WordPress, Webflow, Shopify or a custom build: how to actually choose

Every agency has a favourite platform, and the favourite is usually the one they are fastest in. That is not a terrible reason, but it is not your reason. The question worth asking is narrower: over the next three years, who will change this website, how often, and what will it have to do beyond showing pages?

Answer that honestly and the choice mostly makes itself.

Start with who edits it

This single question eliminates more options than anything technical. If your marketing person publishes two articles a week and wants to rearrange a landing page on a Friday afternoon, you need a real editing experience, and you need it without a developer in the loop.

If, on the other hand, the site changes four times a year and those changes are a new team member and an updated phone number, you are paying for an editing experience nobody uses. That budget is better spent on speed, structure and the parts that convert.

WordPress: still the right answer more often than people admit

WordPress has a reputation problem, and most of it is deserved by the way it gets built rather than by WordPress itself. A site assembled from a bought theme and twenty-eight plugins will be slow, fragile and unpleasant to edit. The same platform, built as a lean custom theme with a handful of well-chosen plugins and editor screens designed around your actual pages, is genuinely excellent.

It wins clearly when you publish a lot, when several people need different levels of access, and when you already have years of content and search rankings that would be risky to move.

• Strong when: frequent publishing, multiple editors, existing content and rankings to protect
• Weak when: nobody on your team will ever log in, or you want unusual layouts without a developer
• Running cost: hosting, a few licences, and someone keeping updates applied

Webflow: design freedom with a visual editor

Webflow earns its place when the site needs to look distinctive and change often, and when the people changing it think visually rather than in content fields. Animation and layout control are genuinely good, and a marketing team can move fast without touching code.

The trade-offs are real. You are renting the platform, costs scale with what you need, and complex logic or deep integrations eventually hit a wall. For a marketing site, that wall is usually far away. For an application, you will meet it in month three.

Shopify and WooCommerce: use them if you sell products

If you are selling physical products, resist the urge to build a custom cart. Checkout, tax, shipping rules, refunds, fraud, payment retries and the hundred small behaviours customers expect are a genuinely hard problem that these platforms have already solved and keep solving.

Shopify is the lower-maintenance choice and handles scale well. WooCommerce gives more control and sits inside WordPress, which is convenient if content marketing is central to how you sell. Pick based on who is running the store day to day, not on a feature table.

Custom code is worth it where your business is genuinely different. Checkout is almost never where you are genuinely different.

Custom builds: when the site is really a product

Astro, Next.js and React make sense when the website stops behaving like a website. Customer portals, booking systems that check live availability, quoting tools, dashboards, anything that has to talk to your internal systems or handle logins and permissions properly.

They are also the right call when speed is a competitive advantage, because you control every byte that ships. The cost is that changes need a developer. If that is a problem, say so early, because it shapes the whole approach.

The question almost nobody asks

What does this cost to run, not to build? A cheap build on an expensive platform with five paid plugins can quietly cost more over three years than a more considered build with lower running costs.

Ask for the three-year figure before you choose. Hosting, licences, plugins, the platform subscription and a realistic maintenance allowance. Any developer who cannot give you that number has not thought about your project for long enough.

A short version

• You publish often, several people edit, you have existing rankings: WordPress
• Marketing owns the site and it must look distinctive: Webflow
• You sell products: Shopify, or WooCommerce if content drives your sales
• It has logins, live data or unusual logic: a custom build
• You genuinely do not know: start with the content plan, and the platform follows