We build on Next.js. When clients ask why, we give them an honest answer rather than a sales pitch. Here is the real comparison.
Speed on African networks
This is the most important factor for businesses in Uganda and East Africa. Most visitors are on mobile, often on 3G or 4G connections. A WordPress site with a standard theme and a handful of plugins typically loads in 4 to 8 seconds. A Next.js site, properly built, loads in under 2 seconds on the same connection.
Google penalises slow websites in search rankings. Your audience abandons slow websites before they read a single word. Speed is not a technical vanity metric — it directly affects how many customers reach and engage with your content.
Security
WordPress powers over 40% of the web, which makes it the most attacked CMS on the internet. A WordPress site that is not actively maintained — plugins updated, security patches applied, backups running — is a site that will eventually be compromised. We have seen this happen to Ugandan business websites multiple times.
Next.js sites have no database, no plugin ecosystem, and no admin login page to brute-force. The attack surface is dramatically smaller.
Maintenance cost over time
WordPress requires ongoing maintenance: plugin updates, theme updates, PHP updates, hosting management, and regular backups. If something breaks after an update — which happens frequently — you either need a developer to fix it or you pay a maintenance retainer.
A Next.js site deployed on Vercel has no server to manage, no database to maintain, and automatic scaling. The total cost of ownership over three years is significantly lower.
When WordPress still makes sense
WordPress is a reasonable choice when the client needs to manage their own content extensively and cannot afford a developer for content updates. The WordPress admin interface is genuinely easier for non-technical users than a custom Next.js CMS setup.
For purely content-driven sites — blogs, news publications, and magazines — WordPress with a lightweight theme is a defensible choice. For business websites where performance and security are priorities, Next.js is better in almost every respect.
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We build on Next.js. From UGX 1,000,000, delivered in 7 days.
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