A practical comparison of custom WordPress design and Next.js development to pick what fits your project.
Before a single line of code is written, one decision shapes your site's speed, cost, and how easy it is to run for years: what technology is it built on? At Nasj we work along two main tracks — custom WordPress design and Next.js development — and each has its sweet spot. This guide helps you choose without the jargon.
WordPress is a content management system that powers a large share of the world's websites. Its biggest strength is a mature dashboard that lets you edit text, pages and posts yourself without a developer. We never use off-the-shelf templates; we design a custom theme in your brand on top of this flexible foundation, so you get management freedom with a unique design.
Next.js is a modern development framework that builds ultra-fast sites with full control over every detail. Sites built with it open almost instantly and excel at mobile experience and the performance metrics Google measures. It's the ideal choice when you want the highest possible performance, or design and interactions beyond the limits of traditional templates.
If you publish content often — a blog, news, service pages that change constantly — and want to manage it all yourself flexibly, custom WordPress is excellent. You get a familiar dashboard, ready plugins for most needs, and usually a lower initial cost.
If top speed and user experience are the priority — a store, a platform, an ad landing page, or a company site that wants to stand out technically — Next.js delivers. It's also the better fit when you need custom integrations or a design unconstrained by an off-the-shelf system.
Search engines reward fast, easy-to-understand sites. Both can be tuned well for SEO, but Next.js gives you a higher ceiling on performance metrics (Core Web Vitals) thanks to its architecture. With WordPress, good speed is achievable but requires care in hosting and plugins.
On both tracks you get full ownership of your site, its code and content — no lock-in, no forced subscriptions. This is a fixed principle in our work whatever the technology.
There is no absolute "best" — only the best fit for your project. We start by understanding your content type, site size, budget, and who will run it after launch — then we recommend the technology clearly and explain why. The goal is a site you own, that serves your goals, and that you're proud of.