WordPress, Wix or custom: you're asking the wrong question.

The debate that isn't one

WordPress or Wix. Wix or Webflow. Squarespace, IONOS, a bought theme, custom build. Each one has its believers, its comparison posts, its tables full of green and red columns.

If that's what you're after, there are entire articles on the subject, better documented than this one. Go read them.

Me, after several dozen sites built and put online, I notice one thing: that question has never determined the result. I've seen WordPress sites that bring in business and WordPress sites that are dead. Remarkable custom sites and useless custom sites.

What makes the difference is somewhere else.

What WordPress promises, and almost nobody uses

The main argument for a CMS is autonomy. An interface, a back office, the ability to change a piece of text, add a page, publish an article.

It's a real argument. It holds for the people who actually use it.

A publication putting out three articles a week needs that interface. A site with several writers, a catalogue that shifts every day, an editorial team: there, yes, no discussion.

The problem is that this isn't the situation most businesses are in.

In practice, the back office gets opened twice: on delivery day, and six months later to change a phone number. The intention to write articles is almost always there. It rarely survives the first quarter.

So you pay for the complexity of a tool to get a freedom you never exercise. You inherit the updates, the plugins, the incompatibilities and the security holes, in exchange for a door you never open.

“I want to be able to edit it myself”

That's the sentence I hear most often. It comes from a good place and it almost always backfires on whoever says it.

Because editing a site isn't filling in a field. It's understanding a structure, respecting a hierarchy, not breaking a layout, not wrecking the search rankings of a page that was working.

I know how it ends: a year later, the page has three fonts, two heading sizes and a block spilling over the edge on mobile. Nobody did their job badly. It just wasn't their job.

I'm honest about this, because I apply the same rule to myself: I don't work on any site I didn't build. Either I rebuild it, or I don't touch it. Tinkering on a shaky foundation means spending three hours understanding someone else's problem for a result I won't stand behind.

The bathroom

Anyone can redo their own bathroom.

That's not a provocation. The tutorials are out there, free, detailed, step by step. They walk you through moisture-resistant board, drainage slope, silicone sealant, redoing the waterproofing. Everything is available, right now, without paying a cent.

And yet tradespeople still exist. Not because the information is hidden. Because doing the work takes time, tooling, mistakes you pay for, and above all judgment when reality doesn't look like the tutorial. A wall that isn't square, a drain in the wrong place, a floor that moves.

For a website it's exactly the same, and today more than ever. Everything I do, you can learn. The information is public, and AI is a genuinely powerful tool that speeds everything up. This isn't false modesty: it's true.

So the question isn't “can I do it.” It's “is that where I want to spend my time.”

The real calculation

If you want to do it yourself, do it. Genuinely. No problem with that, quite the opposite.

But do the whole calculation.

Count the hours of learning. The hours of building. The hours of fixing. The weeks of delay before going live. And above all, the result you end up with: does it do what you expected, or does it simply exist?

It's the same reasoning as bookkeeping. You can learn to do your own accounts, it's all documented. Except any business owner who has made a mistake on a filing knows exactly what that mistake cost.

A site that looks amateur doesn't cost you what you saved on it. It costs you what it fails to bring in.

A website follows the same logic, just less visibly. It doesn't send you a tax bill. It costs you the clients who never got in touch, and you'll never know how many there were.

What gets planned before, not after

There's a simple way to settle the autonomy debate: put it on the table at the start.

You know you'll publish articles? That your prices will change every six months? That you'll be adding references regularly? That gets said before, and the site gets built accordingly.

On my projects, those needs are identified up front and built into how the site works. It's not an extra you discover afterwards, it's part of the brief like everything else.

The difference between “I might want to touch it one day” and “here's what will change, how often, and who does it” is the whole difference between a site that ages badly and a site that stays alive.

When a standard solution is enough

I'm not going to pretend everything has to be custom. That would be dishonest, and I sell the opposite elsewhere.

I built an interactive digital storefront tool for pastry shops and food trades. Standardized, fast to deploy, effective. It works very well, because those businesses share a real common base: a menu, products, opening hours, seasonality.

When a universal solution genuinely matches your situation, take it. It's faster and cheaper.

The trap is elsewhere: taking a universal solution and hoping it solves a specific need. Two companies in the same sector don't have the same goals, the same customers, the same strategy or the same resources. A template doesn't adapt to a situation. The situation ends up adapting to the template, and that's where you lose.

The only question that matters

So, WordPress or not WordPress?

Today, I build custom. It lets me control exactly what happens, carry nothing useless, get fast pages and point everything at one precise goal. WordPress stays on the table when an editorial team genuinely requires it. It's a situational choice, not a religion.

But if you're busy comparing platforms, you're not yet looking at the right part of the problem.

The real questions are these. What is this site supposed to produce, concretely? Who takes care of it in a year? What's going to change, and how often? And do you accept a half-decent result, or not?

Answer those, and the technology choice makes itself. It was never the subject.

If you're unsure about your own case, write to me. We look at what your site really has to produce, and I tell you what holds up, no spin.