WordPress or custom development?
WordPress fits when a site publishes content and sells products in standard patterns: brochure site, blog, store up to roughly 5,000 SKUs. Custom becomes necessary when the business logic is specific — multi-permission user accounts, calculations particular to your trade, integration with an existing system. The criterion is not site size but whether a plugin already exists for what you do.
Key facts
- WordPress: from 3,100 MAD; custom: from 14,900 MAD
- The criterion is business specificity, not page count
- WooCommerce scales to roughly 5,000 SKUs
- Every added plugin is one more security dependency
- Custom costs more upfront, less to evolve
The criterion that actually decides
The right question is not "is my site big?" but "does what I do already exist as a plugin?". Publishing articles, presenting services, selling products through a standard cart — all solved, and rebuilding them by hand means paying for something already written. But as soon as you need unusual user roles, pricing logic specific to your trade, an internal approval flow, or synchronisation with existing software, you are in territory WordPress only covers through a fragile stack of plugins.
When WordPress becomes the expensive option
WordPress remains the cheapest starting point — from 3,100 MAD against 14,900 MAD for custom. The reversal happens when it takes ten to fifteen extensions to approximate the behaviour you wanted. Each plugin is a dependency to maintain, an added attack surface, and a conflict waiting for the next update. That cost never appears on the quote; it appears in maintenance, and it appears at the worst moment — when you need to add a feature and nothing moves without breaking something else. In practice that maps to our two offers: a WordPress brochure site on one side, custom development on the other.
The choice is reversible, but not free
Starting on WordPress to validate a business is a reasonable decision, provided it is taken deliberately. What transfers easily later is content and earned search equity, as long as the URL structure is preserved. What does not transfer is the configuration accumulated inside plugins. A migration has to be planned: it is far less painful when you knew from the start that it would eventually come.
WordPress vs custom development
| Criterion | WordPress | Custom (Laravel / Next.js) |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | 3,100 MAD | 14,900 MAD |
| Best for | Brochure, blog, standard store | Specific business logic |
| Initial timeline | Short | Longer |
| Cost of a change | Grows with plugin count | Stable |
| Security surface | Core plus every extension | Code you control |
| Practical limit | ~5,000 product SKUs | No structural limit |
Published ROUGUITECH entry prices, excluding tax.
Related questions
Is WordPress bad for SEO?
Can the two approaches be combined?
What about no-code site builders?
A project to scope?
Free audit + costed quote within 24h. No commitment.