For my sites it’s definitely cheaper I only have domain costs to pay for (8 – 10 per year) plus free hosting on Github and other platforms compared to the pricy equivalent, content can be easily managed through a platform such as Forestry or Netlify. The scalability is insane since the server resources are a lot less compared to a bloated monolithic cms such as WordPress, and the speeds are amazing. I understand that with sites such as news sites etc that are updated like down to the second perhaps a custom cms or something like WordPress is more suited…but there are sophisticated site generators that can handle 5k – 100k so I guess it’s possible, but I’ve never looked into it as it’s outside of my use case. My personal general philosophy is the the same as Arron Swartz “Bake, Don’t Fry” and WordPress don’t fit that mantra.

I’m happy that some developers are experimenting as I think that too often people get what I like to call WordPress disorder, I should state this can be for any cms, where they have tunnel vision without considering different use case and tools, I would say 60% – 75% of the time WordPress is overused where it could be done cheaper elsewhere, thats the real reason that it runs 30ish% of the web, it’s because you have people continually reiterating what percentage runs WordPress and naive web creators buying into it, when in fact what they really should be doing is asking if it can be done cheaper with a static site generator or something similar, if people did that I think WordPress share wouldn’t have got as large as it has and we see people making better decisions and saving money on server resources they don’t need.