We get asked this every other discovery call. "Why not WordPress? It's free, it's mature, my marketing team already knows it." Fair questions. WordPress is genuinely good at what it's good at — fast content publishing by non-technical editors, a massive plugin ecosystem, and a hosting market that's been commoditized for a decade. For some clients that combination is still unbeatable.
But the calculus has shifted. The cheapest, fastest, most secure way to ship a brochure site in 2026 is to skip the database entirely. Next.js with `output: 'export'` produces a tree of static HTML, CSS, and JS. There's no PHP runtime to keep patched, no database to back up, no plugin update Tuesday. The whole site lives in a CDN's edge cache.
The trade-off is the editing experience. Without a CMS, content changes ship through git. For a four-person studio website with a deliberate publishing cadence, that's a feature — every change is reviewed, versioned, and reversible. For a 30-person company shipping daily blog posts, it's a non-starter. The right tool depends on where you are, not which tool is fashionable.
Our default for new client work: static Next.js. Our exceptions: Shopify for e-commerce, WordPress when the client genuinely wants it, Payload CMS when we're on a maintenance retainer and the client needs page-edit autonomy. We're tool-agnostic, but the defaults matter — they shape every conversation downstream.