Skåne — and Sweden in general — is full of agency websites still running on WordPress. It's a familiar system, there's a plugin for almost everything, and it's easy to hand off to a client. We take a different approach, and it's worth explaining why.
The WordPress trade-off
WordPress is a database-driven CMS: every page view triggers a PHP execution and a database query before any HTML reaches the browser. Plugins fill in the gaps — SEO, caching, forms, security — but each one adds more JavaScript, CSS, and dependencies that need to be kept up to date. HTTP Archive's own WordPress page-weight report tracks this in real time across millions of live WordPress sites, and it's a useful gut-check for how heavy a typical install gets once plugins and a theme are layered on top of the core system.
Page weight matters because it feeds directly into Core Web Vitals, which Google confirmed as a ranking signal in 2021 and still measures today across three metrics: LCP (Largest Contentful Paint, loading speed), INP (Interaction to Next Paint, responsiveness), and CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift, visual stability). Google's own guidance defines "good" as LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, and CLS under 0.1 — and INP in particular has gotten stricter over time, since it replaced the older First Input Delay metric specifically because it captures the full cost of a heavy, JavaScript-laden page reacting slowly to clicks and taps.
None of this means Core Web Vitals alone decide who ranks first — content relevance and authority still matter more. But when two pages are otherwise closely matched, Core Web Vitals act as a tie-breaker, and a WordPress site weighed down by a dozen plugins starts that race from behind.
What "static" actually means
When we say we build with Next.js, we specifically mean static export: the entire site is compiled to plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript at deploy time, with no server rendering pages on the fly and no database being queried per visit. The browser downloads finished files straight from a CDN edge node — there's no PHP runtime translating a request into a page in real time.
The difference in practice
- Load time. Static files served from the edge reach the browser faster than a page assembled from a database on every request, especially on mobile connections where every extra round trip costs more.
- SEO control. Canonical tags, hreflang, sitemaps and structured data are written directly into the code — not bolted on afterward by a plugin that can silently break on an update.
- Fewer moving parts. There's no WordPress core, theme, or plugin stack to patch. Fewer updates means fewer chances for something to break or get compromised.
As a concrete example: this site is built exactly this way — server response times in the 120-200ms range, HTTP/2, Brotli compression, and no third-party plugin code shipped to the browser at all. That's not a marketing claim, it's what the site actually measures at, and any visitor can check it themselves in their browser's network tab.
The maintenance and security burden
Every WordPress plugin is also a piece of third-party code running with elevated access to your site. When a plugin misses an update, it becomes a known, searchable vulnerability — security scanners and bots specifically look for outdated WordPress plugins because they're one of the most common paths into compromised small-business websites. A static export has no admin panel to brute-force, no database to inject into, and no plugin registry to keep current, because none of those things exist at runtime.
The real cost over time
The upfront cost of a WordPress site can look lower, especially with a cheap template. What often gets missed is the cost that shows up later: a plugin conflict that breaks the checkout right before a busy weekend, a core update that changes how the theme renders, or a slow site that quietly loses rankings over months without anyone noticing until traffic has already dropped. A static site removes most of these failure points up front, which shifts the cost curve — more thought at the start, far less firefighting after launch.
It also matters for AI search
The same static, well-structured HTML that helps classic Google rankings also helps AI systems like Google's AI Overviews, ChatGPT, and Perplexity read and cite a page correctly. These systems work from the same crawled, indexed content as traditional search — a page that loads fully without depending on client-side JavaScript execution, and that has clean semantic HTML instead of plugin-generated markup, is simply easier for any system, human or AI, to parse correctly.
Where WordPress still makes sense
If a client needs a large team of non-technical editors publishing dozens of posts a week through a familiar dashboard, WordPress (or a proper headless CMS) is a reasonable choice. Most small and mid-sized businesses in Skåne don't have that need — they need a fast, accurate site that ranks well and rarely changes its structure.
That's the site we build every time — see our web design and development services for what's included.