The question sounds technical and is actually about money and about who will touch the site every day. We break it into four plain conditions and show what each option costs after a year, not on handover.
WordPress makes sense when you change content daily yourself, or need a shop with thousands of items. Otherwise it only adds invoices.
Custom code: hosting ₴0, nothing to update, nothing to break in. WordPress: hosting from ₴1,200 a year plus mandatory updates.
WordPress — when you change content yourself daily or weekly: adding items, writing news, editing prices, uploading photos. Custom code — when there are few pages, they change once a quarter, and what matters is that the site opens instantly and costs nothing every month.
Everything else is detail. But detail here costs money, so it follows below.
| Condition | WordPress | Custom code |
|---|---|---|
| You change content yourself, often | yes, that is what it is built for | needs an admin panel — a separate add-on |
| More than twenty pages | yes, easier to manage | possible, but each one is built by hand |
| Speed is critical | can be tuned, but the ceiling is lower | fast by default |
| Hosting must be free | no, from about €25 a year | yes, static sites run on a free plan |
If you recognise yourself in the WordPress column on two rows or more, take WordPress. If the opposite, take custom code. If it is even, the first row decides: it is the most expensive one to redo.
A site built from HTML, CSS and JavaScript with no ready-made engine. No admin panel, no database, no plugins — just files the server hands over as they are. That is why it opens faster: the browser does not wait while the server assembles the page from a database.
This very site is built that way. Open the developer tools and look at what it weighs and how fast it paints — that is not a claim from an ad, it is something you can check in half a minute.
Static is not “the cheaper option”. It is a different model: you pay once for the work and nothing for owning it.
At handover the price difference is small. It accumulates afterwards, and that is the part nobody counts.
| Cost | WordPress | Custom code |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | from about €25 a year | €0 — static fits a free plan |
| Engine and plugin updates | mandatory, or you get hacked | nothing to update |
| Editing panel | included in the site price | a separate add-on, listed in the price list |
| Paid plugins for specific jobs | sometimes, from $30 a year each | no such line |
| Risk of being hacked | always there, because there is something to break | nothing to break: the pages are static |
None of this argues against WordPress. It argues for counting the price of the site plus a year of living with it. On twenty pages you maintain yourself, WordPress pays for its hosting with the first evening you do not spend on edits.
WordPress gets hacked not because it is bad but because there is so much of it: holes are hunted for at scale, automatically, around the clock. In practice that means one thing — updates cannot wait, and plugins should be ones that are alive and maintained.
A static site has none of that attack surface: no admin panel, no database, no code running on the server. It also has no “add an article” button without a developer — everything is paid for with something.
“WordPress is slow” — not true as stated. Twenty plugins and a heavy bought theme make it slow, not the engine. A carefully built WordPress passes PageSpeed fine.
“Custom code is more expensive” — also not always. Complex logic makes it expensive, not the absence of an engine. A services page in static costs exactly what the same page costs on WordPress.
“A website builder is the same, only cheaper” — no. A builder is cheaper at the start and more expensive to own: a subscription every month, a painful exit, and usually the worst speed of the three.
We ask the four things in the table above and name the option that is cheaper for you — before taking any money. We build both static and WordPress, so we have nothing at stake in that conversation.
If the site already exists and you are thinking about moving, start with an audit: it shows what actually slows it down and whether the platform is the problem at all. Often it is not — often it is eight megabytes of photos on the home page.
The job picks the platform, not fashion. The right question is not “which is better” but “who opens this site from the inside every week”.
Two articles help you cost ownership: hosting and the editing panel.