Shopify, WordPress, Squarespace or custom: which website does my small business need?
The platform matters less than people think and more than the templates suggest. Here is how we actually choose for clients, including when we tell them not to go custom.
Selling physical products: Shopify, with a custom theme if the brand matters. A simple site you will edit yourself and rarely change: Squarespace or a similar builder is fine. Content-heavy or lots of plugins: WordPress, but budget for maintenance. A site that must be fast, rank, and do something specific (a booking flow, a client area, a product configurator): custom. The wrong choice costs you twice, once now and once when you rebuild.
Start from what the site has to do
Before picking a platform, write down the three things the site must do. Take a booking. Sell a product. Get found for a specific search in a specific city. Let clients log in. Show work so well that a founder trusts you before the call. The platform is chosen to serve those, not the other way round.
Shopify
If you sell products, use it. Checkout, payments, stock, shipping and tax are solved problems and you should not pay anyone to reinvent them. The catch is that off-the-shelf themes make every brand look the same and are often slow. For Martina London, a luxury resort-wear brand, we hand-coded a custom Shopify theme so the site looks like the brand, loads fast, and is set up to rank in search and be recommended by AI. That is the best of both.
Squarespace, Wix and similar builders
Good for a simple brochure site you want to edit yourself, when you are not relying on search for leads. Cheap and quick. The limits show up when you need real speed, specific structure for search, or anything custom. They are also easy to outgrow, and moving off them later is a rebuild.
WordPress
Flexible, huge ecosystem, and you can find someone to work on it anywhere. The cost is maintenance: plugins, updates, security and the slow creep of bloat. It is a fine choice for a content-heavy site with someone looking after it, and a poor one if it is going to be installed and abandoned.
Custom
A custom site is built from scratch for exactly what you need and nothing else. It is the fastest option, the easiest to structure for search and AI visibility, and the only option when the site has to do something specific: a bespoke client area, a booking flow, a configurator, a product that needs a backend. VandaVee needed a luxury front end plus a secure system where the owner manages pages, products and images herself, so it was built custom on Next.js and Supabase. That would have been a compromise on any platform.
Custom does not have to mean expensive. A focused custom marketing site for a small business starts from £1,000 with us, and it usually outperforms a themed site at the same price because nothing on it is generic. What custom is not: the right answer for a shop with two hundred products and standard needs. That is Shopify.
How we decide for a client
Products: Shopify. Simple and self-edited: a builder. Content-heavy with a maintainer: WordPress. Anything where speed, search or a specific function decides whether you win work: custom. Then, whichever it is, the part that actually brings in clients is the positioning and the words, and those get done properly regardless of platform. More on what that costs in how much should a small-business website cost.
Related questions
Can I edit a custom site myself?
Yes, if it is built with that in mind. Editing can range from a simple content system to a full admin area like VandaVee's. Say up front what you want to change yourself.
Is a custom site worse for SEO because it is not WordPress?
No. It is usually better, because it is faster and has nothing on it you do not need. Google ranks pages, not platforms.
Do you build on Webflow or Framer?
We can, but for most clients a hand-built site is faster and cheaper to run. We choose the tool for the job rather than the other way round.
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