clients ask this often enough that it's worth a proper answer. wordpress runs a huge share of the web and it isn't going anywhere. but we don't build on it, and the reasons are about your interests, not our preferences.
the bill that never stops
a typical wordpress build comes with a stack of recurring costs that are easy to miss at the start. managed hosting, usually £10 to £30 a month. premium plugin and page-builder licences, often £100 to £300 a year. over three years that's hundreds to low thousands in fees, paid forever, just to keep the lights on. a static site built properly can run at near zero on a free tier in your own account. the difference compounds.
plugins are the attack surface
most wordpress sites that get hacked get hacked through a plugin, usually one that wasn't updated. every plugin you add is more code you didn't write, running on your site, that someone has to keep patched. an unmaintained wordpress install is a genuine liability, not a dormant one. the more a site leans on plugins to do its job, the larger the surface someone can attack.
page builders ship weight
the drag-and-drop builders that make wordpress feel easy also generate a lot of markup to do simple things. that weight shows up as slower pages, which shows up in bounce rates and search ranking. you pay for the convenience twice: once in the licence, again in performance.
what we build instead
next.js, deployed to your own vercel account. for a standard site that's £0 to run, no licences to renew, no plugins to patch, and you own every line of it. it's fast because there's nothing bloated in the way, and it's yours to keep or hand to any developer later.
the honest counter-case
to be fair, wordpress is the right tool for some people. if you need to publish and edit content yourself every single day, have no developer on call, and want to reach into a vast ecosystem of off-the-shelf plugins for niche features, wordpress earns its place. there's no shame in that fit. we're simply not built for it, and pretending otherwise would waste your money.
but if what you want is a fast site you own outright, with no recurring licence bill and no plugin to break at 2am, that's exactly the gap we build into.