WordPress or Custom PHP for a Small Content Website?

WordPress - done in hours, zero programming knowledge; works on top of well established code base.

custom PHP - done in days/weeks depending on your own skill (or hired skill); rushed jobs will have bugs.

I've seen folk fall for "you'll need a custom" solution too many times.

The worst case was when I suggested using a ready to deploy system that had all the things. Shopping cart, checkout, inventory management, shipping labels, and the list goes on and on.

Three years later and not a single online sale. And a million dollars to the development company.

They called in another consultant and they said "take off and nuke the site from orbit". Or rather, go with a ready to deploy system. In fact they named the same system I talked about three years ago.

The development company was called in and asked for another funding round (100,000USD) and six months till rollout. This time they were asked to stop work and leave the premises.

A few people at the company setup the ready to use site and sales happened two days later. Yes it wasn't much but it was on its way.

There's a lesson here.

Well I hate wordpress and for the specs you have given I would say use wordpress, wordpresses main strength in the day was hosting articles.

Wordpress is only a problem when you need to add in some custom solution that wordpress has no functionality for, which was a lot when it first came out, or to have complete control of the codebase so you can know it is all secure and you can make it as lightweight as possible. I'm not saying wordpress isn't secure either though, I just mean you didnt write it so you don't know, but it should be pretty secure by now with them being around so long.

And even so, you can just host a subdomain to run some custom PHP so you aren't even locked down to wordpress.

I think modern PHP full stack developers moved towards Laravel now - which i am in the process of learning on my first 2 sites - but I wouldn't do that for a simple job unless you already have a templated Laravel site or want to learn it - I'd just do it on Wordpress and let them keep it.

you get the advantage of being able to pass on the job to someone else quite easy too - cause you can just say you need someone who can use wordpress - where as the alternative is a native PHP programmer who gives higher prices cause it is custom code.

For a small content-focused website, I would personally choose WordPress, mainly because of the easier maintenance.

Custom PHP can be lightweight and potentially faster since you have full control over the code. However, you also have to build and maintain many things yourself, such as the admin panel, search, contact forms, security, updates, and backups. That can become more work as the website grows.

With WordPress, most of these features are already available. If you use a lightweight theme, reliable hosting, caching, optimized images, and only a few necessary plugins, page speed can still be very good.

I think the main point is that WordPress performance depends heavily on how it is configured. A clean WordPress setup can be faster and easier to manage than poorly maintained custom PHP.

For this type of project, I’d choose WordPress unless there is a specific reason to build everything from scratch.