React or WordPress? How to actually choose

Who changes the words and pictures?

This decides more than anything else, and it is the question people skip. If you want to change your own prices, add a new blog post on a Sunday night, or swap a photo without asking anyone, you need an editing screen. WordPress gives you one out of the box. A custom React build does not, unless somebody adds one.

If you would genuinely rather send a message and have the change made for you — and plenty of business owners would, because learning a content system is work you did not ask for — then a custom build removes a whole category of thing you have to think about.

There is a middle option people rarely hear about: a custom front end with a content system behind it. You get the speed and the freedom of a custom build, plus a proper editing screen. It costs more than either option alone, which is why it only makes sense when you genuinely need both halves.

How distinctive does it need to look?

WordPress themes are good now. Genuinely. If your site needs to look clean, professional and conventional, a well-chosen theme will get you there faster and cheaper than anything custom, and anyone claiming otherwise is protecting their invoice.

The limit shows up when you want something nobody else has. Themes are built to suit thousands of businesses, which means they suit none of them exactly. Pushing a theme into a shape it was not designed for is usually slower and more fragile than building the shape directly — and you can feel it in the result.

Does it do anything beyond showing pages?

A brochure site shows pages. An application does work: accounts people log into, dashboards, bookings that check real availability, calculators, anything with logic behind it.

WordPress can be pushed into doing these things with plugins, and for simple cases that is a perfectly sensible answer. But each plugin is someone else’s code running inside your site, with its own update schedule and its own opinions. Stack six of them and you have assembled a system nobody designed, which somebody now has to maintain.

Once real logic is involved, a custom build stops being the expensive option and starts being the cheap one — because the alternative is paying for the same functionality in maintenance, forever.

Who looks after it after launch?

This is the cost nobody quotes you. WordPress needs looking after: core updates, plugin updates, backups, and the occasional morning where an update breaks something and you find out from a customer. That is not a flaw, it is the price of an ecosystem that can do almost anything.

A custom build has far less to maintain, because there is far less of it and none of it is third-party. It does not need a monthly plugin review. The trade is that when you do want a change, you ask a developer rather than clicking a button.

Be honest with yourself here. "I will keep it updated" is something many business owners believe in month one and almost none are still doing in month eight.

A rough shape of the answer

Not a rule, but it is right more often than it is wrong:

• You edit it weekly, you want a blog, conventional design is fine, and you do not mind admin — WordPress.
• It should look like nobody else, it needs real functionality, and you would rather nobody had to maintain it — custom build.
• Both: distinctive design and you need to edit it yourself — custom front end with a content system behind it.
• People log in and do work in it — custom build, and it is not close.

What does not decide it

Speed is not a reason on its own. A well-built WordPress site on decent hosting is fast enough for almost any business, and a badly built custom site can be slow. The difference matters at the margins, not at the decision.

Nor is SEO. Both can be made to rank. Titles, descriptions, structured data, a sitemap, fast loading and content worth reading are available in either, and missing from a bad build in either.