WordPress or Static — What Should a Contractor Website Run On?

Short answer: static is faster and safer; WordPress is easier to edit. For a contractor site whose content changes a few times a year, that trade usually favours static. If you need to publish and restructure pages weekly without help, it usually favours WordPress.

We build static, so treat this as an interested opinion — but the tradeoffs below are real and stated honestly, including where WordPress wins.

What the difference actually is

WordPress assembles each page when a visitor asks for it: query the database, run the theme, run every active plugin, render, send. That happens on every request.

Static builds every page in advance. The server sends finished HTML. No database query, no plugin chain, no rendering step.

That single architectural difference produces most of what follows.

Speed

Google’s thresholds are LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1, measured on real visitors at the 75th percentile.

WordPress can hit those. It requires caching, image discipline, plugin restraint, and decent hosting — and it degrades as the site grows, because every plugin added later costs a little more on every page.

Static starts there and stays there. This site loads its main content in well under a second and ships zero JavaScript; the measured Largest Contentful Paint on the HVAC page is 288 milliseconds against Google’s 2,500ms threshold.

The honest version: a well-maintained WordPress site is fine. A neglected one is not, and contractor sites are almost always neglected — not from carelessness, but because you are running a business, not a website.

Maintenance and security

WordPress needs updating. Core, theme, and every plugin, indefinitely. Skip it and you accumulate vulnerabilities; the overwhelming majority of WordPress compromises trace to outdated plugins rather than to WordPress itself.

A static site has no database and no plugin surface. There is materially less to attack and nothing that breaks because an update shipped on a Tuesday.

This is the difference that shows up in year two, not week one.

Editing — where WordPress genuinely wins

This is the real tradeoff and it deserves a fair hearing.

With WordPress you log in, click, and change things. Add a page, install a booking widget, restructure navigation — no developer, no deploy.

With static you edit content files and rebuild. Manageable, but it is a different workflow, and “I want to add a page this afternoon myself” is a legitimate requirement that static serves worse.

If you publish weekly and want full self-service control, WordPress is the better answer. That is not a concession — it is the correct recommendation for that situation.

Most contractors are not in that situation. Services change rarely, service areas change rarely, and content updates are a handful of times a year. Paying a permanent speed and security cost for editing convenience used four times annually is a bad trade.

Cost

Build costs are comparable — both land in the $5,000–$12,000 custom range.

Running costs differ. WordPress carries hosting plus ongoing maintenance, because the updating is not optional. Static hosting is cheap or free and there is no update treadmill.

Beware the cheap end specifically: a $5/month shared plan puts you on a machine with hundreds of other sites, and response times climb under load — which arrives on the first 100-degree day, exactly when your traffic peaks.

AI search readability

Newer consideration, and it favours static for a structural reason.

Google’s crawler renders JavaScript. Many AI crawlers do a simpler fetch. If your content only appears after scripts execute — common with page builders — a meaningful share of what visits your site sees an empty frame.

Static sends complete HTML to everything. Nothing to execute.

Check yours in thirty seconds: view page source, the raw HTML rather than the inspector, and search for your phone number and a service name. If they are not there, they may not exist as far as a large share of AI crawlers are concerned.

Side by side

How to decide

Choose WordPress if you publish frequently, want to make structural changes yourself, need a specific plugin integration, or have someone who will genuinely keep it maintained.

Choose static if content changes a few times a year, speed matters commercially — and in this trade it does, because your customer is on a phone in a hot house — and you would rather not think about updates at all.

If you are already on WordPress

Do not rebuild reflexively. Run PageSpeed Insights on the mobile tab and look at the field data for real visitors. Count your plugins; over thirty is usually the whole story. Check your largest image.

If the site is fundamentally sound, compressing images, removing unused plugins, adding caching and moving to better hosting can take a mediocre site to a passing one for far less than a rebuild.

Rebuild when you are optimizing against the architecture rather than within it — when each fix buys a fraction of a second against a structure that adds weight every time someone edits a page.

Sources: Google Search Central Core Web Vitals documentation and 2026 thresholds; Chrome User Experience Report methodology; measured field data from this site’s own production deployment.