Should You Create Your Website in WordPress or HTML & CSS?

If you’re looking to build a site for your business, then you’ll have to make many important decisions around the planning, design, and launch of the site. One of your first major choices will be deciding whether you want to build the site from scratch or use a website building platform.

You will likely need to hire a developer to create a website from scratch. A developer will use HTML with a variety of markup and scripting languages, including CSS and Javascript, to create web pages. Although it may require more time and money to build from scratch, this option can result in a site that looks and functions exactly like you want.

If you’d rather not hire a developer, then you can get started with one of the hundreds of publishing platforms, website builders, and content management systems on the market.

Of these solutions, a CMS is the most popular. It allows you to easily customize the design of your site, add multimedia in your posts, organize your content by tags and categories, manage multiple users, edit the underlying code, and much, much more.

To help you find a solution that’s right for your business, we’ll compare the different experiences you’ll get using WordPress or building an HTML site.

Below are the key differences we’ll focus on. Click any of the links below to jump to that section.

Now that we have a brief overview of the differences between building and managing a site on WordPress and building and managing an HTML site, let’s start by clarifying a possible misconception. Does WordPress use HTML?

Does WordPress Use HTML?

The short answer is yes. 

The long answer is that WordPress is not primarily written in HTML. Its core software — as well as WordPress plugins and themes — are primarily written with PHP, a programming language that controls how a WordPress site interacts and connects with its database.

PHP is a server-side language, which means it runs entirely on the server that hosts the website. So when a site visitor types in one of your page’s URL, the PHP code on your server receives that request and pulls the relevant content from your WordPress database. It then converts that content into an HTML file (and the accompanying CSS files) and sends them back to the visitor who made the request. Because the WordPress core is written in PHP, third-party developers can also create plugins and themes that run on their own PHP files and use database content however they like. 

So while a WordPress site will look and function the same as a static HTML site to end users, the process of how its content and functionality is stored and delivered to those users is very different.

Whereas the hosting server has to assemble your WordPress posts or pages into HTML files using PHP code, each page of a static website is stored as an individual HTML file and these exist in their entirety. No assembly is required. That’s because HTML, like CSS and JavaScript, is a client-side language. Rather than run on the hosting server, HTML runs on the device of the visitor accessing a website.

Let’s look at what this means in terms of speed. 

WordPress vs. HTML Speed

Online consumers don’t want to waste time waiting for a website to load. In fact, page speed is so important to the user experience that Google began including it as one of its ranking factors in 2010 for desktop and 2018 for mobile. Its main reason for including speed in its algorithm was that data showed visitors spent less time on slower sites. According to a study by Google, as page load time goes from one second to 5 seconds, the probability of a mobile site visitor bouncing increases 90%.

To ensure you provide a good user experience and reduce bounce rate on your site, you have to consider speed when deciding how to build your site. Let’s compare the speed of WordPress and HTML sites below.

WordPress Speed

The disadvantage of a WordPress site requiring PHP and a database is its impact on load time. Every time a visitor lands on your site, your server has to execute the PHP code and retrieve information from your database to display the correct information to the visitor. Because this requires more server resources than an HTML site, it can increase load time and delays.

However, by selecting a fast hosting provider, purchasing a Content Delivery Network (CDN), optimizing and compressing your images, and taking other steps to speed up your WordPress site, you can meet your consumers’ expectation for speed.

HTML Speed

As mentioned above, HTML sites do not require PHP execution or database queries to load. That means that, if their code is optimized, HTML sites are faster out-of-the-box than WordPress sites.

There are several steps you can take to optimize an HTML site to ensure it’s fast-loading. These steps including eliminating unnecessary white space and comments, caching your content, reducing the number of inline scripts, minifying and compressing images, using lazy loading for images, and more. It’s important to note that many of these steps will also help reduce the load time of a WordPress site. 

WordPress vs. HTML Ease of Use

You want building a website to be as easy and quick as possible. But often, ease of use comes at the expense of flexibility. The more control you have over the administration and design of your site, the more difficult it will be to create and manage. The easier the process, the less control you’ll have.

So picking a platform is, in part, about deciding whether ease of use or flexibility is more important to you. With that in mind, let’s compare the ease of use of a WordPress and HTML site below.

WordPress Ease of Use

With WordPress, you can have ownership over your site without needing to code it from scratch or know how to code at all. You can easily create and manage content, change your site’s appearance, and configure its setting in the built-in dashboard, and easily extend its functionality via plugins.

To leverage the platform’s flexibility in these ways, you will have to spend time, effort, and money managing your site. Plugin, theme, and software updates will be essential management tasks for keeping your site safe and avoiding compatibility issues. 

Ecommerce stores, small business sites, and other companies looking to grow their brand and customer base will prefer building with this open-source CMS because of its ease of use, even if it does require more day-to-day management.

HTML Ease of Use

Tasks that are simple on WordPress — like adding and editing content, extending the functionality of your site, and changing how it looks — will be much more difficult when building an HTML site. That’s because you won’t have a dashboard with built-in features and buttons, themes, or plugins to automate these tasks. You’ll have to write the HTML and CSS yourself — or pay someone to do so.

There are ways to speed up the build process. You can use open-source toolkits like Boostrap CSS, which comes with pre-designed buttons, navbars, forms, tables, and other components you won’t have to build from scratch. 

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If you don’t anticipate needing to update or change your site regularly, then you’re better off building or hiring a developer to build an HTML site. It will require less server resources and therefore be cheaper and easier to build. Once it’s published, you won’t have to worry about updating any software or third-party extensions to keep it secure.

Restaurants, gyms, boutiques, and other small businesses looking to establish a simple online presence will find this option appealing. While the up-front time and costs required to build an HTML site will be greater than a WordPress site, the day-to-day management will be much easier. 

WordPress vs. HTML Price

The cost of building a website depends on a whole host of factors but the four major ones are your time, budget, technical knowledge, and design skills. If you have time but not technical knowledge, for example, then you could learn how to build an HTML site. If you lack both time and technical knowledge though, you can build a site on WordPress.

Below we’ll look at the costs of creating and managing a website on WordPress and one built from scratch.

WordPress Price

As open-source software, WordPress is free to download and use. However, you will have to pay for a custom domain name and hosting to launch your site. You may also have to factor in any premium plugins or themes you want to install.

Although premium themes can cost up to $200 and plugins can range from one-time fees of $3.99 to annual fees of $250, these design options are most likely cheaper than hiring a web developer or designer to customize the appearance and functionality of your site.

Because domain registration, hosting, themes, and plugins vary in price, the costs of building and managing a WordPress site can range from a couple hundred to a couple thousands dollars.

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The average costs are much more moderate than that range implies though. According to Website Builder Expert, building a WordPress site will cost you around $200 and managing it will cost $11 to $40 per month, on average.

HTML Price

Let’s first consider the cost of building an HTML site. Hiring an agency to build and design your site from scratch will be the priciest option, costing tens of thousands of dollars. Hiring a freelancer will be cheaper but range dramatically, depending on their hourly rate and the duration of the project.

According to a custom quote by WebFX, hiring a developer to build out a responsive site with one to ten pages that’s moderately styled would cost between $7,000 and $10,000.

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Estimating the cost of maintaining an HTML site is even more difficult than estimating the cost of building one because it completely depends on your coding abilities. If you don’t have any coding skills, you will have to pay a developer to make any changes to your site. Even simple tasks like adding new content or inserting images will require you to hire a developer for a few hours.

That’s why WebFX estimates that the cost of maintaining an HTML site can range from $400 to $60,000 per year. However, a smaller site like the one mentioned above will range much more moderately from $400 to $1,200 per year.

Since you can add new content and perform most tasks without hiring a WordPress developer, managing an HTML website will likely end up costing much more than a WordPress website.

WordPress vs. HTML for SEO

If you’re investing this amount of time and money into building a site for your business, then you want people to see it. To boost your site’s visibility, aim to get ranking as close as possible to the first page. According to Search Engine Journal, sites listed on the first Google search results page get 91.5% of the traffic share for a keyword or phrase.

To drive that organic traffic to your site, you need to optimize your on-page and technical SEO. Let’s compare the SEO friendliness of building a site on WordPress and building one from scratch.

WordPress for SEO

WordPress enables you to easily customize your image alt-text, meta descriptions, headings, and custom URLs right in your dashboard so you don’t need to edit a single line of code.

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You can also choose among thousands of responsive themes to design a mobile-friendly site. Installing and activating a responsive theme will take a few clicks and you won’t need to worry about defining viewport meta tags, setting text in the viewport width unit, or adding media queries. 

If you lack experience or knowledge of SEO, then you can download or purchase a range of WordPress plugins to help. Plugins like Yoast SEO, WP Rocket, and Redirection let you control many aspects of your site’s technical and on-page SEO.

HTML for SEO

There are several ways you can optimize your HTML site for search engines — you just need to know how to do it.

Adding keywords in your posts and pages, linking to internal and external pages, and optimizing your URLs, heading tags, title tags, meta descriptions, and image alt text are all familiar best practices.

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But, unlike on web building platforms, you can’t use any buttons on a dashboard or third-party plugins to help you with these steps. Instead, you have to spend the time creating the right tags and code for your site, or hiring someone who will.

While optimizing your on-page SEO in the steps outlined above is relatively easy, optimizing your technical SEO will be much more difficult. Adding breadcrumb menus and pagination to your site, for example, will require time and coding, whereas WordPress offers built-in functionality and plugins for adding these features.

And building a responsive site from scratch will require you to define viewport meta tags, resize your text and images, add media queries, and more. 

WordPress vs. HTML for Blogging

Since websites that feature a blog are 434% more likely to be ranked highly on search engines, you want to pick a solution that will enable you to easily create and publish custom content. Let’s compare what it’s like to blog with WordPress and with HTML below.

WordPress for Blogging

Although WordPress has evolved into a multi-purpose CMS, it was originally built as a blogging platform. It therefore has lots of built-in functionality to help you easily create content.

Using the Gutenberg editor, you can drag and drop elements to create an unlimited number of multi-media blog posts and pages. Once drafted, you can schedule, publish, update, and delete these posts and pages as needed. You can also moderate comments, assign user roles and permissions, make your content public or private, and secure posts and pages with a password.

The best part? You can do all this right in your dashboard without having to access or edit your source code.

If you’re a more advanced user with coding skills, then you can add code to your files to style individual category pages, display a list of recent posts in their sidebar, and extend the functionality of their site in other ways.

By offering these out-of-the-box features and access to its source code, WordPress combines ease of use and flexibility to advance your blogging efforts.

HTML for Blogging

Using HTML and CSS, you can create even more complex blog posts than you can on WordPress. You can insert images, format headlines, add bullet points, create tables, display posts in your sidebar, and anything else you can think — you’ll just need to write the code or hire someone to write the code to do so.

This takes time. For example, say you want to display some text in a simple list format. In WordPress, you can simply drag and drop the list block onto the page. On an HTML site, you’ll have to add the following code:

 
 
   
My list includes the following:

Item A

Item B

Item C

 

While you’ll have total control over the structure and design of your content if you create an HTML site, you’ll need the time and in-depth knowledge of HTML, CSS, and Javascript to wield that control. Since most users will have to hire a developer to add content to their site, those looking to regularly publish blog posts will be better off on WordPress.

Differences Between WordPress and CSS & HTML

Building a site on WordPress presents a very different experience from building a site from scratch. Deciding which one is right for you will depend on your time, budget, current coding and design skills, and willingness to develop those skills.

To help you make this decision, we’ll summarize the key differences between the two solutions below.

	WordPress	HTML & CSS
Software	Open-source content management system	No underlying software
Uses HTML	Yes, but primarily written in PHP. When a user visits your website, PHP code on your hosting server queries the database for relevant content, then packages that into an HTML file to deliver to users.	Yes. Web pages exist as individual HTML files in their entirety. No assembly is required.
Speed	Slower out-of-the-box because requires more server resources.	Faster out-of-the-box because requires less server resources.
Ease of use	Built-in dashboard, themes, and plugins make it easy to build, customize, and manage a WordPress site.	Building and managing an HTML site will be difficult without coding experience or hiring a developer.
Price	Free to use the software but have to pay for domain registration, hosting, and premium plugins and themes. On average, costs range from $11 to $40 per month in addition to a one-time sum of $200.	Hiring a developer to build and design a small, responsive site from scratch ranges from $7,000 and $10,000. Maintaining such a site will cost $400 to $1,200 per year.
SEO	In addition to being able to configure SEO settings in your dashboard, you can choose from hundreds of plugins that let you control your on-page and technical SEO.	Have to optimize on-page SEO by including the right tags in source code or hiring a developer to do so.
Blogging	Offers a drag-and-drop block editor and advanced built-in blogging functionality for managing users, controlling content visibility, and more so you can create and manage content right in your dashboard. More advanced users can edit the underlying code to make specific customizations if they want.	Offers total control over the structure and design of content, but requires a significant time investment and in-depth coding knowledge to create.