Craft vs WordPress, for design studios rather than end clients

There's no shortage of Craft-versus-WordPress comparisons. We read the ones currently ranking before writing this, and most are good. One runs to about 12,500 words and covers the feature set more thoroughly than anybody needs.

They also have one thing in common. Every one is written for the person choosing a CMS for their own website.

That isn't you. If you run a design studio, you're deciding what to recommend to a client, build under your name, and live with for the next five years while your reputation is attached to it. The feature comparison barely touches the parts that decide that.

So this is that version. We only build in Craft, so weigh it accordingly, but the concessions below are real, the numbers are sourced, and there's a section at the end on when to pick WordPress.

The short answer

If the site is a marketing site carrying a brand you designed, the client will edit it regularly, and it needs to still look right in four years, Craft is the better tool and the extra build cost is recoverable.

If the budget is small, the brand isn't the point, or the client already has a WordPress team, use WordPress and use somebody good at it. Over-building doesn't help anyone.

Where WordPress wins

It's cheaper to start, and sometimes that's the right answer. No licence cost, a huge supply of themes, and a plugin for nearly every requirement. A studio that insists on a £10,000 custom build for a client who needed a £2,000 site isn't listening, whatever it tells itself about standards.

You can replace your developer. This matters more than agencies like to admit, and it cuts against us directly. WordPress runs somewhere around a third to two-fifths of all websites depending on whose survey you read. Craft is a low single-digit percentage. If your build partner disappears, the pool of people who can pick up a WordPress site is enormous and in every town. The Craft pool is capable and much smaller. That's a real risk and you should take it on knowingly.

The client may already know it. A marketing team that has used WordPress for a decade needs less support on it than on anything new, however well the alternative is designed. Training is a cost even when nobody invoices for it.

The ecosystem covers unusual problems. A regional payment provider, an industry-specific booking system, a compliance integration: somebody has probably already built a WordPress plugin for it. In Craft that's often custom work, and custom work has a price.

Where Craft wins, and why it matters to a studio

The content model fits the design, rather than the other way round. In Craft you define fields and structures to fit what you designed. In WordPress you often reshape the design to fit what the page builder can do, or install something to bridge the gap and inherit its opinions, its markup and its release schedule along with its features.

That compromise is invisible in the finished screenshot and very visible eighteen months later, when the client wants a variation the builder can't produce and the answer is another plugin.

The control panel is defensible. A well-modelled Craft install shows an editor the fields their page needs and nothing else. The default WordPress experience shows a large surface, most of it irrelevant to the specific site, some of it capable of breaking the design, and a fair amount of it advertising other plugins.

Clients see this daily and form an opinion about it, and the opinion attaches to whoever's name is on the project: yours, not your developer's.

The security section, with numbers

This is usually where a Craft advocate waves at "fewer plugins, fewer problems". The figures are public and worth stating precisely, because the fair conclusion is narrower than the marketing version.

Patchstack, which runs the largest vulnerability database for the WordPress ecosystem, recorded 11,334 new vulnerabilities across the WordPress ecosystem in 2025, a 42% increase on 2024, which itself saw 7,966, up 34% on 2023.12

The distribution is the part that matters. 91% of those were in plugins and 9% in themes. WordPress core itself accounted for six.1

So the fair reading is not that WordPress is insecure. Core is well maintained by any standard. Six issues across a year on software running a third of the web is a good record. The risk is the ecosystem you assemble on top, and that risk scales with how many plugins the site carries.

One more figure, and it's the one that should worry a studio offering support: 46% of those vulnerabilities had no patch available at the point they were publicly disclosed.1 Knowing about a problem and being able to fix it are different things, and the gap between them is time your client is exposed and you're answering the phone.

Craft has fewer plugins. On the 2025 numbers, that's an advantage rather than a compromise.

Craft's smaller install base is also a factor people skip past. Mass automated exploitation is worth somebody's time when the target is a third of the internet. It's much less worth it at low single digits. That's a property of the market rather than the software, but it's real, and it means fewer 3am problems.

What it costs to run, over five years

Both platforms get compared on build cost, which is the number studios can see, and rarely on running cost, which is the number that decides whether a client is still happy in year four.

Craft carries a licence. Pro is a recurring annual charge (the model changed from a perpetual licence at Craft 4), so there's a line item WordPress doesn't have.3 Against that, a typical Craft site we build carries a handful of paid plugins rather than a couple of dozen, so the renewal surface is small and predictable.

WordPress has no licence cost and often a longer list of paid plugins, each renewing annually, on a card belonging to somebody who may have left. Add the patch labour implied by the figures above and the running cost is real even though no single line of it looks large.

The trade depends almost entirely on how long the site is expected to live. Under two years, WordPress usually wins on total cost and it isn't close. Over five, it usually doesn't. Most brand-led sites are built on a five-year horizon and replaced in seven.

The standards question, which increasingly decides procurement

If your client is a public sector body, or sells to one, this stops being a quality argument and becomes a legal one.

The Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) Accessibility Regulations 2018 require WCAG 2.2 AA, and they're enforced by the Equality and Human Rights Commission in England, Scotland and Wales, and the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland, through investigations, unlawful act notices and court action.4 An accessibility statement has to be published and kept current.

Neither CMS makes you compliant. Both can be built to the standard and both can be built badly. But a platform where you control all the markup is a much easier place to hit it than one where a theme and several plugins are each producing HTML you didn't write and can't fully change.

The same applies to performance. Google's thresholds are specific: largest contentful paint within 2.5 seconds, interaction to next paint under 200ms, cumulative layout shift at or below 0.1, measured at the 75th percentile of real visits.5 Hitting those depends on how much third-party code the page loads, which depends on how many plugins are involved.

The editor experience, compared properly

This deserves more than a bullet, because it's where the two differ most and where studios most often get caught out.

WordPress's block editor is generic by necessity. It serves every site, so it offers general-purpose tools and the theme constrains what they produce. The client can build almost anything, including things you'd never sign off, and the guard rails are whatever your theme happens to enforce.

A Craft Matrix field is specific by design. You define the blocks that exist. Three heading levels in the design means three in the editor. If cards work at two, three or four across, those are the options. The client can't produce something off-brand because nothing off-brand is available.

Which is better depends on what you sold. Maximum flexibility is right for some clients. If what you sold was a brand identity, constraint is the feature.

The question that decides it

Are you selling a website, or are you selling the brand you just spent six weeks building?

In eighteen months the website is what the client points at when they describe their brand. Every compromise made to fit a template is a compromise made to your work, in public, permanently. And when it goes wrong, nobody says the CMS was limiting. They say the website is hard to update, and the website has your name on it.

When we'd tell you to use WordPress

Small budget where the brand isn't the point. A client with an existing WordPress team and established processes. A requirement list full of things that already have mature plugins. A site with a two-year horizon.

In all four cases WordPress is the better commercial answer and we'd say so rather than take the work. We only build in Craft, which means sometimes the straight answer is that we're the wrong people.