There are many pros and cons to both WordPress vs custom web design. As a business, it’s important to have a beautiful and friendly website best suited to users' goals and needs. If your business is targeting customers online, a good website is crucial to your success.

Even if your website is only informational, you’re still going to see growth in potential customers with a well-done website. If you are trying to set up an online presence for your new business, it may be challenging to grasp just how much thinking, planning, designing, and strategizing go into website design.

There are two ways to have a website for your business: using WordPress or getting a custom-built website. However, each option has some pros and cons and offers different advantages.

In this article, you will learn the differences and help to decide which option is best for taking your website to the next level!

Pros and Cons of Using WordPress

WordPress is a well-known CMS and powers over 43.3% of websites on the internet. It’s simple and easy to use and you can create any type of website from a simple blog to a complex business website. Here are some of the pros and cons of using a WordPress website for your business:

Pros

Extremely affordable: The WordPress framework is open-source software. This means that WordPress is also completely free. It has hundreds of free themes and plugins and can be invaluable for businesses that are on a tight budget.

It scales well: WordPress offers very good scalable features. You can build a simple website that costs next to nothing; however, you can add the required features and functionality to your website with the help of paid themes and plugins.

Modular design: Adding new plugins and features are easy due to the WordPress platform’s modular design. Even if you are not a tech person, you only need basic technical skills in order to install a plugin on your website.

Cons

Good plugins are all paid: You get a wide range of free plugins on WordPress, most of the ones designed for business environments are paid. This increases the total cost of the website if you are using paid themes and tools.

Generic code: The WordPress framework was created for a variety of things so it contains a lot of unnecessary generic code. As per Google, your website loading time should be very fast to rank high in the search results, you cannot achieve this with the WordPress framework. Even with a lot of optimization work and optimization plugins, you cannot beat the custom build website.

Vulnerability and updates

WordPress has some security issues and gets big attention from potential hackers. So you need to select your themes and plugins very carefully and update everything frequently. Installing new updates is important for your website's health and sometimes it can break your website too.

Pros and Cons of Creating a Custom Web Design

The biggest and most popular companies in the world use custom web design instead of WordPress. This is mostly because you can make it look and feel however you want. There are many advantages of custom web design vs WordPress.

Pros

Complete control over the website: If you choose a website custom-built for your business, you can control all of its functions and structure. Custom web design doesn’t use any third-party components like plugins. Most elements will be coded from scratch and seamlessly connected to the website.

Unique design for your brand: Getting a custom-built website allows businesses to make it looks and feels as per your brand message. Every aspect of custom web design can be tailored to business needs and goals, making it truly unique. You can customize your site design to showcase your products in a unique way.

High security and performance: WordPress has major security and performance issues as they are built on the same framework. It is open source which means anyone can inspect the source code and exploit security gaps. Custom web designs are built from the scratch and there is no way for hackers to know how the website is built and how they can exploit it.

Cons

It can get expensive: Custom web designs are considerably more expensive than WordPress websites. Even if you hire a web design company or a freelance web designer, the cost of design, creation process, and hosting expenses keep adding. Even if you just want to make small changes, it can get expensive very quickly. You get a high-quality website but it can be out of budget for startups and casual small businesses.

Difficult to maintain alone: Once your custom-built website is ready, you’ll need someone to maintain and keep it running. WordPress is built for easy customization and maintenance and you can do it alone easily but for custom web design, you may require a specialist’s attention.

These websites are more complex than WordPress and only those who have ample technical skills can fix them if anything goes wrong.

So You need a professional to maintain it so have some budget for it. Secondly, every time you want to make any changes or add something new to the website, you will need to get a specialist to make the modifications.

Which Design Option is Right for You?

Now you understand the pros and cons of WordPress vs custom web design, which option is the right fit for you? You need to consider many things like your budget for the website, time duration, and your individual website needs. Here are top 8 web design tips you shouldn’t ignore while creating the design of your website.

Ultimately, if you are a startup or small business owner and setting up your online presence, the best option for you is to choose WordPress and customize your theme to your liking. It is affordable, fast, and accessible. Even if you need more options and functionality for your website, you can buy a theme and some plugins.

If you are a big company with a flexible budget and a long list of customization, you should go with custom web design. You can have someone design your website layout reflecting your brand and hire a specialist to code and build a custom website.

At the end of the day, there are pros and cons to WordPress and custom web design. Some businesses benefit from a large and robust web design while others thrive with a simple WordPress website. Either way, knowing the pros and cons of both options will help you make up your mind and choose what’s best for your business.