WordPress vs Custom Next.js: Honest Cost & Speed Comparison for SMBs

WordPress powers 43% of the web. Next.js powers most of the fast web. If you're running a small business and trying to figure out which to choose for your next site, here's the comparison nobody selling either one will give you straight.

This isn't a "which is better" piece — there's no universal answer. It's a "which is right for your specific situation" piece, with real costs.

The 30-second version

	WordPress	Custom Next.js
Initial build cost (typical SMB)	£1,500 – £8,000	£4,000 – £20,000
Year 1 total cost	£2,000 – £10,000	£4,500 – £22,000
Year 5 total cost	£15,000 – £40,000	£10,000 – £30,000
Time to launch	3–8 weeks	4–12 weeks
Page load (typical)	3–6 seconds	0.8–2 seconds
Maintenance burden	High and ongoing	Low and predictable
Editor experience	Excellent (Gutenberg)	Depends on CMS choice
SEO ceiling	Good with effort	Excellent by default
Security risk	High (most-attacked platform on the web)	Low
Best for	Content-heavy sites, frequent editing	Marketing sites, conversion-focused, product showcases

Year 5 is where the lines cross. Most cost comparisons stop at year 1. That's why WordPress looks like the obvious choice initially. By year five, the cumulative maintenance + hosting + plugin costs flip the picture.

What's actually in each cost number

WordPress build cost (£1,500 – £8,000)

The cheap end:

£30/year domain + £80/year shared hosting (SiteGround, Bluehost — adequate for low traffic)
£80 premium theme (Astra, GeneratePress, Kadence)
£50–£200 in plugin licenses (Yoast, WP Forms, security plugin)
A freelancer or agency to assemble it: £1,000 – £3,000 for a basic small-business site

The expensive end (still WordPress, just better-built):

Same domain + £200–£600/year managed hosting (Kinsta, WP Engine — actually fast and secure)
Custom theme or premium starter kit: £500–£1,500
Heavier plugin stack (page builder like Elementor Pro, advanced custom fields, security suite)
Agency build with strategy + design + copywriting: £4,000 – £8,000

Next.js build cost (£4,000 – £20,000)

The cheap end is still serious money because there's no shortcut:

£30 domain + Vercel hobby (free up to a certain threshold) or Vercel Pro ($20/month)
Custom design or a Tailwind UI starter (£0 if you have eyes, ~£250 if you buy)
Developer time: this is the variable. A skilled developer ships a marketing site in 60–100 hours. At £80–£150/hour, that's £4,800 – £15,000.
A CMS if you want non-developer editing: Sanity (free for small projects), Contentful, or Payload — each adds 4–12 hours of integration work.

The expensive end:

£15,000–£20,000+ if you want bespoke design, strategy work, complex animations, region/language switching, multi-product showcases, or careful conversion optimisation.

Where WordPress eats your money over time

Year 2 onward is where the costs you didn't budget for show up:

Plugin license renewals: £100–£500 per year, every year, forever. Some plugins go premium or get acquired — you pay or you lose features.
Plugin compatibility breakage: Plugin X updates → plugin Y breaks. Site goes down at 3am. Someone has to fix it. Average WordPress site we've audited has 25–40 plugins. Compatibility issues are not rare — they're guaranteed.
Security incidents: WordPress is the most-attacked platform on the web because it's the biggest. We've cleaned up infected sites for clients three times this year. Each one costs £500–£3,000 in remediation and lost traffic.
Hosting upgrades: As traffic grows, shared hosting won't keep up. The jump from shared to managed (£20/month to £200/month) is sudden.
Speed optimisation: WordPress speed is fixable but requires effort — caching plugins (WP Rocket, £49/year), image optimisation (ShortPixel or Imagify, £10–£40/month), CDN (£10–£60/month). Easy £500–£1,500 per year just to feel fast.

Cumulative annual maintenance on a serious WordPress site: £2,000 – £8,000/year.

Where Next.js stays cheap (or doesn't)

Hosting is mostly free on Vercel Hobby or Netlify Free for SMB traffic. Vercel Pro at $20/month is the realistic ceiling.
No plugin licenses to renew.
No compatibility breakage from auto-updates — you control deploys.
Security is much lower-risk by default. No public admin panel to brute-force.
The cost is developer time when you want to change things. A WordPress editor can change copy or add a section in 5 minutes. A Next.js site (without a CMS) might require a developer for those same changes.

This is the real WordPress vs. Next.js trade-off: WordPress optimises for editor flexibility at the cost of ongoing technical overhead. Next.js optimises for performance and reliability at the cost of needing a developer (or a connected CMS) for content changes.

The fix for Next.js's editing weakness is to add a headless CMS — Sanity, Contentful, Payload, or Strapi. Adds £20–£200/month and 1–2 weeks of integration but recovers most of WordPress's editor advantage.

The speed difference is bigger than people think

A typical WordPress site (managed hosting, decent theme, normal plugin load) hits 3–6 second LCP on mobile 4G. A typical Next.js site hits 0.8–2 second LCP on the same connection. That's not a marginal difference — it's 2–4× faster.

Why does it matter for an SMB?

Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal. Sub-2.5s LCP is the "good" threshold; most WordPress sites sit in the 4–6s range and lose rankings to faster competitors.
Page load directly affects conversion. The Amazon-cited number is ~7% conversion loss per second of additional load time. For an SMB, even a 1-second improvement is meaningful.
Mobile users on slower connections (large parts of India, much of the UAE outside city centres) abandon slow pages quickly. A site that's 5 seconds to load on 4G effectively doesn't exist for those users.

WordPress can be made fast — caching, CDN, image optimisation, careful plugin selection, and a fast theme. We've taken WordPress sites from 6s to 1.8s LCP. It requires sustained attention. Most sites don't get it.

When WordPress is the right answer

You're a content-first business — blog, magazine, recipe site, course portal, news outlet. The editor is the product, and Gutenberg is excellent.
You publish frequently (multiple times a week) with multiple authors. WordPress's user roles, scheduling, and revision history are unmatched.
Your budget is genuinely tight (under £3,000 for a build) and you can't justify more.
You or someone on your team has WordPress experience already. The marginal cost of staying on it is low.
You need a specific plugin ecosystem (WooCommerce, LearnDash for courses, MemberPress for membership sites) that doesn't have a clean Next.js equivalent.

When custom Next.js is the right answer

You're a service business or product company where the website is mostly evergreen marketing pages — not constantly-published content.
Page speed directly affects your business: e-commerce, ad-driven traffic, mobile-heavy audience.
You're targeting an international audience and want serious i18n, multi-currency, multi-region from day one.
You care about brand quality and want bespoke design without the visual ceiling of WordPress page builders.
You're planning to integrate your website with a custom backend, mobile app, or third-party APIs — Next.js makes this dramatically easier.

The middle path: WordPress headless

You can run WordPress as a headless CMS — WordPress as the backend for content, Next.js as the frontend. You get the best editor on the web and the fast frontend. Architecture cost: high to set up, low to maintain.

This is increasingly the right answer for content-heavy businesses that also care about speed. Editorial brands, agencies with serious blog programs, companies with hundreds of evergreen articles. We do this build pattern often. It's not cheap to set up — typically £8,000–£15,000 — but the ongoing TCO is lower than either pure WordPress or pure Next.js with a separate CMS.

How to actually choose

If you publish more than weekly and have multiple authors → WordPress (consider headless if speed also matters).
If your site is mostly evergreen marketing pages → Next.js (with a small CMS like Sanity for the bits that change).
If you have a tight initial budget and don't care much about speed → WordPress. Acknowledge the maintenance reality.
If you're running ads or selling at scale → Next.js. Speed is the difference between losing money and making money.
If you genuinely don't know → talk to someone who'll give you a straight answer based on your specific business, not a sales pitch for whatever they happen to sell.

We do both, and we'll tell you when each is wrong

We've built dozens of sites on both stacks. We've also told prospective clients to stick with WordPress when they were about to over-pay for a Next.js rebuild they didn't need. And we've migrated WordPress sites to Next.js when the technical debt was eating their growth.

There's a right answer for your business. Usually it's not the one your nephew recommended.

Get a 30-minute consultation

We'll review your current site, your business model, your publishing cadence, and your growth plans — then tell you whether your current stack is the bottleneck or whether your time and money are better spent elsewhere.

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Black Arrow Technologies builds custom Next.js sites and migrates from WordPress when the math justifies it. Landing pages from £350. Business sites from £2,500. We also rebuild WordPress sites for clients when that's the right call. We don't have a stack to sell — we have an outcome to deliver.