Most people who ask me for a website don’t much care what it’s built on, which is fair enough. But a fair few have heard something. That WordPress gets hacked. That Squarespace is easier. That a mate’s lad who once installed Linux reckons it’s dated. So here’s my answer, once, properly.
You own it
Everything else on this page is a footnote to this bit.
WordPress is open source. The software costs nothing, the site is yours, and it sits on hosting you pay for, in a form you can pick up and carry elsewhere. If you and I fall out tomorrow, you can hand the lot to any of several hundred thousand other WordPress developers and they’ll know what they’re looking at.
A hosted builder is a rental. Your site lives on their platform, in their format, on their terms. When they put the price up, you pay it. When they redesign the editor, you learn it again. And when you decide to leave you don’t move your site, you rebuild it, because there’s nothing to take with you but the text you can copy and paste.
If you’re a business that intends to still be here in ten years, that’s worth a thought. If you’re a club or a charity where whoever looks after the website changes every couple of years, it’s worth two.
It’ll still be the right site in three years
Sowena Cornwall came to me for a site for their wellbeing retreats and events. Eighteen months after it launched they came back with a problem rather than a brief: they needed people to be able to book the cabin, and what they were doing by hand wasn’t holding up.
So I built them a booking system inside the site they already had. No move to another platform, no separate booking service sitting awkwardly alongside the website, no second place for the team to keep things up to date.
That’s the part people underrate when they’re choosing what to build on. The question isn’t whether a platform can do what you need this month. It’s what happens the first time you need something nobody thought of at the start, because on a closed platform the answer is either a migration or a shrug.
You’ll be able to update it yourself
Or your treasurer will, or whoever picks it up after you. This quietly decides whether a site is still any good in five years, and it’s where a lot of builds fall down.
Falmouth Sports Club is run by volunteers. I built it so a committee member can get results, fixtures and membership details up in minutes without ringing me first. That matters more than anything I could tell you about the design, because the alternative isn’t a slightly worse website, it’s a website three seasons out of date that nobody trusts.
Cornwall Birds is the same idea at a larger scale. Sightings, events and membership, all run by the society rather than run by me.
“But isn’t WordPress slow and insecure?”
Sometimes. Usually that’s the build rather than the platform.
The sites that earn WordPress its reputation are the ones running forty plugins added one at a time over six years, on a marketplace theme nobody has understood since 2019, with a login page that’s never seen two-factor. You can make that mess on any system. WordPress just hands you more rope.
What I do instead: as few plugins as I can get away with, custom code for the things a plugin would do badly, hosting that takes performance seriously, and sites that get maintained rather than built and abandoned. Cornwall Squash is a fair example. Most of its visitors are players checking results on a phone between matches, so it was stripped back and organised around what a player wants rather than how the organisation is arranged internally.
The bit that actually goes wrong with Wix and Squarespace
People point me at them as the cheap option and I understand why. The price is upfront and the adverts are good.
My objection isn’t really the software. It’s what tends to come out of the other end. When someone builds their own site, you can usually tell, and the business ends up looking smaller and less careful than it is. The spacing is slightly off. The photographs are whatever was on the phone. The type is the pair the template came with. None of that is a lack of effort, and it isn’t stupidity either. Design is a job, and it takes someone who does it every day to make something look effortless.
So the real question isn’t WordPress or Squarespace. It’s whether the thing gets built by someone who does this for a living. If it doesn’t, the platform won’t rescue it.
Who I do this with
A good deal of the work in my portfolio was done through Ridgeline Studio, where I’m the digital half. Ridgeline is a Cornwall studio doing branding and print alongside the web work, which means that when a job needs more than a website, an identity or the printed side of things, it doesn’t get farmed out to three people who’ve never spoken to each other.
When it’s only a website, you’re dealing with me. Either way it gets built the way I’ve described above.