There is a version of this article that is a cheap dunk on WordPress. That is not the one I wanted to write. WordPress is a remarkable piece of software, and for a small business website where the owner updates the menu twice a year and the blog three times, it is still a perfectly sensible choice.
But this is a post about startup marketing sites, and the honest answer is that Next.js has quietly become the default for a reason. Here is the trade-off, with no team loyalty involved.
What WordPress is still great at
- A non-technical owner editing copy without calling a developer
- A mature plugin ecosystem for forms, SEO, and commerce
- Hosting that costs fifteen dollars a month and still works
- Decades of tutorials and stack overflow answers
- A content-heavy site that will ship dozens of blog posts per year
If your site is going to be mostly edited by you, and your business is not trying to look like it lives on the frontier, WordPress is the adult answer. I have no argument against it in that context.
Where WordPress starts to hurt a startup
Most early-stage startups do not actually need a content management system. They need a tight marketing site that changes slowly, and a product that moves fast. The moment you start trying to make a WordPress site feel custom, you pay in three different currencies.
Performance
A plugin-heavy WordPress site is, by default, a loading spinner. You can tune it, you can cache it, you can pay for premium hosting. You can get it fast. You cannot get it as fast as a statically rendered Next.js page without serious effort, and that matters for Core Web Vitals, which matter for SEO.
Design fidelity
Custom WordPress themes are a specialty of their own. To get a design that looks like a modern SaaS site, you either buy a theme that looks like everyone else's, or you hire a theme developer, at which point the cost advantage is gone.
Developer ergonomics
Most developers under thirty have never seriously written PHP. They have written React. When you hire, the WordPress world is a smaller and more specialised pool, and the cost per hour reflects that in the wrong direction.
What Next.js gives you, in one paragraph
Typed, component-based pages. Hosted on the edge. Instant deploys from a git push. Native metadata and sitemap APIs. Image optimisation included. A React ecosystem of components that match whatever you can imagine. No plugin bloat, no database to maintain, no CMS surface to secure. If you want a content editor for a non-technical teammate, you add a headless CMS on the side when you need it.
A simple decision rule
“If your site updates more often than your product, pick WordPress. If your product updates more often than your site, pick Next.js.”
Most startups sit squarely in the second camp. Their marketing site changes maybe monthly, their product changes weekly, and the people writing the code are the same people building the product. Next.js makes that one unified workflow. WordPress fights it.
I build every BekerDev project on Next.js for exactly that reason. I do not think WordPress is bad. I think it is built for a different job, and I would rather use the tool that matches the job than the tool that matches the habit.