§ 01Overview
Compared
WordPress / Custom build
Data
12,621 AU sites · Lighthouse mobile
25 May to 5 Sep 2026
Prices read
5 October 2026

WordPress or a custom website

WordPress is the default. It ran 44.0% of the 12,621 Australian small business sites in our study, so whatever we find about it is a finding about the web most of your competitors are on. It is also the platform where the argument for staying is strongest and the quality of the individual build matters most. This page keeps both in view.

§ 02WordPress in the study
WordPress sites tested
5,554
of 12,621 · Lighthouse mobile
Scored poor (under 50)
28.7%
All sites 27.3%
Mean performance score
59.6
All sites 62
Median load, main content
7.4s
All sites 6.9s · Google good: 2.5s

WordPress is not one thing, and the data shows it. Across 5,554 sites the mean Lighthouse mobile score was 59.6 (median 59), a little below the 62 mean of the whole sample. 28.7% scored poor, slightly above the 27.3% overall rate. The median LCP was 7.4s, against 6.9s for all sites. WordPress sites in Australia sit near the middle of the pack, a touch slower than average.

Compare that with the builders: 28.7% poor sits well below Squarespace (47.2%) and well above Wix (10%). The spread inside WordPress is probably far wider than the spread between platforms, because a lean theme with a handful of plugins and a page-builder theme with thirty plugins are both counted as WordPress. The study measures the average. Your site is one build, not the average.

Source: data/research/lighthouse-2026.json, by_platform and overall_scores.performance. Read the full study.

Platforms with 100+ sites
PlatformnMean% poorLCP
WordPress5,55459.628.7%7.4s
Wix70766.110%6.6s
Squarespace52849.447.2%11.1s
Shopify52751.545.9%11.1s
Webflow14355.928.7%8.4s
How to read this

The study identifies WordPress from page fingerprints and only counts matches at 0.7 confidence or higher; all 5,554 cleared that bar. It cannot separate WordPress.com from self-hosted WordPress, nor lean builds from heavy ones, nor tell you which plugins were running. Each site was run once through throttled mobile lab testing, and the sample leans toward small local service businesses.

§ 03What WordPress does well

Where WordPress is the better tool

01
You own it
Open source, portable
WordPress is free software you can host anywhere and move between hosts. Of the three platforms on these pages, it is the one with the least lock-in, and we will not pretend otherwise.
02
Editing for teams
The most mature editor workflow
Roles, drafts, scheduled posts, revisions and a familiar admin screen. For a business where several people publish regularly, that workflow is a genuine advantage.
03
An ecosystem for everything
Plugins, themes, developers
A very large pool of plugins, themes and freelancers means almost any need has an existing answer, and almost any developer can pick up a WordPress site.
04
Commerce
WooCommerce
For a real shop with product variations, shipping rules and a long tail of integrations, WooCommerce is a serious, flexible option that you control.
05
Content-heavy sites
Built for publishing
Hundreds of articles, categories, authors and archives are what WordPress was built for. A site that is mostly a growing library of content is where it shines.
§ 04Where custom code wins

What a hand-coded site changes

01
Payload
Code for what you use
A WordPress page loads core, a theme and every plugin that touches it. Each is sensible alone, yet together they plausibly feed the 7.4s median LCP. A custom page ships only the code it needs. The study cannot show hand-coded sites beat that number, since its "Custom" label only means no fingerprint was found.
02
Maintenance
Far less to keep patched
A WordPress site has core, theme and plugin updates to apply, any of which can conflict. A custom site has no plugin supply chain to patch, and a much smaller surface for attackers.
03
Ownership, without the upkeep
A handover you can run
You own a WordPress site too. The difference is what you own: a small, documented custom repository rather than a stack of third-party code on its own update schedule.
04
Hosting cost and speed
Static where it can be
Pages that do not change per visitor can be served pre-built from a global edge network, with no database query on the way to first paint.
05
Design without a theme
Built to your brand
Most WordPress sites are a premium theme with the content swapped. A custom design starts from your market and your customers, not from a theme demo.
§ 05Price

What each side costs

Ours first: custom builds start from $8,000 AUD, fixed price, and the floor does not move. The rows below are WordPress's public plans, read directly off its pricing page.

Personal
US$4 / month
WordPress.com, billed yearly. US$9 a month if you pay monthly.
Premium
US$8 / month
Billed yearly. US$18 a month if you pay monthly. Adds more storage and payment buttons.
Business
US$25 / month
Billed yearly. US$40 a month if you pay monthly. Lists SFTP/SSH, Git and real-time backups.
Commerce
US$45 / month
Billed yearly. US$70 a month if you pay monthly. Includes WooCommerce tools.
WordPress.com Business over three years
US$900
US$25 a month billed yearly, times 36 months, excluding taxes. This is the hosted product; domains and premium plugins are extra.
Self-hosted WordPress
Priced by the host
Many sites in the study will be self-hosted, where WordPress itself is free and you pay a host, any premium theme or plugin licences, and whoever maintains it. That varies too much to quote one figure honestly.
Our custom build
From $8,000 AUD
Fixed price, once. The optional Care Plan (hosting, small updates, monitoring) is $229 a month, which is $8,244 over three years if you take it.

Source: https://wordpress.com/pricing/, read 5 October 2026. These are WordPress.com's hosted plans, in US dollars, excluding taxes. WordPress software itself is free; self-hosting costs depend on your host. Plans change; confirm on the platform before you decide.

Full price ladder, including the $1,500 Fix Sprint and the $495 Blueprint, is on the pricing page.

§ 06When to stay on WordPress

Stay on WordPress if

  1. 01Your site is a publishing engine: hundreds of articles, several authors, categories and archives. WordPress was built for that, and a custom build would have to reinvent it.
  2. 02You run a WooCommerce shop with real depth, such as variations, subscriptions and integrations you rely on. Rebuilding a mature shop rarely pays.
  3. 03Your WordPress site is lean and fast already. A tidy theme with few plugins can be quick. Run it through PageSpeed Insights: if it passes, leave it and keep it updated.
  4. 04Your team knows the admin and publishes weekly. Retraining people has a real cost, so weigh it before you switch.
  5. 05You have a good developer or agency who maintains it. A well-kept WordPress site with someone accountable for it is a sound setup.

If your site is slow, it is worth knowing whether the cause is WordPress, the theme or a plugin. The free audit will tell you, and sometimes the answer is a fix, not a rebuild.

§ 07Moving, six weeks

What moving looks like

WordPress is the easiest of the three to move away from, because your content is yours: the database and uploads can be exported in full. The work is deciding what to bring across, since years of plugin-generated pages, shortcodes and unused media rarely deserve a place on the new site.

Six weeks is the plan we scope against for a typical small business site. Larger sites, shops and booking systems take longer, and we say so at quote stage, not after.

01
Week 1
Audit the plugins and the pages
We list every plugin and what it does, then every URL, including ones plugins create such as tag archives and attachment pages. We pull Search Console data, and export SEO titles and descriptions from Yoast or Rank Math so the optimised copy is not lost.
02
Week 2
Decide what comes across
A lot of WordPress content is legacy. We separate pages that earn traffic and enquiries from those that do not, and decide what each plugin's job becomes: a native form, a booking flow, a line of code, or nothing at all.
03
Weeks 3 and 4
Build
A hand-coded site with no theme and no plugin stack, built to your design. If you have a blog, it keeps its structure. A staging link lets you click through as it grows.
04
Week 5
Content, redirects and testing
Content moves across from the export. Where addresses change, 301 redirects are written one by one. We test forms and tracking, and compare Lighthouse results against the live WordPress site.
05
Week 6
Launch and hand over
We point DNS at the new site. WordPress stays up in the background until the redirects are confirmed, then it is archived rather than deleted, so you keep a full copy. You receive the repository and a plain-language guide to making changes.
§ 08Next

Talk it through, or keep reading

Book a 20-minute call→Get the Blueprint→
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