Ask a web agency what stack they use and you'll often hear “it doesn't matter, we deliver results.” Sounds reasonable. It's only partly true. For a simple brochure site, the stack really doesn't matter much. For anything that has to be fast, easy to maintain and able to grow with the business, it matters a lot. Here's what the choice means day to day, and why we build most of our web development projects in Delhi NCR on Next.js.
What WordPress actually costs you
WordPress runs roughly 40% of the web, and for a blog or a basic marketing site on a tight budget it's a sensible pick. The trouble starts when the business needs a fast site with real functionality on top: booking flows, client portals, API integrations, pages behind a login. That's where WordPress slowly turns from an asset into a liability.
- Performance:A typical page-builder WordPress site takes 4–8 seconds to load on a phone in India. You can't configure your way out of that, because it's architectural. Page builders produce bloated HTML and CSS by design, and plugins pile on JavaScript that's hard to defer.
- Security surface: WordPress needs constant plugin updates to stay safe. Every plugin is a dependency with its own history of vulnerabilities. Leave a site unattended for a few months and it becomes a target.
- Maintenance cost: Plugins clash after updates. Regularly. Someone has to debug it, and that someone is either a developer on retainer or you, learning PHP at 11pm.
What Next.js changes
Next.js is a React framework from Vercel. This site runs on it, and so do most of our client projects. In practice, the differences look like this:
- Fast out of the box:Next.js builds optimised HTML ahead of time, serves images in modern formats at the right size, and ships only the JavaScript each page needs. A well-built Next.js site scores 90+ on Google PageSpeed as a matter of course. That's the starting point, not a trophy.
- No plugin zoo to babysit: Features live in the codebase instead of being bolted on. No surprise plugin update knocks something over. The site does what the code says.
- Real custom functionality: Booking system, client portal with logins, a dashboard reading from your own database. These are built properly, not approximated by a plugin.
- Longevity:A Next.js codebase from 2024 can be read, maintained and upgraded by any decent React developer. You aren't tied to one agency or some obscure theme ecosystem.
Don't ask an agency what they build with. Ask what the site will score on PageSpeed and what maintenance will look like in two years. The stack decides both answers.
When WordPress is still the right answer
Fair's fair. If what you mainly need is a content-heavy blog your non-technical staff update every day, and speed is a secondary concern, WordPress with a clean theme and decent hosting is a perfectly defensible choice. Its editing experience is genuinely very good. We tell clients so when it fits.
For a business site that has to convert visitors, load quickly on mobile and handle custom workflows, though, Next.js is the better foundation. Not because it's newer or shinier. Because it does measurably better on the numbers your business actually cares about.
We build custom web development projects in Delhi NCR with Next.js, React and TypeScript. If you'd like to know what your current site is costing you in speed, or what a rebuild would involve, get in touch.