Why we don't do WordPress.

Every studio has a version of this note. Most of them read as tribal — WordPress bad, our stack good. This isn't that.

We don't build client sites on WordPress. Not because it's a bad tool. It powers about 40% of the web for reasons that are real. We don't build on it because our clients pay us to hand them something that will run for five years without a support contract, and that's a different question from "which CMS is popular".

What actually breaks

The failure mode we've inherited on WordPress rebuilds is almost always the same. A well-intentioned build ships in year one on a theme + eight plugins. Two years later the theme author has drifted, three plugins are unmaintained, one has a critical CVE, PHP has moved on, and the client is being asked to pay for "modernisation" that costs a good chunk of the original build. The site becomes a liability disguised as an asset.

You can absolutely run WordPress at a level where none of this happens. Publishers do. But it requires a paid managed host, a maintenance retainer, a plugin diet, and a person who owns updates on a calendar. If you're paying for all of that anyway, our take is that a small custom build under our stack — Next.js, TypeScript, Payload CMS, a Postgres you own, a single Railway or equivalent — will cost you less over three years and break less along the way. The maintenance surface is smaller because there are fewer moving parts.

Where we would recommend WordPress

If the client's team writes and publishes content weekly and needs the standard WordPress editorial surface (categories, tags, editorial calendar, native rich text), and they have an existing agency who runs updates and hosting, WordPress is the right call. We'll tell you that. We just aren't the right studio to build it — we don't run WordPress-shaped ops, and we'd be quietly worse at it than the specialists you can find in Geneva who do.

What we actually ship

For most of our clients — hotels, restaurants, developers, law firms, funds, ateliers — content moves once a quarter, not once a week. What matters is that the site loads fast, ranks properly, holds up to a compliance review, and doesn't ask them to think about it. That's a much easier problem to solve on a small custom build than on a shared-hosting CMS, and it costs less.

The tell that WordPress is the wrong tool for a given brief: the client says "we won't need to touch it much". If nobody's going to be in the admin regularly, you don't need the admin surface WordPress gives you. You need a site that stays quiet.