WordPress powers over 40% of the web - and that's its biggest flaw when you're competing for premium clients. Your site looks like your competitor's, because it was literally born from the same theme.
What you actually buy in a template
A $60 theme is code written for everyone, which means for no one. In practice that means 2–4 second load times, dozens of plugins with conflicting agendas, and a design that was modern three years ago.
- Every plugin is a potential security hole and tens of kilobytes of scripts.
- The page renders through PHP on the server - slower than Google would like.
- Any change beyond the theme's limits means fighting someone else's code.
What custom code changes
A Next.js site is statically generated and served from a CDN - it loads in a fraction of a second worldwide. There are no plugins, because features are built in. There's no ceiling, because the code is yours.
Across our clients, rewriting a WordPress site in custom code lifted Google PageSpeed from 40–60 to 100/100 - and enquiries grew on average 40% in the first month.
An example from our portfolio: the Lexa & Partners law firm recorded +40% enquiries within four weeks of the rewrite.
When WordPress makes sense
Honestly: if your budget is $1–2k and the site is a business card with a phone number - WordPress is enough. Custom code starts paying off when the site is meant to sell: when one client is worth thousands, the conversion difference repays the project many times over.
The decision comes down to one question: is the website a cost to minimise, or an asset that should earn?