Next.js vs WordPress: Which Is Right for Your Business?

I've built with both. I've migrated sites from WordPress to Next.js, and I've talked clients out of Next.js when WordPress was the better fit. There's no universal answer here, but there is a decision framework that works every time.

The core question is: what does the website need to do?

If the answer is "publish content and look professional," WordPress is probably fine. If the answer involves custom functionality, performance-sensitive conversion flows, or anything that starts with "and it should automatically..." - that's where Next.js earns its keep.

Where WordPress still wins

WordPress has been around for twenty years for a reason. The ecosystem is enormous. You want a multilingual e-commerce store with affiliate tracking and a membership area? There's a plugin combination that does exactly that, and a fourteen-year-old YouTube tutorial showing you how to set it up.

Content editors love it. Your marketing person can update a page, publish a blog post, and swap a hero image without calling a developer. That self-sufficiency is worth a lot.

And the economics for simple sites are hard to beat. A premium theme, decent hosting, and a few plugins will get you a professional-looking site for well under €1,000 and it can be live in days.

The problem is everything that comes after.

The WordPress tax

Every WordPress site I've inherited for a migration has the same story. It started clean. Then someone added a page builder plugin. Then a caching plugin because the page builder made it slow. Then a security plugin because WordPress sites get attacked constantly - and I mean constantly. Then an SEO plugin, a forms plugin, an analytics plugin, and by year two you're running thirty-seven plugins, the site loads in five seconds, and nobody wants to update anything because last time they did, the contact form broke.

I'm not exaggerating. This is a pattern I've seen at least a dozen times.

The total cost of ownership in year one for a typical WordPress business site - theme, hosting, security, SEO, backups, and someone to handle updates - runs €1,000 to €3,500. And you pay that again next year. And the year after.

A Next.js site costs more upfront (€1,500 to €8,000 depending on complexity) but hosting runs €0 to €20 a month on Vercel. No plugins to update. No security patches to panic about. No page builders to fight with. By year two, you're basically paying for the domain.

The performance gap is real

I migrated a B2B SaaS company's marketing site from WordPress to Next.js last year. These were the numbers:

Load time went from 4.2 seconds to 0.9 seconds. Lighthouse score went from 55 to 97. Core Web Vitals went from failing to all green. Bounce rate dropped by about 35 percent.

Those aren't vanity metrics. Google uses Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal. Their own research shows that as page load time goes from one second to three seconds, the probability of bounce increases 32 percent. From one to five seconds, it increases 90 percent.

If your site takes four seconds to load, you're losing a third of your visitors before they see a single word.

When to choose what

Start with WordPress if you're testing a business idea, need something live immediately, or your team needs to update content frequently without developer involvement. There's no point engineering a custom solution for a site you might pivot away from in three months.

Build with Next.js if the website is core to how your business makes money. If you care about page speed and SEO as competitive levers. If you need custom functionality that would require five plugins duct-taped together. If you're thinking in years, not weeks.

I tell this to about one in four people who come to me wanting a custom build: just use WordPress for now. When you've validated the concept and the website becomes the bottleneck, come back and we'll build it properly.

That honesty has never cost me a client. It's gotten me several referrals.

If you're weighing the options for a specific project, I'm happy to give you a straight answer. No commitment either way.