This decision is usually framed as modern against old-fashioned, which is unhelpful. Both stacks build excellent websites. The question is which set of trade-offs matches your team, your content volume and your five-year plan.
Where WordPress still wins
- Editorial staff already know it, which removes weeks of training.
- A vast plugin ecosystem covers events, memberships, job boards and forms without custom code.
- Hosting is cheap and every German agency can take over the project.
- Time to first version is short: a solid site can be live in three weeks.
For a company that publishes twice a month, needs a contact form and a news section, and has no integration requirements, WordPress with a lean theme is a perfectly rational choice. Problems start when the plugin count climbs past twenty and each one needs its own updates.
Where Next.js pulls ahead
Next.js renders on the server, ships far less JavaScript than a typical page builder, and gives you precise control over caching. In our own measurements a Next.js corporate site typically reaches a Largest Contentful Paint of 1.1 to 1.6 seconds on a mid-range Android phone over 4G, where a plugin-heavy WordPress build sits at 2.8 to 4.5 seconds. That difference is visible in conversion rates, not only in audit scores.
- Server components keep interactive JavaScript to the parts that truly need it.
- Incremental static regeneration serves cached HTML while updating in the background.
- Type safety across content, routes and components catches errors before deployment.
- Multilingual routing with translated URL paths is a first-class feature, not a plugin.
- The attack surface is smaller: there is no admin login on the public domain.
Editing content is the real question
The honest weakness of a custom frontend is the editing experience, and it is solvable. Pair Next.js with a headless CMS such as Storyblok, Sanity or Payload, or even keep WordPress purely as the content backend. Your editors get a visual editor with live preview, and the public site stays fast. Budget 2,000 to 5,000 EUR extra for this layer and take it seriously, because a CMS your team avoids is worse than no CMS.
Choose the stack your editors will still be using happily in year three, not the one that demos best in week one.
Cost over five years
A WordPress corporate site costs less to build, roughly 7,000 to 14,000 EUR, and more to maintain: plugin licences, monthly updates and the occasional security incident add up to 1,800 to 4,000 EUR per year. A comparable Next.js site costs 12,000 to 22,000 EUR to build and 600 to 1,500 EUR per year to run. Over five years the totals converge, and the faster site usually wins on revenue.
When to rebuild and when to repair
Rebuild if the site is on an abandoned page builder, if Core Web Vitals fail on mobile after optimisation attempts, if you need a second language or a serious integration, or if every content change requires a developer. Repair if the structure is sound and only speed and design are dated. A cleanup of an existing WordPress installation costs 2,400 to 6,000 EUR and often buys another two good years.
A short decision rule
Under fifty pages, no integrations, an editorial team that publishes weekly: WordPress, kept lean. Above that, or with any product data, booking logic or multilingual requirement: Next.js with a headless CMS. Both choices are defensible. Choosing neither and letting the current site decay is the only clearly wrong answer. Whichever you pick, insist on two things in the contract: the repository in your own account, and a documented way to export all content. That keeps the next decision cheap.
