Software Development Blog

Weekly Newsletter Friday 28th Nov 2025 - When WordPress Is Perfect (and When It Isn’t)

Hi there, Rob here…

WordPress has a strange reputation. For some people it is the answer to everything. For others it is the thing they swear they will never touch again. The truth is somewhere in the middle. WordPress is brilliant in the right context and completely the wrong choice in others.

If you want a content led site, like a marketing site or a blog, with lots of pages, posts, landing pages, and a decent ecosystem of plugins, WordPress is very hard to beat. You get a mature editor, a huge plugin library, and plenty of people who know how to work with it. For many businesses, that is exactly what they need. They want to publish content quickly and not think too much about the underlying platform.

But as soon as you move into serious e commerce, Shopify usually starts to make more sense. Payments, tax rules, checkout, shipping, security, all of that is handled for you. You spend more of your energy on products, customers, and conversion, rather than keeping a WooCommerce stack alive. If online sales are the core of your business rather than an add on, Shopify tends to be the safer bet.

Then there are the cases where neither is quite right, and custom is the answer. Maybe you are building internal tools, a portal with unusual workflows, or you have a product that does not fit neatly into a standard CMS or storefront. That is where a custom application shines. You get exactly what you need without fighting against a system that was designed for something else entirely. It costs more up front, but you avoid years of workarounds and plugin gymnastics.

So when someone asks, “Should we use WordPress?” the honest answer is, “It depends what you are trying to do.” Start with the job you need the site or app to do, then pick the platform that fits, not the one that just happens to be familiar.

👉 Because the tech stack should serve the business, not the other way round.

See you next week,
Rob & Jason
Dev Partners

PS. We are Dev Partners, helping founders and businesses choose the right platform and build software that just works.