Do you need WordPress, or would a static site be better?

A designer tells you the new site should be WordPress. A friend with a café says to get something simple and static. Both of them sound sure, you have never needed to know the difference, and the quote lands on your desk next week.

You can settle it with four questions about how you will use the site. Which one wins depends on your answers.

What the two are

WordPress builds each page when somebody asks for it. A visitor arrives, the server reads your content out of a database, fits it into the theme, runs the plugins and sends back the finished page. You edit it by logging in and typing into a screen.

A static site builds every page once, ahead of time, and stores the finished files. When a visitor arrives the server hands over a file that already exists. There is no database to query and no plugin to run, and no login page for anybody to attack.

Both give the visitor an ordinary web page. The difference lies in the work behind it, and who has to do that work.

Question one: how often does the content change?

If you add a news item every week, post prices that move, or have three people updating pages, WordPress earns its place. Editing in a browser, with no developer in the loop, is the thing it does best.

If the site says who you are, what you do, where you work and how to ring you, and that changes two or three times a year, you are paying a daily price for a monthly benefit. A solicitor’s practice, a plumber, a dentist with a fixed list of treatments: these sites change when the prices change, and a developer can do that in ten minutes.

Count how many times you edited the site last year. If the answer is under six, a static site will suit you.

Question two: do you take payment on the site?

A shop with stock, variations, delivery rules and customer accounts needs software that remembers things between visits. WordPress with WooCommerce does that, and so does Shopify. A static site cannot.

Selling a handful of fixed things is a different case. A booking deposit, a gift voucher, a single product with a fixed price: a static site can hand the payment to a hosted checkout from a payment provider, and the card details never touch your site. That is also less for you to keep secure.

So the question is how many products you sell and how much you need to manage them yourself. Fifty products with changing stock mean WordPress or Shopify. Three products at fixed prices do not.

Question three: who makes the changes?

This one decides more projects than the other three together.

On WordPress you can make changes yourself, which is a real freedom. It comes with a real chore: you are now responsible for a login that other people would like to get into. Our piece on auditing the users on your WordPress site covers what happens when that login list goes unchecked.

On a static site somebody else makes the changes. You send the new opening hours or the new price, and a developer updates the site. If you value being able to fix a typo at ten at night without asking anybody, that arrangement will annoy you. If you have not logged in to your WordPress site since the developer left, you are already living with it, and paying for the privilege of an editing screen you do not use.

Question four: who looks after it?

WordPress needs looking after every month. WordPress itself, the theme and each plugin publish updates, and some of those updates close holes that attackers are already using. Somebody has to apply them, check the site still works afterwards and keep backups somewhere safe. We wrote about the hazards in whether to click update all on your plugins. Done well, it is a small job, but it never ends.

A static site has far less to keep up. There is no database holding customer details and no plugin list to go stale, so the usual routes in are missing. The hosting needs to stay up and the domain needs to renew, and that covers most of it.

Speed comes out of the same difference. A static page is a ready-made file, so there is nothing to wait for. A WordPress page, on the same hosting, does work before it answers, and a page-builder theme with a dozen plugins does a lot of it. On a good server and with care, WordPress can be quick. A static site starts quick and stays there. If you want the detail on why a slow page costs you enquiries, read why your website is slow.

How the answers add up

You want WordPress if you:

• edit the site weekly, or several people do
• sell a range of products that change
• want to make changes yourself, and will keep up with the upkeep or pay somebody to

You want a static site if you:

• change the content a handful of times a year
• take payment through a hosted checkout, or not at all
• would rather have a fast site that needs little attention than control over every edit

Plenty of businesses sit between the two, and for those the tie-breaker is upkeep. A WordPress site nobody maintains gets slower and less safe each month. A static site nobody maintains stays much as it was on the day it launched.

What we do

We build both, and we host both on our own servers or on a static edge network, never on shared hosting. For a business whose site is a shop window, we lean towards static, because most of those sites would never have used the editing screen they were sold. For a business with a real content calendar or a large shop, we build WordPress and look after it.

If you already have a WordPress site and are wondering whether it should be something else, ask for a free website review. We will look at how often it has been edited, what it costs you in speed and upkeep, and tell you plainly whether to keep it. Websites start from £1,295, and our prices page lists the rest.