Choose WordPress when content is the product
If your site is mostly pages, posts, services and case studies — and non-technical people need to publish without a deployment — WordPress wins on cost and speed to launch. The editing experience is mature, and your marketing team already knows it.
- Marketing needs to publish daily or weekly
- You want a straightforward blog, SEO plugins and forms out of the box
- Budget matters more than pixel-level control
- You need an e-commerce catalogue without building one
Choose a custom React build when behaviour is the product
Once the site is really an application — logins, dashboards, calculators, real-time data, complex state — a custom front end is cheaper to maintain than fighting a CMS into being an app framework.
- Users log in and see personalised data
- Heavy interactivity: configurators, dashboards, live updates
- Tight integration with internal APIs or third-party systems
- You need full control over performance and rendering
The middle ground: headless
You can run WordPress purely as the content API and render the front end in React. It gives editors the interface they know and developers the control they want — at the cost of two systems to maintain and a more complex preview workflow.
It's a good fit for content-heavy sites with demanding front-end requirements. It's overkill for a ten-page brochure site.
What about SEO and speed?
Both can be excellent, and both can be terrible. A bloated WordPress theme and a client-only React app that ships nothing in the initial HTML will both perform badly. What matters is server-rendered HTML, disciplined images and scripts, and a sensible content structure.
Don't pick a stack for SEO reasons. Pick it for editing and functionality, then implement it well.
Our default recommendation
Business site with regular content updates: WordPress. Product or platform with logged-in users: custom React and a proper back end. Large content site that also needs app-like features: consider headless.
Tell us what your team needs to do day to day and we'll recommend the option we would actually pick if it were our money.