WordPress is a reasonable choice if you plan to publish often and someone is going to maintain it. It is a poor choice if nobody will, because the plugins that make it work are also what break it, and an unmaintained WordPress site is a security problem inside of two years. We build custom sites instead, and the reason is maintenance cost rather than snobbery.
By Jacob Graber, founder of Blessed Arc Media · Updated
Publishing. If you are going to write regularly, or you have staff who need to change pages without calling anyone, a content editor earns its keep.
It is also portable in a useful way: a lot of people know it, so you are not tied to one developer. That is a real argument and it is the strongest one in its favor.
The site you are handed at launch is not the site you have in three years. A typical small business build runs on a theme plus somewhere between ten and thirty plugins, each from a different author, each updating on its own schedule.
Skip the updates and you have known vulnerabilities sitting on your domain. Apply them and something eventually breaks, usually the contact form, usually silently, usually noticed a month later when you wonder why nobody has called.
That is what the maintenance plan you are being quoted is actually for. It is not padding — it is the real cost of the architecture.
Custom sites with no plugin layer. Nothing to update, nothing to license, nothing to break on its own. Hosting starts at $35 a month, or $75 if the site needs a database, and that is the whole ongoing cost.
The tradeoff is honest: you do not get a drag-and-drop editor on the $499 and $999 builds. Text and photo changes come to us, and we do them. At $1,499 you get an admin dashboard, so you can manage leads and content yourself.
If publishing weekly is genuinely part of your plan, say so up front. That changes what we recommend, and sometimes it changes it toward a CMS.
Do not rip it out because someone on the internet said to. If it is fast, secure, and bringing in calls, leave it alone.
Rebuild it when the maintenance bill stops making sense, when it has been hacked, or when the structure cannot hold the pages you would need to compete. Those are the three real triggers, and a rebuild starts at the same $499.
Or skip the reading and call Jacob at (812) 787-2569.
Send what you do and which towns you want the work from. Back comes a fixed price and a launch date.