Wordpress or custom built website?
-
Hello fellow mozzers,
Hope you are all well.
I am looking to get a website done and I am struggling to decide whether to get a custom build website site done or a website built on the WordPress platform.
Would you be able to share your experiences and advice/suggestions on what you would use, and why? (pros and cons, etc.)
Thanks in advance.
Kind Regards
-
Hey, I like Drupal, but I tend to use it as a base for much heavier bespoke projects rather than as a starting point for something small like a personal blog.
Each to their own I guess.
-
Personally, I would hop on Drupal. Although the learning curve is much steeper, once you get the hang of it you will have much better insight into a much greater expanse of web development (CSS, design, server-level stuff, etc.)
Although in the short run, such a transition can be very frustrating, it is an easily adaptable platform and looks like it's going to remain a top choice amongst devs for some time.
Not to mention, there's lots of great SEO opportunities if you set it up correctly!
-
That's probably the case Jazy.
Also, it may be the designer is just upselling to the other business in order to get more work as I have seen this done before.
-
Thank you so much for both your quick responses, they are great
WordPress is a lot quicker to set up, and has all the functions that we need. Plus millions of plugins that will be extremely helpful, not to mention the quote for a WordPress site we got was about £2000 cheaper!
The only worry I had was that the guy who gave us a quote for the custom build was building a website for a similar company to ours and they were moving away from WordPress. But I guess every website is different and they must need functionality that WordPress can't offer.
-
Hey Jazy
As Daniel points out, this really depends on what you want from a site. If you are looking to put out regular content and share your knowledge and experience via a blog and have a few service type pages then WordPress is ideal.
If you want a solid SEO platform then WordPress + the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin is pretty damn good (with some savvy configuration).
**Pro's of WordPress **
- Free
- Good for SEO
- Loads of free and premium plugins and themes
- Turnkey solution that can be up in no time
- lots of great backup and security plugins (wordfence and vaultpress for starters)
Cons of wordpress
- It is what it is so if that is not what you want then... you need a bespoke site
Pros of Bespoke
- You can have exactly what you want
Con's of bespoke
- Price
- maintenance
- adding new functionality can be costly
Ultimately, we always look to see if there is a reason not to use WordPress for a project and in most cases it is a perfect solution. This is especially true if you are looking to do a lot of blogging or set up a personal brand as it is just such a strong, scalable and flexible tool that has a low barrier to entry in terms of technical knowledge.
Happy to answer any specific questions if you have any!
Maybe check out WP101 as well, they have a bunch of WordPress videos so you can get a better idea of how everything works and what you will be getting.
Hope that helps!
Marcus -
Hi Jazy,
It all depends on what you want from a website!
Wordpress is easy to set up - has lots of options to customise and add new functionality, it has a wide community that supports it if you trip up and it doesn't hamper SEO (as long as you have brought the domain, there is no point going with the free Wordpress system if you want to optimise your websites SEO). However, there are a few limitations to the system in terms of what functionality you can ad for free and there are some security issues if you dont know what you are doing.
A custom build however can look and act exactly as you want it to but takes time and expertise to that for free. If you have that time and expertise though it means you get the website that you want at little cost. The downsides are that you lack the community and free developers.
Just my opinions.
Cheers,
Dan.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
WordPress redirects are taking too long to navigate: Anyone ever faced this?
Hi community, We are using wordpress website. We have redirected hundreds of URLs from wordpress redirect manager for last 10 years around. Suddenly from last one week, the redirects are taking too long to navigate to the pages; like around 1 minute. Could you anybody face the same issue? Please help me on this. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
We redesigned our website, make it responsive and page views tanked. What happened?
Last year, we redesigned our site and made it responsive. Our page views only grew by only 3% (the previous year they grew by 40%). If we exclude homepage views from our calculations, we get a drastically different picture-- and see over 30% growth for both total and unique pageviews. Any thoughts?
Web Design | | Anna720 -
Website rankings drop significantly after moving to new hosting provider
My website - www.isacleanse.co.nz has dropped from being top10 rankings for all of my keywords to not even being in top 50 after just checking now. It used to be hosted on: www.1stdomains.nz
Web Design | | IsaCleanse
It got migrated to Sitground servers about a month ago See attached screenshot - would moving hosting provider cause such a huge drop? Or would there be anything else I should be looking at ? J2ahi0 -
Multiple websites for different service areas/business functions?
I'm wondering what the implications are for having multiple domains for different service areas of a company? I realize having multiple domains for one company can be troublesome because of the possibility of duplicate content, keyword cannibalization, and linkbuilding to multiple domains. But when the domains are for very different service offerings/unique business functions that each serve their own purpose (and have different positionings), is there a downside to having more than one domain? Any thoughts would be appreciated!
Web Design | | KevinBloom0 -
Wordpress Plugin To Capture Form Completion Data, Before Visitor Hits "Submit"?
Greetings MOZ Community: Visitors frequently start to enter contact information in the forms on our website, but then chicken out and don't hit the submit button. I noticed this watching the recordings of visitor web site visits using Mouse Flow. Is there a Wordpress Plugin that would allow us to capture data entered in forms, where the visitor does not finally hit the "submit" button? Obviously this would be very, very valuable as this scenario occurs in one out of three or four instances. Thanks!!!
Web Design | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Drupal vs. Wordpress
I'm working with a site that is built completely in Drupal - including the blog. As we begin on a content strategy initiative the blog is vitally important but lacks core SEO functionality and is cumbersome for the content teams to work with as they have no technical background. While there will be more work required (moving the blog to a sub-domain or separate URL) to play nice with the broader drupal environment I believe it may be the better choice to move over to Wordpress and port over any existing content worth keeping. Has anyone encountered a similar scenario or have an opinion on either platform? Love to hear your thoughts both pros and cons. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | JonClark150 -
How does using a CMS (i.e. Wordpress/Drupal) affect backlinks and SEO?
So I need to build a website with over 100 pages in it. Elements of the design will probably be moved around and or tested so I need to use a CMS. It's pretty much a review site so while the content will remain static I'd like to employ A/B testing to mess with conversion rates. Wordpress has a plugin for that even. So I'm just wondering, since CMS pages are pretty much created on spot and not retrieved from a library, how this affects backlinks and anchor text? How exactly does the external website point to yours if the URL is dynamically generated? Or am I misunderstanding something? Please recommend any extra resources as well if you can.
Web Design | | seochump0 -
Website redesign testing environment
An external company is redesigning our website. They have a draft version active in a folder on their website to enable us to view it (example: www.externalcompanywebsite.com/ourwebsite/). There is no permission required to view the website, anyone with the url could just go there. I am not sure if they're using the robots.txt to block crawlers, or if they're blocking specific ip addresses. If the engines are allowed to crawl their website and they index pages of our draft website, does that affect our website negatively in the future once we host it on our domain?
Web Design | | jdossetti0