The standard pattern: a small business pays for a low-cost WordPress site built on Elementor, Divi, or WPBakery. The agency drops in a template, swaps the colours, plugs in seven plugins (Yoast, WPForms, WP Rocket, Smush, contact forms, Cookie banner, CRM integration), hands it over. Two years later: Lighthouse 35, organic traffic flat, no one in-house knows how to edit the design, the page-builder licence has lapsed twice and three plugins broke after a WordPress update. The cycle restarts with a new agency.
A bespoke build costs more upfront and lasts longer. Lighthouse stays above 90 because the code was written for performance, not the result of a page-builder rendering layered div soup. SEO foundations were baked in, so organic growth from month six is real. The editorial controls are designed for your team's actual workflow, not the page-builder's idea of what they need. Six years on, the site still performs.
The third option (rarely used but increasingly viable) is static-site generation with a headless CMS: Astro or Next.js for the front end, WordPress or Sanity for the editorial layer, Cloudflare Pages or Vercel for hosting. Best-of-both: editorial flexibility, sub-second page loads, near-zero hosting cost, and a codebase that survives the agency churn most websites cannot. We are happy to build any of the three; the recommendation follows the goal, not the agency stack we prefer.