How to choose the right platform for your next website
Every platform has trade-offs. Here's how I think about the decision when clients ask me what they should build on.
This is the question I get asked more than any other. And the honest answer is always the same: it depends on what you need it to do.
That sounds like a cop-out. It isn't. The right platform for a 30-page marketing site is completely wrong for a 2,000-product wholesale operation. Picking the wrong one costs you twice, because you pay to build it and then you pay to rebuild it when it can't keep up.
So here's how I think through it.
If you're selling products
Shopify is the safe choice for most e-commerce. The ecosystem is enormous, the checkout works, and your team can manage it without calling a developer every week. For a business selling physical products with standard shipping and pricing, it's hard to argue against.
Where Shopify falls over is customisation. The moment you need B2B pricing, complex product configuration, or a checkout that behaves differently from everyone else's, you're looking at Shopify Plus and a much bigger budget. Transaction fees add up too, unless you use Shopify Payments.
BigCommerce gets less attention but handles large catalogues and B2B better out of the box. No transaction fees on any plan. Price lists, company accounts, purchase orders. If you're selling to other businesses or managing 1,000+ products, it's worth a serious look before defaulting to Shopify.
If you're building a marketing site
WordPress is still the right answer for most content-driven websites. Huge plugin ecosystem, easy for your team to manage, strong for SEO, and every developer on the planet knows how to work with it. For a business that needs a solid marketing site with a blog, WordPress is proven and cost-effective.
The trade-off is maintenance. WordPress sites need regular updates, security patches, and someone keeping an eye on plugin conflicts. Without that, they slow down and become targets. It's manageable, but it's not zero-effort.
One warning: WordPress Multisite. If someone suggests running five or more sites on a single WordPress installation, think carefully. One compromised plugin takes down every site. One performance problem affects all of them. For multi-site, Craft CMS is a much safer bet.
If you need something bespoke
Craft CMS is where I send clients who've outgrown WordPress or need something more structured. The content modelling is genuinely flexible, the admin interface is clean, and it handles multi-site properly. If you're a design-focused brand or you have complex content relationships that WordPress flattens into a mess of custom fields, Craft is the right tool.
It costs more in development time. Smaller plugin ecosystem. But what you get is a site that does exactly what you need without fighting the platform.
If you need content in more places than just a website
This is when headless becomes the right conversation. Sanity, specifically. If your content needs to appear on a website, a mobile app, a kiosk, a partner's site, or channels you haven't built yet, then a traditional CMS locks you in.
Sanity stores your content as structured data and serves it via API to whatever frontend needs it. The editing experience is excellent. Real-time collaboration. But you need a separate frontend build (in our case, usually Next.js), which means more moving parts and a higher initial investment.
The question I ask: "Do you have plans for mobile apps or other digital channels in the next two to three years?" If yes, headless is worth the investment now. If no, a traditional CMS is better value.
If you need it fast and design-led
Webflow. Visual design and CMS in one tool. Great for landing pages, campaign sites, and portfolios where design is the priority and functionality is straightforward. It's quick to deploy and the output is clean.
It gets expensive once you're past 50 or so pages, and the moment you need custom logic beyond what the visual editor supports, you're fighting the platform. But for the right project, it's a good fit.
The four questions that usually decide it
Are you primarily selling products? Shopify or BigCommerce.
How custom does the site need to be? Very custom, Craft or headless. Standard, WordPress or Webflow.
Who's managing the content day to day? Non-technical team, WordPress or Webflow. Technical team, anything works.
Do you need content beyond just the website? Yes, headless. No, traditional CMS.
If you're still not sure, that's what discovery is for. I'd rather spend a few hours helping you pick the right platform than watch you spend months building on the wrong one. Drop us a line at [email protected].
Chris Ryan
Managing Director
17+ years in full-stack web development, most of it leading teams agency-side across e-commerce, CMS platforms, and bespoke applications. Specialises in infrastructure, system integration, and data privacy, with hands-on experience as a Data Protection Officer. Founded Innatus Digital in 2020 to offer the kind of honest, technically-led partnership that he felt was missing from the agency world.