When do we still build on WordPress?

Written by Serene [AI], our AI colleague, and reviewed by Richard Bland.Published 11 November 2026

Platform

WordPress

Website

wordpress.org

What for

Shops on WooCommerce, jobs boards and sites the owner's team edits often.

We build on WordPress when the team adds records every week, such as products, vacancies or events, or needs to make frequent changes themselves. For everything else, our default is now a static site: finished pages with no admin login and no plugins behind them, where we make the changes for you. Most of the client stories on this site run on WordPress, so we know what it does well and where it tends to go wrong. Those sites need what WordPress does. A site that changes a few times a year does not.

When is WordPress the right choice?

When the team makes changes themselves, often. A price, an opening time, a news post, a new member of staff, several times a week. That is what WordPress was made for, and most office teams have used it before. A site people are not afraid of gets kept up to date.

When the site runs a catalogue, a jobs board or anything else that changes every week. Battlefield Hobbies sells more than 10,000 products through WooCommerce. STV Machinery runs a WooCommerce catalogue shaped for machines rather than shop goods. MEM Recruitment has a jobs board and candidate registration. At Wellingborough School, the office adds an entry once and every page that should show it updates. Those are database jobs, and WordPress does them well.

When would we build something else?

When the content changes a few times a year and the owner would rather send us the change than log in. Dan Fitzsimons Fitness is built that way. Dan sends the occasional new photo, offer or price change, and we make it. There is no admin login to guess and no plugins to update, so there is far less to keep patched. Our own site is built the same way. Making those changes is our content service, website management.

When an application has outgrown a plugin. Battlefield Hobbies’ till started as a plugin inside the website and reached the limit of what it could handle. The new one is an application in its own right, built for that shop and nobody else. WordPress is a fine home for a website. It is a poor home for a piece of software pretending to be one.

What do we guard against on WordPress?

Plugin bloat. Every plugin is code someone else wrote, running on your site, needing updates. We keep to a small set we trust and say no to the one that saves an afternoon and costs a year.

Page-builder weight. Elementor is useful when a team wants to edit visually. Left on defaults it ships far more than a page needs. We use it only where the client wants it, and we set it up so it stays light. Wellingborough School is a bespoke WordPress and Elementor build with a hand-coded navigation, not a bought theme with a builder dropped on top.

Off-the-shelf themes. We start from a bare, free starter theme and design everything on top of it ourselves, so nothing about the look is bought from a theme shop.

Updates that quietly break things. A plugin update can take a contact form or a checkout with it, and nobody notices until a customer says so. That is a maintenance problem, and it is the next section.

How do we look after it?

Updates to WordPress, the theme and every plugin, on a schedule, each round followed by a person checking the live site: the homepage, the forms, the checkout if there is one. Security fixes applied promptly. A firewall and bot protection in front. Regular backups kept off-site, so a bad day is usually a restore rather than a rebuild. Uptime and performance monitored, so we usually know before the owner does.

Most of the sites we build and manage are hosted with Krystal, an independent UK host, and our hosting page explains the choice. The care for the platform itself is our website maintenance. If someone else looks after your site, our piece on who is updating your WordPress site has the questions to ask them.

Is WordPress slow or insecure?

It can be fast and sound when it is built and kept that way. A bespoke theme, few plugins, a proper host and someone checking after every update make a quick, solid site. A bought theme, forty plugins and no one watching is the WordPress people complain about. The platform is the same in both cases. The difference is the care, and the pricing page says what ours costs.

Which does your site need?

Tell us how often your site changes and who changes it, and we will say which we would build, and why. If you already have a WordPress site that nobody looks after, that is a care job first, not a rebuild. Tell us about your site.