Custom Code or WordPress for My E-shop or Website?

A question that comes up again and again is how best to build an e-shop or a website. To answer it, though, we first need to ask a few basic questions.

What is the budget for building the website or e-shop?

Personally, I see this as the most crucial question, and the one people are most afraid to ask themselves, or that we as professionals are afraid to ask our clients. How much money do we have, and how much should our website cost?

Before going ahead with any build or website rebuild, we need to be ready to say how much money we can spend.

At a conference, one of the most important things I have heard about digital advertising in general was this: the ideal advertising budget is the amount you would not mind losing without a single sale while you gather data about your sector (that is, your potential customers), as long as it gets you enough data.

By the same logic, the budget for building our website should always be small enough not to cause our business any problems, yet big enough to create something (a website or e-shop) decent, attractive and easy to use, so the business can then be advertised.

If our budget is very large, custom code would be a very good choice, as it could give us maximum speed and every feature we would want as a business. If our budget is more limited, a platform such as WordPress, PrestaShop or OpenCart would be a good solution.

All of this assumes the developer can deliver an ideal result with any of these solutions.

So why would custom code be much better?

Quite simply, because if something has been built for us and nobody else, it follows our specifications and only our needs. Only specific libraries are loaded, each page does only what it should, specific SQL queries are sent to the database, and we get the best possible result.

Building something just for us, however, takes many hours of design and even more hours of development. If someone quotes you less than 6,000 euros for a custom e-shop, it is probably either not custom or they do not know how to build it properly.

But does everyone need a custom build?

From the above, we would say that a custom website build is the ideal solution in terms of speed, provided of course it is done properly (and that is a big if).

The first things we need to think about are these:

• What if I want to add features to the website, and how much will that cost with a custom solution?
• What happens if I fall out with the developer, if I do not get good support, or if for some reason I cannot reach the person who built my website?
• What happens if my staff or I need training on a custom solution with no online resources to look up examples?
• What happens if the website needs rebuilding later because a new technology is required?
• What happens if I want to work with someone else for advertising?

These are just some of the questions you can ask yourself, and you may find that building a custom website is not the best solution after all. Let’s look at them in more detail.

To understand this even better, we should think beyond adding a feature that already exists and that we simply have not added yet, and think about a feature that will be created in the future (for example, connecting shipping to a courier company’s API, or connecting our new ERP to our e-shop). Clearly, with a custom solution, adding the new feature will cost far more than on a WordPress website, where it can be done in very little time.

At best, if the website has been built properly, a custom solution will be a little easier and cheaper to maintain.

Of course, we do not face this problem when the website is built with WordPress, as there are millions of developers who can do whatever you ask. Even if you do not want a developer, there are plenty of tutorials to help you solve simple problems yourself.

Having answered the questions above, we have essentially also answered what happens if we want to rebuild our website in five years. What we also need to consider is that the site will by then hold a lot of data that must be transferred intact, as well as the time and cost of that process.

But with custom code my site is harder to hack!

I have heard this sentence many, many times, and explained it even more often.

In theory, it is much harder to hack something you do not know, such as custom code. But how good can a developer (or a team of developers, say 10) be, so that nothing slips past them in an e-shop?

Or to put it more clearly: can 10 people check code better than the hundreds of thousands who check WordPress code and release updates very frequently?

In general, the weak point is usually the plugins in use, which is where most security holes are found. WordPress core has very few, and those that are found get fixed very quickly.

Finally, the strongest protection there can be, and should be, is at hosting level, because with the right firewall there you can avoid 90% of the risks.

So which is the better solution: WordPress or a custom build?

Once we have answered the questions above for ourselves first and thought everything through, we can decide which solution is best for our business.

For clients of web-mate.gr who have never had a website or e-shop before, I personally recommend starting with a WordPress-based solution so they can get to know it. For a small business, I also recommend starting from a ready-made theme, so we avoid the high cost of building a custom theme and save time too.

That way they get to know WordPress, and together we learn, at a lower cost, what problems an e-shop can bring (I mean problems with the e-shop itself and with the whole e-commerce process).

Also, if things do not work out, since not everyone in a sector can succeed, they will have lost a smaller amount. Most importantly, they can put their budget into advertising, and without advertising, however good an e-shop or website is, it cannot succeed these days.

When we talk about slow and fast sites and how they are built, we need to consider the context. The speed of a website is very important both for its promotion and for generating leads and sales through the site, but it is not a disaster if a site loads in 3 seconds instead of 2. Obviously, 2 seconds is better, but how much more do we have to pay for that, and what will we gain from the difference, if we may have to sacrifice something in design or features?

In my view, the best solution, as long as there is a budget and the business or person already has experience with a website, is to build a custom WordPress theme and custom plugins, so that you get optimal performance with a tool like WordPress, which keeps evolving and is easy for anyone to use.

Finally, if someone sings the praises of either option, check two main points.

• If it is custom code, the score in Google’s speed testing tool must never be below 88% on desktop and 75% on mobile.
• If it is just a template and its customisation with no extra services, the cost must never exceed 4,500 euros (note that we are not talking about a custom theme or extra services).