Why We Don't Use WordPress, Squarespace, or Webflow

Every platform promises the same thing: a beautiful website, fast. And for personal blogs and hobby projects, they deliver. But for businesses that depend on performance, SEO, security, and long-term ownership — they all fall short in different ways.

The WordPress Problem

WordPress powers 43% of the web and accounts for 90% of all hacked CMS sites. Every WordPress site comes with:

• A PHP server running 24/7 to serve content that hasn’t changed in months
• A MySQL database for five pages of text
• 23+ plugins that each need updating, each one an attack surface
• Constant maintenance just to keep the lights on

Your site shouldn’t go down because a contact form plugin pushed a bad release on a Friday afternoon.

The Squarespace & Wix Problem

These platforms solve the WordPress maintenance headache — but they introduce a worse one: you don’t own anything.

• Your site lives on their servers. You can’t move it.
• Your design is constrained by their templates. You can’t break out.
• Your SEO is limited by their rendering. You can’t optimise what you can’t control.
• You’re paying monthly rent forever. Stop paying, lose everything.

Squarespace sites consistently score 40-65 on Lighthouse performance. That’s not a settings problem — it’s an architecture problem you can’t fix from inside their platform.

The Webflow Problem

Webflow is the closest competitor to custom code. It’s genuinely good for designers who don’t code. But:

• You’re locked into Webflow hosting — their CMS plan starts at $23/month for what static hosting does for free
• Complex interactions require fighting their visual editor instead of writing 10 lines of CSS
• Exporting your site produces bloated, unreadable code that no developer wants to maintain
• You’re still renting. Webflow decides the pricing, the features, and the limits.

What We Use Instead

We build with modern static-first frameworks like Astro, Next.js, and React. The output is pre-built HTML that gets served from a CDN — no server, no database, no platform dependency.

# Platform-hosted site: the request lifecycle
Browser → Platform CDN → Platform Server → Platform Database → Browser
# Time: 2-4 seconds. You don't control any of it.

# Custom static site: the request lifecycle
Browser → CDN → Browser
# Time: 0.2-0.8 seconds. You own all of it.

But What About Content Editing?

This is the question everyone asks. The answer: you probably don’t need a CMS.

Most businesses update their site content a few times a month. For that, you email us the changes and we push them live — usually within hours. No dashboard to learn, no interface to break.

For businesses that genuinely need direct content control, we integrate headless CMS solutions that give you an editing interface without the platform lock-in.

The Ownership Question

Here’s the real differentiator. With every platform — WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, Webflow — someone else controls your infrastructure. They can change pricing, deprecate features, or shut down entirely.

With custom code:

• You own every line
• You host wherever you want (Cloudflare, Vercel, Netlify, your own server)
• Any developer can maintain it — not just one who knows your specific platform
• You pay for hosting, not rent — typically $0-20/month, not $30-50+

The Bottom Line

If you’re paying monthly rent to a platform or paying an agency to manage WordPress, you’re paying for the tool — not your business. We’d rather spend that budget on things that actually move the needle: performance, SEO, conversion optimization, and features that matter.