Why I stopped building small business sites on WordPress

A great many small business websites in Devon run on WordPress, and for a long time I would have built yours on it too. It is free, it is everywhere and there is a plugin for nearly anything. I have nothing against it, and for some businesses it is still the right choice. I will say which ones further down.

But the sites I build are for tradespeople, cafés, practices and shops: one to ten pages that need to load quickly on a phone and change a few times a year. For that job, WordPress brings far more than it needs. So every site I build now is plain HTML, written by hand. This is why.

What a small business site actually needs

Strip it back and the list is short. Who you are and what you do. The towns you cover. Photographs of your work. Your prices, if you publish them. A phone number to tap, a WhatsApp button and a short form. And all of it quick on a weak signal, readable by everyone and easy for Google to understand.

None of that needs a database, a page builder or a single plugin. It needs well written pages, properly sized photographs and someone who knows how to put them together.

Everything WordPress brings along

A typical WordPress site is WordPress itself, a theme, often a page builder, and a handful of plugins: one for the contact form, one for search engines, one for speed, one for security, one for backups. Each comes from a different developer, and each has its own updates.

That is where the ongoing work hides. Most WordPress security problems come in through plugins and themes that have fallen behind on updates, not through WordPress itself. Updates now and then break a layout, or each other, so somebody has to check the site after each round. And a single wrong line in one server settings file is enough to take a whole site offline until the hosting company steps in.

Every plugin is a small promise that somebody will keep it updated.

None of this is a disaster on its own. Added together, it is a lot of upkeep for a site whose words change a few times a year.

What I build instead

Your site is a set of plain HTML pages, written by hand, with your photographs sized for phones. There is no database, no password login for bots to guess (the editor sits behind a one-time code sent to your email) and no plugin to update. What sits on the server is simply the finished pages.

Those pages are kept in a private GitHub repository, which records every version of the site, and served by Cloudflare Pages from data centres around the world, including in the UK. When someone in Honiton opens your site, the pages are already built and arrive from somewhere close. That is a large part of why it is quick on a phone.

It also costs nothing to host. There is no server to rent and no licence to renew. The only running cost is your domain, around ten to fifteen pounds a year, registered in your name.

The one thing WordPress did better

The fair argument for WordPress has always been editing. You can log in and change your opening hours without phoning anybody. With a hand built site, that used to mean sending your web designer a message and waiting.

So I built an editor, and every site I make now comes with it. You go to your site’s /edit page, sign in with a code sent to your email, and click the words, photos or buttons you want to change. You can hide a section, such as a seasonal offer, and bring it back later. Nothing goes live until you press Publish, and about a minute later the change is on your site.

What you cannot do is break it. The layout, the styling and the menus are locked, so a slip of the mouse cannot knock a page out of shape. And every version is kept, so any change can be undone. For bigger changes, like a page for a new service, you message me, or it is covered by a care plan.

When WordPress is still the right answer

If several people publish articles every week, if you need members to log in, or if you rely on a plugin that does something particular to your trade, WordPress may well be the better fit. If you want to sell products online, a dedicated shop platform such as Shopify is usually better than either.

If that sounds like you, I will say so on the first call and point you towards someone who specialises in it. It saves us both time.

What you end up with

• A fast site with nothing to update and no hosting bill.
• An editor for everyday changes that cannot break the design.
• Every version of the site saved, so nothing is ever lost.
• Your domain in your name from day one.
• If you ever leave, I move the site to your own accounts or send you every file. It is plain HTML, so it runs on any host.

That last point matters most to me. A website should be something you own outright, not something you rent from a platform or from the person who built it.