WordPress powers a huge share of the web because it is excellent for content-heavy sites, blogs, and many e-commerce setups with WooCommerce. A custom site—often React, Next.js, or similar—shines when you need a highly tailored product experience, strict performance budgets, or complex authenticated applications.
Choose WordPress when…
- Marketing and editorial teams will update pages and posts frequently.
- You want a large plugin ecosystem for SEO, forms, and commerce.
- Time-to-launch and budget favor a proven CMS workflow.
Choose custom when…
- The site is really a web app: dashboards, roles, real-time data, or heavy interactivity.
- You need fine-grained control over performance and architecture.
- WordPress’s model would fight your product instead of supporting it.
Hybrid approaches exist: headless WordPress for content with a custom front-end. That adds complexity, so use it when the benefits clearly outweigh operational cost.