WordPress, Shopify or custom: choosing your website build
Three good options, three different trade-offs. A plain-English guide to picking the right foundation for your website.
The platform you build on shapes what your site can do, how easily you can update it, and how well it ranks. There’s no universally best choice — only the right fit for your business, your team and your goals.
WordPress: flexible and SEO-friendly
The default for content-led sites. Endlessly customisable, excellent for SEO, and easy to update once it’s set up. It needs proper hosting and maintenance, but for businesses that win work on enquiry, it’s a solid choice.
Shopify: built for selling online
If you sell products online with checkout, payments and shipping, Shopify handles the hard parts out of the box. It’s less flexible for deep content and SEO than WordPress, but far simpler for actually running a store.
Custom / static: fast and precise
For a focused showcase and enquiry flow, a lightweight custom build is the fastest and most secure option, with nothing to patch. This is how we build most local-business sites — speed and control, with the everyday updates still easy.
Our rule of thumb: enquiry-led business → WordPress or a custom build; selling online → Shopify. Whatever the choice, the fundamentals stay the same — search-ready structure, real content, and a build you fully own.