Why we build in Framer instead of WordPress

Why WordPress became the default.

A founder sits down to build the first real website for their business, asks around, and the answer comes back the way it has for over a decade: use WordPress. We won't pretend WordPress is bad software. As of August 2026, W3Techs puts it at 40.7% of all websites, a 58.9% share of the entire CMS market. Nothing else comes close.

But scale cuts both ways. A platform used by four in ten websites is also a platform with four in ten websites' worth of plugins and third-party code sitting on top of it, most written by people who won't be around to fix it later. Most small business owners don't have someone watching plugin updates. That's normal, and it's exactly the gap that gets exploited. The pattern repeats across almost every compromised WordPress site: not a flaw in WordPress itself, but in one of the small pieces of code layered on top of it.

“A website built to be endlessly extended eventually becomes a website nobody fully understands, including the person who built it.”

Framer works differently at the level that matters. There's no separate plugin marketplace to browse and patch. The features a normal small business site needs are built into the platform itself, maintained by Framer's own team, not bolted on by thousands of independent developers. The trade-off is real: Framer's ecosystem is smaller, and a business needing an elaborate custom booking engine may not find an equivalent yet.

Patchstack's State of WordPress Security in 2026 report tracked 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities discovered in 2025, and found that 91% of them were in plugins, with only a small remainder in WordPress core itself. A small business owner doesn't install a plugin thinking about who patches it in two years. Framer removes that specific decision from the owner's plate entirely, because there's no separate plugin layer to patch.

The question that actually matters.

Don't start by asking which platform is more popular or more flexible. Start by asking who maintains the site after launch, and what that costs you in time, money or risk over the next three years. For a business running fifteen plugins on WordPress, the honest answer is usually "nobody, most of the time," until something breaks.

Neither platform is right for every business. WordPress suits a business that needs deep customisation and has technical staff on hand. Framer suits a business that wants a fast, clean site it can update itself without touching code. We picked the second option, on purpose, for the businesses we build for.

If you're weighing this up for your own business and want a straight opinion on which way you'd lean, we're happy to look at what you've got in mind and tell you honestly where you'd land.