WordPress vs a Static Site: Which Fits Your Business?
WordPress runs a huge share of the web, and a huge share of slow, hacked, high-maintenance sites. Here's when it earns its keep, and when a static site wins.
WordPress powers roughly two in five websites, so it's natural to assume it's the default choice. For blogs and complex, custom web apps, it often is. But for a small business that just needs a fast site that books work, it's frequently the wrong tool, and the reasons are worth understanding before you commit a year of maintenance to it.
Where WordPress costs you
- Maintenance: plugins and core need regular updates, and a missed one can break your site or open a security hole.
- Speed: layers of plugins and a database behind every page load make it slower, especially on mobile.
- Running cost: hosting, a theme, premium plugins and security tools add up before you've written a word.
- Security: it's the most-attacked platform on the web precisely because it's the most popular.
Where a static site wins
A static site is just fast, pre-built HTML served from a global network. There's no database and no plugins, which means nothing to patch, almost nothing to hack, and near-instant load times. For a brochure or lead-generation site, that's exactly what you want, and it's the default we build on at Arc Growth. Speed and security aren't upgrades, they're the baseline.
When WordPress is still the right call
If you publish content daily and want to manage it all yourself, run a large or complex online store, or need a genuinely custom web application, WordPress or a dedicated platform can earn its keep. The honest answer is that it depends on what you're building. For a fast, low-maintenance site that brings in enquiries, static wins on almost every measure that matters, including the page speed that affects both visitors and Google (see our note on why site speed is a business metric).
Switching without starting from zero
Moving off WordPress doesn't mean losing your content or your rankings. A good rebuild keeps your existing pages, copy and URLs, and simply rebuilds the plumbing underneath so it's faster and easier to run. Our website design process includes exactly that option for anyone migrating off an old platform.
On WordPress now and tired of the upkeep? Send us your site and we'll rebuild it as a fast static preview, free.
Get a Free RebuildMore from the blog
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