About PressOrBuild

PressOrBuild is a small independent site about one decision: whether to build on WordPress or on a hosted website builder. It exists because most of the writing on that question is produced by people who had committed to an answer before they started, and it shows.

Who writes this

The people behind it have migrated sites in both directions. WordPress installations rebuilt on a hosted platform because nobody was ever realistically going to apply a plugin update. Builder sites rebuilt on WordPress because the template system ran out of room somewhere around page two hundred. Both were somebody's expensive lesson, and both were avoidable at the planning stage.

That is what the site is built on: not a preference for one platform, but a fairly well-earned sense of which kinds of project end badly on which route. We are not a WordPress agency and not a builder partner. Nobody pays us to be listed, ranked, or described in a particular way.

The editorial promise

Three commitments. We price both routes with the same method — list prices, new customers, renewal rates printed next to introductory rates, and the arithmetic shown so you can check it. We score comparisons mechanically, with the criteria and the points visible, so you can disagree with a number rather than with a conclusion. And we name the loser of each round: a comparison where one side wins everything is a comparison that was written backwards.

The structural reason to believe that is simple: we earn on both paths. Managed WordPress hosting pays us, and so do builder subscriptions. There is no direction in which shading the truth would be profitable — which is exactly the position a comparison site ought to be in, and the reason we would rather show our working than ask for trust.

How corrections work

Prices move, products ship, and vendors quietly change what a plan includes. Every figure we publish carries the month it was checked, so you can see when a page has aged. If you find something wrong or out of date, tell us: we correct the page, and where the change alters a recommendation we say what changed rather than editing silently. Where a number cannot be verified from a primary source, we say that too instead of borrowing a confident figure from somebody else's blog.

How the site makes money

PressOrBuild is funded by affiliate commissions on hosting plans, page-builder licences and builder subscriptions. Partner links are marked, they never cost you more than going direct, and they never buy a better score or a higher position. Our affiliate disclosure sets out the programmes we belong to and what we earn on, on both sides of the fork.

Get in touch

Corrections, a disagreement with a score, or a scenario we haven't covered — the contact page is the fastest way to reach an editor. The argument that changes a page is more useful to us than the one that agrees with it.