When TaxFlow knocked on our door, their site had been out of touch for over five years. The content was still correct, but the site was slow, looked outdated and did not cooperate with the Google Ads campaign that was driving traffic on it. That five years standstill had never been a decision. It just happened year after year, until nobody looked at it anymore.
And that's exactly my point. How much maintenance your website will require in the next few years, you decide most of it one day: not the day something breaks down, but the day you choose your platform. If you choose a WordPress site full of plugins, then you sign for structural maintenance every month. Choose a static site like we build many of them, just move away a lot of that problem. Maintenance is not a matter of discipline or pain. It's a consequence of architecture, and you pick that architecture at the beginning.
What you're actually maintaining
Maintenance sounds vague, so make it concrete. On a typical WordPress site you keep some things alive:
- the core of WordPress itself, which is regularly re-released;
- every plugin you have installed, separately from each other and at their own pace;
- the theme and PHP version on which everything is running;
- the backups, and check if your contact form is still mailing and whether any links are broken.
How much maintenance a website requires depends on how many moving parts it has. A site with ten plugins has 10 pieces of software that age independently, and ten chances that something breaks: in an actual event or just because you're skipping the current. In practice, a static site doesn't have any of those parts. That difference sounds technical, but it directly determines how much work and risk you are carrying over the next few years.
Why WordPress requires structural maintenance
Every plugin is code from someone else, who occasionally closes a leak that an attacker would use differently. As long as you follow the rate, there's little going on. If you skip them, then the lag piles up, and one day your site runs on software whose holes are known to the public.
That's not a doom-thinking. Sucuri Approximately 39 percent of the hacked sites turned up an outdated version of their CMS core at the time of infection. WordPress most frequently appears in those numbers, but especially since it is by far the most widely used system in the world, not because it would be naturally unsafe. The automatic updates of the WordPress core have even reduced that type of intrusion over the past few years.
The weak point is shifting to the rest. At about 14 percent of the cleaned sites there was a vulnerable plugin or a fragile theme in the system, and that's just the part you have to keep up with. The core-to-use largely itself; the plugins you chose were not. If you do not maintain it, then neglect accumulates silently.
The old site with which TaxFlow The damage was visible but limited, a site that no longer convinced visitors. If you have an abandoned site running on outdated plugins, the same stop may turn out to be a hack or a day of downtime. That is not a prediction, but a risk that you buy with maintenance or run at a standstill.
A static site shifts the problem
We build many sites statically: the pages are built up once and served as ready-made files, mostly via Astro and Netlify. No database, no plugins, no login page on your server that someone can try to crack. The attack surface is therefore a fraction of that of a classic WordPress site, and there is simply much less that can age or break.
Keeping honest: maintenance doesn't disappear completely. You update texts occasionally, you replace a broken link, and quite occasionally you experience a part of the building technique. But it shifts from "every month something that can break" to "update something when you want to." That difference is what this is all about.
Continuous follow-up is worth when it comes to real development: new pages, campaigns, things that will bring your site forward. That's something different than paying every month to keep a stack of plugins you never had with another platform choice. We often build just statically to make that second kind of invoice unnecessary, and keep the space for the first one. That choice doesn't suit any customer, but she's aware.
When WordPress is just the right choice
Because static can't do everything, and WordPress is not a bad choice. Mr Louis Van Belle He wanted to manage his website himself: edit pages, write blogs, fine tune his SEO, without knocking on our door. That's why we built a WordPress site and gave him a personal Zoom-tutorial in which we went through the entire A-Z site. Within days he could get away with it himself.
Those who want to publish and tinker themselves every week often get a better CMS like WordPress. And some things just don't fit in static: a webshop with live stock, a member zone, a site that changes hundreds of times a day. Then you choose for WordPress, then it's just part of the maintenance. That's no problem. It only becomes one when you didn't see that burden coming.
What that maintenance costs you
The costs follow from the work required. A website whose content rarely changes can require little adjustments. A site with technical dependencies or weekly new features requires more follow-up and budget. At Fokuus we discuss this need per project. An IT agreement can fit in with continuous work, but is not a standard condition for any site. We register all time spent and make it easy to understand for the customer.
Note also what does and does not solve the problem. Regular web hosting, with a Belgian party like Combell getting from a handful of euros per month, keeps your server running but doesn't keep up with your plugins. That remains human work, or a paid appointment: a bra-wordpress package that Combell sells for more per month will take over those updates. So you pay for this maintenance, with time or money. What a website costs to have built yourself, read in our web site cost guideThis is what comes next every month.
Please include the maintenance load, not only after the offer
Ask not only what the site costs, but also what it asks for every year of maintenance and who does. A cheap site that nobody follows is often more expensive than a slightly more expensive one in three years' time that you can just leave alone.
Choose your maintenance on day one
The question is not just "WordPress or static." The real question is: how much do you want to make your own site, and how much maintenance do you accept in return? If you want yourself to publish and expand, then a CMS with maintenance is a fair trade. If you need a site that does its work for years without monthly care, then statically almost always is the better choice.
What you don't want is years of standstill without someone taking care of the maintenance, like with the old site TaxFlow came to us. Decide consciously, on the day you choose, not the day your site stops. Do you doubt which side of it fits your case? Preface your situation., then we say honestly when WordPress is the better choice, even though we prefer to build static.