How do you decide whether to use a CMS (like WordPress, Joomla or Drupal), versus building a custom website from scratch, and what factors influence that choice?

When choosing between a CMS like WordPress and building a custom site from scratch, it depends on the project scope, budget, and timeline. WordPress provides the flexibility of a custom site while offering an efficient foundation.

As full-stack developers with over 15 years of experience, we moved to WordPress exclusively around 5 years ago, and now build robust, scalable solutions on WordPress that feel like custom-built websites. This allows for complex, tailored functionality while maintaining the benefits of easier updates and management. Our lightweight, optimized approach ensures fast performance and clean code, making WordPress a powerful foundation for long-term scalability and growth without the overhead of a fully custom platform.

For teams seeking simplicity or a DIY option, CMS platforms like WordPress, Webflow, SquareSpace, etc provide robust drag-and-drop tools, ensuring even non-developers can build and manage sites. These platforms excel in ease of use, giving businesses the flexibility to handle updates with minimal technical skills.

Hope that helps!

Deciding between using a CMS like WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal, and building a custom website from scratch depends on several factors. Here are some of my opinion:

Using CMS:
Websites like blogs, portfolios, business sites, or e-commerce platforms with typical features (e.g., user management, content creation, media handling, etc.). CMSs offer pre-built functionalities like themes, plugins, and templates, which speed up development and simplify content management. Even if your project has tight deadlines and needs to launch quickly, CMS platforms are ideal.

Custom Build:
If the website requires highly specific, complex features that aren't easily supported by existing CMSs or plugins—such as unique business logic, advanced integrations, custom data structures, or high scalability—a custom solution may be better.  Also you need bigger budgets and time required to go with custom solution. 

Ultimately, the decision should be based on a thorough analysis of your project's specific needs, resources, and long-term goals.

It's easy

If you want to build a blog website, small-sized business website, simple e-commerce site, brochure sites,
→→→ then you should use a CMS.

If you want to build large-scale web applications like SaaS platforms, heavily customized business solutions, or sites with complex functionality with future ability to scale,
→→→ then you should use custom development.

Using CMS is a good solution for small and mid-sized businesses, it's cost-effective and easy to maintain. It requires less time to develop. For future updates, you don't have to rely on anyone you can easily update some small changes. 

Custom development is the best solution, it is good for businesses, but it's costly, and also sometimes needs someone to maintain the site. 

The decision on whether we will use a CMS platforms or create a website from scratch it depends on two factors. Developer experiences and client requirements.

Some developers only know how to use CMS, they don't know to building a website from scratch, so they need to use some of CMS like wordpress or shopify for build website.

Another important factor that affects the decision to use some CMS or not comes from the client's request. Some clients require to use CMS because of they already have experience with that CMS and they know or can easily learn how to maintain and change the site through the CMS platform.

The client's budget and delivery time is also an important factor in choosing whether to use a CMS or create a website from scratch.

The choice of what CMS platform to use depends on what the website will be. For blog/news, personal/portfolio or business type of site we can use wordpress or webflow, for e-commerce we can use shopify or woocommerce.

Using a CMS is generally more cost-effective for small to medium-sized projects. CMS platforms like Shopify offer many built-in features, plugins/apps, and themes. This helps reduce the development time and costs. Building a custom website is more expensive due to the need for specialized development work. It requires custom coding and dedicated UI design which often leads to longer development timelines as well. It's a viable option when budget constraints are not a major concern and you need something exclusive that isn't readily available in existing CMS platforms like Shopify.

Building a custom solution is always the best option, as CMS platforms like WordPress are packed with functionalities, 90% of which you'll never use. Custom development is much more time-consuming. Considering this, and the fact that in most cases you'll need help from a full-stack developer, it significantly affects the price.

For comparison:
Building a shop in WordPress would cost you $4,400, while building the same shop in Laravel PHP would cost you $25,000.