WordPress Themes Vs. Custom-Made Sites – Which Is The Better Option?

When it comes to creating an online presence for a company, the two most popular approaches should be considered. One can choose the most used open-source Content Management System, known as WordPress, for establishing their website. Conversely, one can also go for highly flexible custom-made sites.

Sometimes it becomes overwhelming to determine which one to use for growing an existing business. Where WordPress can be a more budget-friendly solution with the capability of seamlessly integrating an efficient business management software, a custom-made site can give much better performance in terms of SEO optimization and speed. This article will discover the aspects you need to consider before going for the one that best suits your requirements.

What Do We Mean by a Custom-Made Site?

A professional team of developers designs a custom-made site. These websites are favored for their originality as they get created from scratch. Besides coding the entire site from the ground up, one needs to hire knowledgeable developers to maintain the code base for optimum performance.

What is a WordPress Site?

WordPress is the most used content management system in the digital space. With its user-friendliness and compatibility with the most popular Business management tool/software plugins, it easily outperforms its competitors. We will see why WordPress can be the ideal choice for your startup.

Custom-Made Site Vs. WordPress Site

#1: Uniqueness:

In terms of uniqueness, Custom-made sites are consistently superior. If you want an equivalent authentic look and feel with WordPress, only custom themes can help you.

Authenticity is the number one trait that facilitates the brand recall value. If your website looks like any other website in the virtual space, you won’t be able to stand out. With a custom website, you can achieve the recognition you want to get more leads and retain old customers.

On the other side of the spectrum, we have free ready-to-use WordPress themes, which are used by a large number of small businesses already. Taking the same route will decrease your authority in the digital space.

#2: Cost-Effectiveness:

WordPress is highly cost-effective as it is free and open-source. It doesn’t require much technical knowledge to get started. The cost of maintaining a custom-made site is massive in that regard.

WordPress themes are budget-friendly and let you pay only when you purchase. These types of site are easy to maintain as it uses a very reliable CMS strategy. Moreover, you will get support from the community and the theme developers to fix any issue.

Custom-made sites are expensive to build and maintain. It is because the developers will code it from scratch, meaning you will get complete control over the features of your site. So, the development cost will increase with the increasing efforts of the developers. Furthermore, you may also need to maintain your theme regularly to ensure everything works fine with a growing business. This approach also demands the developers’ expertise that doesn’t come for free.

#3: Scalability:

Custom-made sites are hands down highly scalable and optimizable. Only using the best Business management tool plugins can add better functionality to your company’s site.

Custom websites can adapt themselves to reflect your sales funnel structure and overall business objectives to fit your business requirements. These are highly adaptive in design and implementation, which increases its scalability factor multiple times.

Contrarily, a WordPress site is not highly scalable. As your business expands, you may need new features on the site, which can be undoubtedly challenging and time-consuming to add with plugins. Unlike custom sites, a WordPress site will require hefty investments in the future to scale.

#4: Maintenance:

WordPress is a complete open-source software. It needs fewer resources for maintenance, unlike a custom-made site where the developing team may need days and nights of hard work to maintain and debug an error in the website codebase.

WordPress themes come with developers’ support. However, the help you get here is limited as they will not help you if you have a situation with the backend or server. In custom sites, you will receive comprehensive assistance from the developers as per your contract. Be it tweaking the UI, handling the deployment issues, or server administration, you will get it all. Hence, if the success of your business depends on consistent technical support, you must go for full-fledged support for up-to-the-mark maintenance.

#5: Flexibility:

The flexibility is much better in a custom-made site, making it an attractive choice for big enterprises. WordPress, however, is customizable to a large extent and fails to show as much flexibility in adding custom and latest technology solutions to the site.

WordPress themes are not flexible as far as customization is considered. You can only modify them to a particular dimension. Also, integration of custom technology solutions is not possible in this case.

Tailor-made sites, however, will readily be transformed into integrating the latest frameworks to suit your business needs.

#6: SEO-friendliness:

A custom-made site gets built from scratch. This implies that the site can exhibit much better performance in terms of SEO friendliness. Contrarily, a WordPress site is not, by default, SEO optimized. However, one can again use specific plugins to rank the site better in the search engines.

Mostly, WordPress themes show decent SEO-friendliness. But if you need an exhaustive SEO solution, you need to do thorough customization in the structure. On the other hand, you can directly implement your SEO-optimization plan from the very beginning by collaborating with the custom site developers. They will incorporate the demanded SEO architecture in the website to make it SEO-savvy. Your site can gain more convertible traffic by getting appropriately indexed by search engines.

Typically for small businesses and startups, WordPress is the most cost-effective solution, which gives compatibility with popular software. On the other hand, a custom-made website will be the best option for a larger enterprise for its uniqueness. It is up to your prudent consideration to pick the best for your business.