Ask for a website quote and most of what comes back will be WordPress. There’s a reason: it runs 40.2% of all websites, every developer knows it, and there is a plugin for everything. There’s also a reason we don’t build small-business sites on it. This article lays out both sides honestly, because for some businesses WordPress is still the right answer.
The two approaches, in one paragraph each
WordPress is a content management system: a program running on a server, with a database, that builds each page when a visitor asks for it. You log in, write in an editor, press Publish, and the program takes care of the rest. Its power comes from plugins — tens of thousands of add-ons for forms, SEO, galleries, shops, booking, anything.
A static site is the page, already built. The site is generated in advance into plain files — HTML, CSS, images — and those files are copied to a global network that hands them to visitors. There is no program running when someone visits, no database, nothing to compute. Content lives in simple text files or a lightweight editor, and publishing means rebuilding the files, which takes seconds.
Same content, same design, very different machinery underneath.
Speed
Static wins, and it isn’t close. A static page has a server response time of a few tens of milliseconds because the server only has to find a file. A WordPress page has to run PHP, hit the database and run every active plugin before it can respond — half a second to several seconds on typical shared hosting. Caching plugins narrow the gap but add another moving part, and they break.
The weight of the page is the other half. A WordPress theme with a page builder loads the code for every widget on every page. Elementor alone is on 31.5% of WordPress sites. Our three static demo sites — with photos, animation and real content — weigh 120–250 KB and score 98–100 on Google’s mobile test. The median page on the web weighs about 2.4 MB according to the HTTP Archive, and builder-based WordPress pages are rarely lighter than that.
Security
This is where the gap is widest, and where small businesses get hurt.
Patchstack, which tracks WordPress vulnerabilities, reported 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025 — up 42% on the year before. Three findings from that report matter to a small-business owner:
- 91% were in plugins, 9% in themes, and only six in WordPress itself. The core software is well maintained; the risk is the add-ons you install to make it useful.
- 46% had no fix available when they were publicly disclosed. You couldn’t have updated your way out of them.
- For the most-targeted vulnerabilities, the median time from disclosure to mass exploitation was five hours. Attack bots scan for the new hole the same afternoon.
The practical consequence: a WordPress site needs someone watching it. Updates within hours, a security plugin, backups, and a plan for the day it gets hacked anyway. That is a monthly cost in money or in your own time, and for a bakery or a solicitor it is a strange thing to have to think about.
A static site has no login page, no database, no plugins and no code running on the server. There is almost nothing to attack. The files could be defaced only by someone getting into the hosting account itself, which is protected like any other account with a strong password and two-factor login.
Cost over three years
The build price of the two can be similar. The running cost isn’t.
WordPress: hosting that can run PHP and a database (€5–30 a month for anything decent), premium theme and plugin licences (commonly €50–200 a year across a typical site), and maintenance — either a care plan from a developer or your own hours. Over three years, the running cost often exceeds the original build.
Static: hosting is free or close to it for a small-business site, because serving files costs almost nothing — we use Cloudflare’s network. No plugin licences. No security updates, because there is nothing to update. The only recurring item is the domain name.
Editing: the honest trade-off
This is the one area where WordPress genuinely wins for some businesses, and it’s worth being clear about it.
If someone on your team needs to log in and change the menu every morning, post three times a week, or manage a shop with hundreds of products, WordPress’s editor and admin area are built for exactly that, and they’re familiar. A static site can have an editor too — a small content interface that saves to the text files and triggers a rebuild — but it’s a lighter tool, and large daily changes by non-technical staff are not its strength.
For the majority of small-business sites, though, the content changes a few times a year: new opening hours, a price update, a new team member, a blog post a month. For that pattern, sending the change to the person who built the site, or making a small edit in a simple editor, costs less than running a full CMS every day of the year to be ready for it.
When WordPress is the right choice
- A shop with a large catalogue. WooCommerce runs on about one in five WordPress sites for a reason; inventory, variants, checkout and payments are solved problems there.
- A publication with several authors posting daily, editorial workflow, scheduled posts.
- Membership or community sites — logins, paid content, forums.
- A business whose staff must edit constantly and can’t wait for anyone.
If that’s you, use WordPress, keep the plugin count low, pay for proper hosting and a maintenance plan, and treat security as a line item.
When a static site is the right choice
- A brochure or services site of one to fifteen pages: who you are, what you do, proof, contact.
- A site where content changes a few times a month or less.
- Any business for which speed and first impressions are the point — local services, professional firms, hospitality.
- Anyone who doesn’t want a security and maintenance job on top of their actual job.
That describes most small businesses, which is why it’s what we build. The pages are generated with a modern static framework, the design is drawn for the client rather than picked from a theme, and the finished site is measured for speed and carbon before it ships.
The rule of thumb
If your website is a tool your staff use every day, you may need a CMS, and WordPress is a reasonable one. If your website is a shop window that should load instantly, never go down and never get hacked, build it static.
Not sure which group you’re in? Run your current site through the meter on our homepage to see where it stands, read what each of our three packages includes, or ask for a free 24-hour audit — we’ll tell you honestly if what you have should stay on WordPress.