tens of thousands of themes and plugins that help you build the perfect website.

Yet, the main question arises whether WordPress is best for building professional websites.

Or else you should build a custom website from scratch with the help of a web developer. There are times when a custom website makes sense. It allows you to customize every aspect of the site – look and function exactly the way you want.

Thus if you’re confused about which of these options would be better for your website, then don’t worry. In this article, we’ll compare WordPress with custom websites in different aspects of website building. So, let’s dig in!

A. What is WordPress? – Overview

WordPress is the most popular open-source Content Management System (CMS) platform. It allows you to create and manage every type of website from blogs, portfolios, and online stores.

Originally, WordPress was first created in 2003 as a blogging platform. Since then it has been able to become one of the most widely used CMS platforms on the web.

Over time, it has been able to cover over 43% of websites on the internet. This means WordPress is used by 63.3% of all the websites on the web.

Furthermore, it comes with an intuitive user-friendly interface. This makes it easier for beginners to build websites. In fact, it’s extremely customizable that gives you total control over your website’s layout, appearance, and operation.

Additionally, it offers a wide range of themes and plugins. It allows you to create unique websites with advanced features. Hence, you can easily create and edit content, manage media files, and customize the appearance and functionality of your website.

Eventually, WordPress does allow you to create a custom WordPress site. The only thing required for that would be able to create a custom theme for that site. However, that won’t be publicly available for download or sale. In that case, you either have to be a developer or hire a developer to develop a custom theme.

As mentioned above, WordPress is an open-source platform so it’s completely free to use. Indeed, it’s maintained by a large community of users who’re constantly working to improve the platform’s features and security.

Besides, you can download this platform for free from its official website, i.e. WordPress.org. Once you’ve downloaded the software, you need to install it on a web hosting account and then start building your website.

Today, WordPress has become a part of millions of websites worldwide. Now through it, you can build websites from small personal blogs to large corporate websites.

B. What is a Custom Website? – Overview

A custom website is a website that is generally generated from scratch. It’s coded from the bottom to suit whatever unique needs and requirements of a particular business or individual.

Unlike pre-made themes and built-in tools, custom websites are built from scratch that are tailored to the client’s specifications. When you build a website from scratch, you’ll always build taking into account their unique needs and requirements.

When it comes to the development of a custom website, it usually involves professional web designers and developers. They’ll work closely with the client to create a website that is functional, easy to use, and visually appealing.

Having said that, custom website development will always follow a particular approach. Starting off with research, designing, coding, testing, and launching. Hence, it’s a hefty process that has to go with lots of trial and error before it goes over the internet.

Unlike WordPress, it gives unlimited possibilities that can include a wide range of features and functionalities. Such as eCommerce capabilities, custom forms, interactive elements, and more.

A custom-built website is perfect for businesses and organizations that require a unique look matching their brand and specific functionality. Such as online shops, booking systems, membership, subscriptions, etc.

This way you can build any website that maintains a strong brand identity and stands out from your competitors. 

In addition, it includes better control over the design and functionality of the site, improved security, and more. In fact, it allows you to scale and adapt the site to meet changing business needs.

However, custom websites can be more expensive and time-consuming in comparison to WordPress. Hence, making a good decision depends on the specific needs and goals of the business or individual.

C. WordPress vs Custom Website: Ease of Use

Many people think that building a website is like building a spaceship. If you’re also among those then don’t worry everyone has the same thoughts at the beginning. Or else you’ve not been introduced to tools like website builders.

Nowadays, you can find several free and premium website builders. This allows users to build the website of their choice. Or else if you can hire a developer or you can code down from scratch then you can go with that too.

Ultimately, it depends upon the specific needs of the user and their level of technical expertise. Having said that, let’s find out whether WordPress is better or a custom-built website with ease of use.

There is no debate that WordPress has to be the easier option when it comes to ease of use. Anyone whether you’re a programming expert or a newbie can create and manage a website.

No worries if you don’t know anything about advanced programming. You can simply use their drag-and-drop tool to easily create and manage your website. It comes with a user-friendly interface alongside a wide range of templates, themes, and plugins. 

In fact, this will guarantee to make it easy to customize your site without having to write a single code.

But, creating a custom website from scratch requires a higher level of technical expertise and coding knowledge. If you’re someone who has good knowledge of it, then, you can custom code yourself from the ground.

Or else, you’ll have to hire an expert who can help you create a custom website from scratch. Unlike WordPress, it does offer more flexibility and control over the design and functionality of the site.

Also, creating a single page in WordPress takes a couple of minutes, and a custom website can be more time-consuming and expensive.

D. WordPress vs Custom Website: Designs and Customization

A website must have an elegant look and an eye-catching design. No doubt, that’s why the look of a website matters. As it determines how much your visitors would love to stick around and interact with your website. 

At the same time, when building a website, it should provide you full control over the look and customization of your website.

When it comes to WordPress allows its users to create their choice of the website without any coding skills. It comes with a wide range of customizable themes and templates that help you create a professional-looking website quickly and easily.

To begin with, you can easily select from a vast library of pre-designed themes that are available in both free and premium versions. After that, you can customize those themes to some extent, such as changing the color scheme or adding your logo.

Additionally, it also includes thousands of WordPress plugins that you can add to extend the functionality of your website. Such as contact forms, social media integrations, landing pages, and eCommerce capabilities.

Despite all this, WordPress still comes with its own limitations when it comes to design and customization. Although WordPress offers pre-designed templates, it still becomes a challenge to create a unique and custom design out of it.

Likewise, installing a new plugin just for one particular feature can sometimes totally affect your website speed and performance.

Similarly, if you’re really looking to create a custom website using WordPress then you can do that too. However, for that, you’ve to develop a custom theme to work with your custom website. This is only suitable for those who’re developers themselves or can hire a web developer to develop a custom theme. 

Nonetheless, a custom website built from scratch provides complete control over every aspect of the design and functionality. You can hire a professional web developer who can offer a truly custom solution tailored to your business needs.

Above all, you can design it to be more unique and visually appealing than a pre-designed WordPress theme. Besides, it has been found to be faster and more optimized, providing a better user experience for your visitors.

In addition, you can create and add your own custom features without affecting your website speed and performance.  Although it can be challenging, it’s quite worth it after all.

E. WordPress vs Custom Website: Scalability

The great thing about any website is its ability to grow and expand. Whether it’s a WordPress site or a custom-built site, it should always have room for scaling up without any issues.

When you start building a website, nobody really thinks about how much your website will grow over a period of time. You always start with something basic yet functional.

For instance, you might start your personal website with 4-5 pages and as you go on you can scale it from ten pages to twenty. Till this point, you won’t find any issues or trouble with scalability.

The problem only arises when you’re running a successful eCommerce site that is now going to expand from selling 100 products to 1000 products. Isn’t it massive? Can your existing site be able to cope with it?

When it comes to scalability, both WordPress and custom websites can be scalable to handle a large amount of traffic and content.

WordPress is best known for its scalability. It can easily handle large amounts of traffic and content with the support of caching, Content Delivery Networks (CDNs), and more.

In fact, WordPress can perform much better in this regard than a custom website. In WordPress, one can easily add multiple new pages to a WordPress site quickly. Meanwhile, the same thing for a custom website will take much more labor-intensive when it comes to scaling.

Similarly, custom-built websites built for large enterprises may use a cloud-based infrastructure, load balancing, and other advanced techniques. As a result, it won’t just only increase labor work but also requires extensive expenses in terms of scalability.

Overall, in both WordPress and custom websites, the scalability of a website depends on the resources and expertise available.

F. WordPress vs Custom Website: SEO

When building a new website, one of the key elements is to have a search-engine-optimized website. A good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will ensure that your website will rank higher in search engines. As a result, this will drive more organic traffic to your site. Isn’t that what we want at all?

To your surprise, both WordPress and custom websites are well-optimized for search engines. Although, both of them may have different approaches to optimization.

Talking about WordPress comes with SEO-friendly features such as well-formatted URLs, meta tags, optimized images, and more. The best part is it offers varieties of WordPress plugins that can be used to enhance SEO efforts.

For instance, you can install plugins like Yoast SEO. This is a popular SEO plugin that provides helpful tips for optimizing your content and creating search engine-friendly meta tags.

In fact, its large community of developers is constantly creating and updating plugins to optimize the platform for search engines. Likewise, you can also find many themes that are well-optimized for SEO.

Just make sure that you put an effort to find themes and plugins that are well-optimized for SEO. 

Therefore, WordPress is an excellent SEO-friendly platform that allows you to create search-engine-friendly websites. However, as you’re working with a CMS it does still moderately constrain you on what can and can’t be done. 

On the other hand, a custom website does offer you complete control over every aspect of your site, including SEO. Unlike WordPress, you won’t have to suffer in terms of doing things freely to exactly what you want.

Custom websites are made from scratch so you’ve complete control over their code, structure, and content. In fact, it’ll be obvious that optimization will be from the get-go instead of trying to optimize your site after it’s been built.

Hence, it makes it easier to optimize your site for search engines, as everything is designed with SEO in mind.

G. WordPress vs Custom Website: Pricing

By far in this article, we’ve already come to know that both WordPress and custom websites allow you to build your dream website. Having said that all, when it comes to choosing between them it always comes down to cost. 

At the very beginning only, we’ll tell you that the cost for both options depends upon the niche of your website. 

For example, if you want to build an eCommerce store like Amazon, you’ll have to spend a lot of money.  It’s because when building such types of websites you cannot compromise on security, payment gateways, marketing, and more.

Similarly, for personal and portfolio websites, you can lower the cost and be smart enough to go with simple yet dynamic designs. 

When it comes to pricing, WordPress is generally more affordable than a custom website. We’ve already found out a little bit about why WordPress is affordable and cheap. But let’s list out below for more understanding: 

1. WordPress is a Free Platform – We’ve already stated earlier that WordPress is an open-source platform. Therefore, this means it has to be free to use. All you need is to download the software and install it on your own web hosting account and be ready to go.
2. Free Themes and Plugins – WordPress includes a huge library of free and paid themes and plugins that allows you to customize your website the way you like. For a beginner, you can go with the free version and later on you purchase the premium version for more features. In this way, you won’t have to hire a developer to create a unique website from scratch.
3. Maintenance and Updates – The best part about WordPress is that it releases regular updates to its software. This helps to improve security and fix bugs. As a result, you won’t have to hire anyone to fix your issue. Or else you can contact the support team of respective themes and plugins for dedicated support.

Having said that, it doesn’t mean that WordPress will be absolutely free from building a website to launching it. Although you can create a website for free, you need to purchase web hosting to launch your site. Similarly, you may need to pay for premium themes or plugins to access additional features or customization options.

On the other hand, building a custom website from scratch will require not only technical expertise and time. But also it’s expensive to build in the first place. 

You might have to hire a team of web developers who can create a custom design, code it, and implement the necessary functionality. The time and cost for a custom website are mostly high due to every aspect of it being customized to your specific needs.

Lastly, the cost of a custom website can vary depending on the complexity of the design and the features required.

H. WordPress vs Custom Website: Pros and Cons

Creating a website always requires some planning and decision-making. The very first thing would be whether to build a website from scratch using custom code or use a pre-built WordPress template.

No doubt, both WordPress and custom websites are the best solutions when one’s considering building a website. We’ve already compared them and discussed them in the above section.

Therefore, let’s list out the pros and cons of WordPress vs custom website to help make your decision easier.

Pros of WordPress

• WordPress is an open-source solution, so it’s completely free to use and perfect for individuals who are on a tight budget. Hence, comparatively, it’s extremely affordable.
• It’s an easy-to-use website builder. It’s not only beginner-friendly but also lets you build your website in a matter of minutes.
• Unlike a custom website, you don’t have to build your website from scratch using code. Therefore, you can build your website using themes and plugins.
• It comes with thousands of customizable themes and templates to choose from.
• Includes several plugins (both free and premium) that help you greatly extend the functionality of your WordPress site.
• Has the best built-in SEO solutions for a fully-optimized website or else you can find tons of great SEO plugins available for WordPress.
• Being an open-source platform, it has a huge community of WordPress users worldwide. Therefore, you can have long-term support from around the world without any extra cost.

Cons of WordPress

• No doubt, it gives you lots of customization options. Yet you cannot fully customize in any way for whichever specific use case you may be looking for. In that case, you’ve to custom-code yourself for the result you want.
• The problem with its user-friendly themes is that changing the theme can alter your content without any of your knowledge. As a result, it can lead to the previously well-functioning website falling apart when its theme is changed.
• Although WordPress offers tons of free themes and plugins. These free products are equipped with only basic features. Therefore, you’ll ultimately have to anyhow purchase their premium versions and they’re quite expensive.
• Nowadays WordPress comes with regular updates and security patches. Yet it’s still vulnerable to hackers. Even more, if its themes and plugins are not regularly updated then it can expose your website to security vulnerabilities.

Pros of Custom Website

• Unlike the open-source WordPress platform, custom websites are built from scratch. Therefore, no unauthorized person will know how the website is built and can access it.  Hence, it guarantees reliable data security and privacy.
• With custom websites, you don’t have to rely on template designs for your website. Instead, it gives you the freedom to build your unique custom design for your website.
• You don’t have to compromise the look and functionality of your website when it undergoes any maintenance or system update.
• In comparison to WordPress sites, a custom-built website is found to be more search-engine friendly. This guarantees that your website will rank higher in search engines than the one built with WordPress templates.
• A custom-built website will give you lots of space to grow your business. In no time, you can make any changes to your business in the future by incorporating your company’s branding.
• Lastly, you can directly contact or hire professional web developers who specialize in all types of websites. This ensures more reliable and excellent support if any bug or problem occurs.

Cons of Custom Website

• As custom websites are built from scratch, it’s typically going to be more expensive and take more time to build.
• To be able to build a custom website from scratch, you’ll have to hire a professional web developer. Or else you must be a programming expert who can code themselves to build any type of website of their choice. Hence, it’s not so beginner-friendly at all.
• Unlike in WordPress, you’ll have to follow a coordinated approach or steps to build a professional-looking website. If not then you’ll find yourself in a loop of complexities in web development.

I. Final Verdict – Which is Better?

Generally speaking, it’s even quite hard to give a definitive answer to which one is better – WordPress or a custom website. It usually depends upon the specific needs and preferences of each individual or business module.

However, WordPress is a popular user-friendly CMS platform that can be easily customized with themes and plugins. Anybody, even beginners can easily build, manage and launch their website without having to write a single code.

WordPress is a great option for those who’re looking for affordable website development. Hence, it’s an excellent choice for bloggers, small businesses, and non-technical users who want to quickly and easily create a website.

Nevertheless, its huge community of users worldwide is available for one another to make WordPress better than before.

On the other hand, a custom website is much more secure and gives you more customization options than WordPress. You can harness its flexibility and uniqueness to build a website tailored to meet the specific needs of a business.

However, to be able to build a professional-looking website from scratch, you need to have technical skills and expertise. If not then, you need to hire a web developer who can help you build your dream project the way you want.

Therefore, building a custom website requires more time, resources, and technical expertise. Indeed, custom websites are ideal for those who’re looking for flexibility and control over their website’s design and functionality.

Therefore, building a custom website requires more time, resources, and technical expertise. Indeed, custom websites are ideal for those who’re looking for flexibility and control over their website’s design and functionality.

Ultimately, the choice between the two will come to your budget and business needs.

J. FAQs – WordPress vs Custom Website

Conclusion

That’s all folks! We’ve come to the end of this comparison article between WordPress vs custom website.

Finally, we would like to say that both of these options are the best in their game. We hope this article helped you to know the differences between WordPress and custom websites.

If you have any further queries about WordPress and the custom websites, then please leave a comment below. We’ll try to get back to you as soon as possible.

Also, let us know which one you are going to use for your next project. You can share your pick in the comments section below. Indeed, make sure to share this article with your friends and family too.

You might like our other articles like how to check if a website is built on WordPress and the best WordPress alternatives. Make sure to go through it once.

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