WordPress, Shopify,
or custom code?
The stack wars are mostly noise. The honest question is never “which is best?” but “best for what?”
Whichever the page deserves. That is our real answer, and it frustrates people who want a tribe to join. But a clinic’s editorial site and a fourteen-lender mortgage platform are not the same problem, and pretending one tool solves both is how projects go wrong.
WordPress, for content that grows
Still the right choice for editorial-heavy sites: clinic journals, knowledge hubs, businesses whose team needs to publish without a developer. Kept lean, the right theme, few plugins, real performance discipline, it is fast and durable. Bloated with twenty plugins, it is the slowest thing on the web.
Shopify, for selling, simply
If commerce is the core and the catalogue is conventional, Shopify’s checkout, payments and logistics are hard to beat. We reach for it, sometimes headless, with a custom front end, when the priority is selling reliably rather than bespoke behaviour.
Custom code, for the genuinely unusual
A mortgage platform that runs live eligibility against fourteen lenders. A 3D solitaire configurator on a jewellery storefront. A B2B store with tiered pallet pricing and net-terms checkout. When the behaviour is the product, custom Next.js or Node earns its cost.
The constant is never the stack. It is a 90+ PageSpeed score and green Core Web Vitals. The platform is just the means to it.
If you are weighing a rebuild and unsure which way to go, that is exactly the conversation our web development practice begins with, a notebook, not a quote. Tell us what you are building.
A side-by-side, without the tribalism
Here is the comparison we actually use in the first meeting. Notice there is no "winner" column, only the right tool for the shape of the job.
| Platform | Sweet spot | Self-manage? | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|
| WordPress | Editorial, clinics, knowledge hubs | Easy | Plugin bloat & speed |
| Shopify | Conventional commerce | Easy | Limits on bespoke UX |
| Headless | Scale, omni-channel, big catalogues | Moderate | Cost & complexity |
| Custom (Next/Node) | Configurators, calculators, unique UX | Needs a dev | Maintenance commitment |
The questions that actually decide it
Strip away the fashion and three questions settle most builds. Who edits the site day to day?, if it is a non-technical team publishing often, that points one way. Is the behaviour conventional or unusual?, a standard catalogue and a live eligibility engine are different problems. What is the two-year picture?, the right stack is the one you will not be rebuilding when the business grows. Answer those honestly and the platform almost chooses itself.
Whatever the answer, the non-negotiable underneath every build is the same: green Core Web Vitals and a foundation clean enough for SEO to do its work. The platform is just the means; performance and findability are the point.