A B2B services firm in Boston asked me to settle an argument. Their developer wanted a custom Next.js build. Their marketing lead wanted Webflow. The founder had been told WordPress was dying. They wanted me to pick a winner.
I asked one question instead: in six months, when you want to change the hero headline and swap two testimonials, who does that and how long does it take?
Nobody had an answer, which told me more than the rest of the brief. I have rebuilt marketing sites for clients across the US, UK and Europe, and the platform almost never decides whether the project succeeds. What decides it is whether the people who need to change the site can change the site. Every other consideration is downstream of that.
The question that actually matters
Marketing sites are not finished objects. A site that cannot be edited quickly cannot be tested, and a site that cannot be tested cannot be improved. If every copy change needs a developer ticket, a sprint and a deploy, you will stop making changes. I have watched conversion rate work die for this reason on three separate accounts, and in each case the site was technically excellent.
So before comparing platforms, write down honestly:
- How often will page copy change? Monthly, or twice a year?
- Will marketing need to launch standalone landing pages for campaigns?
- Do you have a developer on the team, on retainer, or neither?
- How many pages, and how much of the content is structured and repeated?
Those four answers usually make the decision obvious.
WordPress
Still the most-used CMS on the web, and the reason is boring and valid: everyone knows how to use it, the ecosystem solves almost any requirement, and you can hire for it anywhere at any budget.
It suits you when you publish a lot, when multiple non-technical people edit content, and when you need things like multilingual, membership or complex forms without building them from scratch.
The cost is maintenance. A WordPress site is a living thing with plugins that update, break and occasionally get exploited. It is also the easiest platform to make slow, because every plugin adds weight and nobody audits them. I wrote separately about what actually makes a WordPress site slow, because it is the most common complaint I hear from businesses two years after launch.
Choose it if you will have someone maintaining it. Avoid it if "maintenance" means nobody.
Webflow
Webflow gives designers real control over layout without writing code, and it hosts the result on a fast, managed CDN. For a marketing site of twenty to eighty pages, edited regularly by a marketing team, it is frequently the right answer and I say that as someone whose team builds custom.
What you get is speed of iteration. A marketer can duplicate a landing page, change the copy, and publish in twenty minutes. For paid campaigns, where you want a page per offer and per audience, that matters more than any technical elegance.
What you give up is ownership and flexibility at the edges. You are on their pricing, their limits, and their export story is poor in practice. Complex application logic, anything that needs a real backend, and very large content sets all get awkward. Costs also climb once you add CMS seats and higher traffic tiers, so check the three-year number, not the monthly one.
Custom build
A custom front end, usually React-based with a headless CMS behind it, gives you the fastest possible site, complete design freedom and no platform ceiling. It is the right call when the site is part of the product, when you have unusual requirements, or when performance is a competitive factor.
The honest downsides: it costs more upfront, it needs a developer available for structural changes, and if the CMS is set up carelessly, your marketing team ends up with a content editor that is technically headless and practically unusable. That last failure is extremely common. A custom build is only as good as the editing experience somebody deliberately designed into it.
How I would decide
| Your situation | Platform | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Content-heavy, several editors, budget-conscious | WordPress | Cheapest to staff, strongest ecosystem |
| Marketing-led, frequent landing pages, no developer | Webflow | Fastest iteration without a ticket queue |
| Performance critical, unusual requirements, dev on team | Custom | No ceiling, best Core Web Vitals |
| E-commerce as the main business | Shopify | Do not build a store on a marketing CMS |
| Nobody owns the site after launch | WordPress with a maintenance retainer, or Webflow | Both survive neglect better than a custom build with no developer |
The row people ignore is the last one. An unmaintained custom build becomes unbuildable within about eighteen months as dependencies drift. An unmaintained WordPress site becomes a security problem. Decide who owns the site before you decide what it is made of.
What does not decide it
SEO. All three can rank. Google does not care what generated the HTML, only what the HTML is and how fast it arrives. Any platform can be configured well or badly; I have audited fast WordPress sites and sluggish custom builds. If someone tells you a platform is "better for SEO" as a blanket claim, press them for specifics.
What a competitor used. You cannot see their constraints, their team or their regrets.
What is trending. The platform that was dying five years ago still runs a large share of the web, and the one everyone is excited about today will have its own backlash.
The question to ask any agency quoting you
Ask them to show you the editing experience, not the design. Have them open the CMS and change a headline in front of you. If they hesitate, or if the answer involves them doing it on your behalf, you have learned the real cost of the build.
We quote web development separately from media work for exactly this reason: the right answer depends on your team, not on what we prefer to build. Our web development and WordPress pages set out how we scope it.
Whatever you build on, the site has to earn its traffic and convert it. Why blog traffic does not become enquiries covers the page types worth building, and how a store loses buyers on mobile covers what happens after they arrive.
If you are planning a rebuild and want a second opinion on the platform choice before you commit budget, the free growth audit includes a review of your current site and what it is costing you in conversion and velocity terms.