- Four things to settle before choosing
- What each approach is good at
- What to check before choosing WordPress
- Why to keep the domain and text yourself
The short answer
Starting from "which platform" gets you nowhere. Start from four facts instead: who updates the site, how often and what they change, which features you need, and how much upkeep you can handle. A site where the owner posts one notice a month is a different animal from one where three staff swap products daily. Once those four are settled, you are choosing between two or three options, not twenty.
Four things to settle first
Write these down before you compare anything. If they are vague, the quotes you get back will not be comparable either.
- Who does the updating? Someone in-house or an agency? Can that person edit HTML?
- How often, and what changes? Only news posts, or prices and stock too?
- What has to work? A contact form, or bookings, payments and member accounts?
- How much maintenance can you actually absorb? Who owns updates, and who answers when something breaks?
The fourth is easy to skip, and it is the one that bites. Sites rarely fail because they were built wrong. They fail because, a year later, nobody is willing to touch them.
What each approach is good at
| Approach | Suits you when | Where it bites |
|---|---|---|
| Hand-written static HTML | A dozen pages, rare changes, someone in-house who can edit HTML | It stops when that person leaves; shared elements get tedious as pages multiply |
| Static site generator | Many pages, a consistent look, changes you want as a repeatable process | Someone technical has to build it; your staff may not be able to edit from a screen |
| Site builder | The person updating is not technical and the features are standard | Limits on fine visual control and unusual features; moving away can be hard |
| CMS such as WordPress | Frequent edits, several authors writing from a browser, features you want to add | The maintenance never stops; neglected, it becomes a liability |
| E-commerce service | You sell things and need payments and stock | Push the whole site into it and the non-shop content fits awkwardly |
Astro, a static site generator that comes up often, describes itself as a framework for content-driven sites such as blogs, marketing pages and shops, and ships no JavaScript to the visitor by default, letting you opt into interactive components only where you need them. That suits a consistent, lightweight site. It does not, by itself, give a non-technical colleague a screen to edit from; that is a separate decision.
Before you commit to WordPress
WordPress is a reasonable choice, but it has to run somewhere specific. Its official requirements page, as of October 2026, recommends PHP 8.3 or greater, MariaDB 10.11 or greater or MySQL 8.0 or greater, and HTTPS support, with Apache or Nginx recommended and a note that any server supporting PHP and MySQL will do. These numbers move with each release, so check the official requirements page before you sign a hosting contract.
Running is not the same as being safe to ignore. A site whose core, theme and plugins have stopped being updated gets riskier every month. If you cannot name who applies updates and when, a non-CMS approach is the more honest choice.
How this plays out
A three-person building firm that adds two or three completed projects a month does fine with a static site. Send the photos and text to whoever built it, once a month, in a folder. No technical staff required.
A clinic where the owner wants to change opening hours and promotions himself is a different case. Editing from a screen outranks everything else, which points to a site builder or a CMS. Judge the options by whether he can make the change in three minutes, not by how precise the design controls are.
A shop selling twenty food products online should choose the payments and stock service first, then check whether the company pages can live there too, and build separately only what does not fit. It gets you trading sooner.
Whatever you choose, register the domain in your own company's name and make sure you can log in to the DNS settings yourself. Leaving both with your web agency is what makes switching later so painful.
Where it goes wrong
If you compare options by "could it support any feature we might ever want", you will pick something heavy. Paying for maintenance every month to keep options you may never use is a poor trade. Choose for what you need this year and rebuild when you outgrow it; that is often cheaper overall.
Keep your copy, product details and article text somewhere outside the website as well, in plain text or a spreadsheet. If the source text is in your hands, changing platforms is just work. If it exists only inside the site, every move turns into a rewrite.
In short
Choose by who edits and how often, not by preference. Rare changes suit static; a colleague editing for himself suits a builder or CMS; selling things starts with payments. And whatever you pick, keep the domain in your name and the source text in your own files. With those two, you can always choose again.