Hello everyone,
Recently I have taken up a few freelance opportunities to build some websites. One is an e-commerce website for a friend to sell their personal art and the other is a static page for another friend to get there name on the web for their profession(an about and contact type of page). I am not planning on charging for the labor but I am going to charge for any cost such as hosting, dns or membership for any tool I use. I have built basic crud apps from ground zero before with MERN, Java and Python stacks. I want to give them the cheapest options in terms of price but I am unsure. I am wondering if it would be more costly for both clients(maybe not the static page) to do it from scratch over using something like Wordpress and Woocommerce. So readers, what do you guys think, is it more cost effective to use Wordpress over coding from square one? Keep in mind I do not plan on charging for any labor, I was just using this for experience purposes. Any input or guidance on this is greatly appreciated!
Eric Brusky
Posted on
Website from Scratch or Wordpress?
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
Top comments (6)
Building from scratch is almost always the more costly option, both financially and labor.
Things to keep in mind when you build from scratch:
Thanks for the reply, it makes a lot of sense when you put it that way. I would be the sole operator on bug fixes, updates and any kind of maintenance. It would also be extremely time consuming to keep up with when I have a full time job already. Thanks again!
You have a few things to consider here:
What are you most comfortable with? You might not be charging labour, but you still want the path of least resistance.
If you build something, can you just hand it over and forget about it, or does it need maintaining?
By the sounds of it you have 2 sites here, an ecommerce site and a static website. Let's take a look at the static site first.
Static 'portfolio' website
You haven't given us much info, but I'm going to assume this is a simple 'Contact Me' kind of website that simply lists some contact information for something. It's unlikely to be updated very often, if at all.
This kind of site lends itself very well to being built from scratch. The technology you use is up to you here depending on what you're most comfortable with, but you could easily take a starter template from something like Tailwind or Bootstrap and tweak it to meet your needs.
In terms of hosting, because it's a simple static website, you have plenty of options, and a lot of them are free. Some to consider:
DNS and WAF can be handled by Cloudflare for free.
Ecommerce website
This is a little more tricky, and really depends on yours and your clients' requirements now and in the future.
WordPress and WooCommerce
WordPress and WooCommerce is great (in fact, we offer a certification in WordPress development), but you must keep the website and associated plugins up-to-date. Due to its popularity, WordPress has a target on its back for malicious users, so keeping everything up to date is imperative.
However, WooCommerce is a complete system, that will allow you to build out a website quickly and easily, and once it is built the hosting costs are reasonably low. You can either roll your own hosting with little-to-no cost on AWS (free tier) or go with a PaaS (platform as a service) provider like WPEngine.
The important takeaway here is that you can't just hand it over and walk away.
Shopify
Another option is Shopify. Shopify is a hosted platform, so you have very limited access to the code that runs the website. That's an advantage and disadvantage, depending on your requirements.
The pros on this is that from a maintenance point-of-view Shopify does everything. They maintain all hosting infrastructure and ensure you're PCI (or equivalent) compliant, take care of your taxes and offer various shipping options.
The downside is that you have less control over the frontend than with WooComm, and you have no access to any backend features. They do have various APIs and allow you to create extensions which does cover some things, but it's certainly not as flexible as something self-hosted.
It's a trade-off, but if you're looking to just build something that works and hand-off to your client then I'd personally look at Shopify over WooComm.
With regards to costs, Shopify is pretty affordable. The lowest tier is in line with what you're expect to pay for hosting. Shopify does get expensive when you start selling, as they take a percentage of sales, but so long as you know this up front it's not as jarring as upfront costs, and it of course scales with your sales.
Hope this helps.
Yes you were correct about the static page, it was a simple about me and contact me type of project. I appreciate your insight and input. The person I was doing the e-commerce for ended up getting sqspace commerce. Which is a bit relieving. I learned a lot from this experience, I jumped the gun in the beginning, not thinking about what I was truly getting myself into out of fear of not having enough on my portfolio.
For the e-commerce site I think WooCommerce is the best option for long term stability and ease of use. The monthly cost of having it run by a managed service is well worth it. You don’t want to have to be concerned about WordPress security, so knowing the service provider is responsible for updates is good peace of mind.
For the static site you have tons of easy options. Going no-code would probably be the easiest but not very interesting imo. I’m not familiar with best options for no-code.
If you want a fun project, I’d recommend building the site using Astro and deploying to Cloudflare pages. The free plan will be more than adequate and the site will be very fast and reliable.
I’d recommend using a template from astro.new
Thanks so much for your input. Most of the feedback I get is to go with woo commerce, so I think I’m going to go that route. I will check out some of your suggestions regarding the static site! Thanks again.