Someone in the room told them to switch. They didn’t question it. Now they’re rebuilding a website that wasn’t broken, on a platform their developer controls, at three times the cost.
This episode of Raising The Bar cuts through the noise around WordPress and what it actually means for your business to own your website.
Mel Strutt and Monique Jecks break down why the “WordPress is dead” conversation is being driven by developer preference rather than business outcomes, how custom-coded and subscription-based platforms create hidden dependencies that cost you more over time, and why your website remains the only digital asset your business truly controls.
If you want to make platform decisions based on your revenue needs rather than tech industry trends, this episode gives you the framework to evaluate what your website is actually doing for your business.
Key Takeaways:
- WordPress Dominance: WordPress powers 43% of all websites globally, nearly double its market share from 2017. Rumours of its decline have circulated for a decade and the data has consistently told a different story.
- Who Custom Code is Built For: Headless and custom-coded websites serve large enterprises with dedicated in-house development teams. For most small and medium businesses, the build cost starts at $10,000 and ongoing changes require paying a developer every time.
- Avoid Developer Dependency: When your website is built in proprietary code by a single developer, you are handing them leverage. WordPress gives you portability. Thousands of developers can work on it, and you retain ownership of your files regardless of who hosts it.
- CMS Keeps You In Control: The ability to update your own staff photos, business hours or service pages without raising a support ticket is a basic operational requirement.
- Own Your Website: Social profiles, Google rankings and AI citations all sit on infrastructure someone else controls. Your website is the one place where your brand, your content and your leads belong entirely to you.
- Optimise The Outcome: The question for 2026 is not what your website is built on. It is whether your website demonstrates credibility and converts the people who land on it.
Raising The Bar is a fortnightly podcast hosted by Mel Strutt that delivers blunt, experience-backed marketing guidance for Australian business owners. Joined by Monique Jecks, they address what matters, call out the fluff and raise the standard of what marketing must deliver for your bottom line.
