Yesterday, I found out that we lost a large website bid. I asked the potential client why and they responded by saying that they wanted to go with a custom CMS to have more flexibility and because the cost of the custom CMS solution and our WordPress CMS solution was similar. There are some major problems with this way of thinking, so I thought I would outline my thoughts on it.

First, is WordPress a limited CMS?

The short answer is no. WordPress isn’t limited other than by the developer’s knowledge of how to work with it. The only exceptions to this are websites that require huge databases of information that are instantly searchable, or possibly massive e-commerce stores. But, if you are talking about a site that needs to be built in the $500 to $150,000 range, WordPress and accommodate your needs 99% of the time.

A good team can take a completely custom design and create a custom WordPress theme that can look and function like any great site on the Internet. Furthermore, that team should be able to write plugins to extend functionality and do some very complex (and awesome) stuff.

If WordPress is not a limited CMS, what makes it better than a Custom CMS that is also not limited?

What makes WordPress better right out of the gate are the thousands and thousands of hours of development that have gone into it. A custom CMS is all fine and dandy, but it doesn’t have the thought or experience behind it that WordPress does. Custom CMSs also don’t get constant security updates, improvements and attention like WordPress. A custom CMS will be the best work of a handful of developers at most while the current build of WordPress is the work of thousands of great developers across many years.

I would argue that a Custom CMS is more limited than WordPress. WordPress has a ton of security, user roles, content types, image editing features, etc. built right into it. To make a Custom CMS even come close to matching WordPress right out of the box would take thousands of hours of work.

Think of it like this.  We have carpenter #1, carpenter #2 and carpenter #3.  Let’s say we have an unlimited supply of nails, brackets, joists, clips, you name it, and we have an unlimited supply of wood.

Carpenter #1 loves to create custom houses.  But he is a carpenter, he’s not so good at foundations.  He wings the foundation and gets the house built.  It looks good, but it has no standards, and it took a lot longer to build because he was busy working on a foundation. This is a custom CMS.

Carpenter #2 loves to build houses. He only knows how to build one type of house.  It gets the job done; the family moves in but they needed a five bedroom house, and he only knows how to build a three bedroom house.  It is a house, just not what they needed. This is a WordPress template.

Carpenter #3 loves to build custom houses. He has an excellent base of blueprints to work from, and he likes to get to know the family that is going to move in. He realizes that they need some extra rooms, and the basement needs to be finished with a mother-in-law suite. He uses the same tools as the other guys, but because he knows his framework or blueprint well, and he knows how to extend it, the house gets built under code/standards and on time. This is a WordPress site, but it looks nothing like WordPress because he knew his framework and how to extend it.

Carpenter 3 is a custom WordPress site, but can only be built be someone that knows the in-and-outs of it.