WordPress
Your last WordPress site locked you out and charged you to change a phone number.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Three things have to be true for WordPress to be the right call, and if only one is, we’ll tell you to build somewhere else.
Every competing page in this category is an argument for WordPress. This one includes the part where we talk you out of it.
The short answer
WordPress is the right answer when three things are true at once: you want to own the site outright, the site has to do something a hosted platform won’t do, and somebody on your side will edit it regularly.
You want to own it. The code, the database, the hosting account, the domain. You can move all of it to another host in an afternoon, and nobody can change your pricing or your feature set out from under you.
It has to do something specific. Structured content with its own fields, an integration with a system you already run, a members area, a search that actually works across thousands of pages. This is where hosted platforms stop.
Someone will edit it. WordPress rewards a team that touches the site weekly and punishes one that touches it twice a year, because the thing you own is also the thing you maintain: updates, backups, and the occasional plugin that misbehaves.
If only one of those three is true, WordPress is probably the wrong answer and we’ll say so. Tell us the goal and we’ll tell you which platform it is.
Sound familiar
You’ve probably met WordPress at its worst.
Someone built you a WordPress site, then held the password until you paid again.
What you got was a sixty-dollar theme with your logo on it, not a custom build.
You can’t change a line yourself, so every small tweak is an email and an invoice.
It’s a pile of plugins nobody documented, and something breaks every time one updates.
None of that is WordPress’s fault, and none of it has to be your experience of it.
When we’d tell you not to use WordPress
When WordPress is the wrong call.
The site is mostly pages and nobody wants a maintenance surface
A ten-page site for a business that publishes twice a year doesn’t need a database, a host and an update schedule. Squarespace does that job with less to go wrong, and we build there too.
The marketing team lives inside HubSpot
If the CRM is where the work actually happens, splitting the website away from it creates a sync problem that outlives the build. HubSpot CMS is the honest answer there.
There’s nobody to own it
WordPress with no maintenance plan degrades quietly, and the first sign is usually a security incident rather than a slow page. If nobody will own it, budget for a retainer or pick a platform where somebody else carries that risk.
The requirement is really an application
If the website is a thin wrapper around software you need built, WordPress becomes the constraint rather than the tool. That’s custom development.
What we build on
A custom theme on Twenty Twenty-Five, already built before your project starts.
The layout system, the type scale and the color system exist on day one. Pages get assembled from blocks in the standard WordPress editor, so your team edits them without a page builder, without a developer, and without a plugin that has to be renewed.
That choice is why a two-page microsite for a real estate development campaign went from a Friday phone call to a first draft on Monday: six custom blocks written for what that campaign needed, assembled on a theme that was already built. Designing a site and building a site inside the same 72 hours is how weekend projects become Wednesday projects.
What this doesn’t cover
Four things that are a different job.
- Emergencies. If a WordPress site is down or broken right now, that’s emergency WordPress support, not a build.
- Ongoing maintenance. Updates, backups and monitoring after launch are a retainer or nothing. A build doesn’t include them.
- Copywriting. Available on any tier, quoted separately.
- Rescuing somebody else’s page builder. We can, and it’s quoted as its own job rather than folded into a build price.
What it costs
Builds start at $3,500.
Three tiers, set by how much of the site has to be designed rather than assembled. The full breakdown is on the pricing page, and the whole approach is on websites.