I build WordPress sites for a living. I would rather you did not need one.

This site is written in plain HTML and CSS. There is no build step, no framework, no database, and no admin login. It is hosted free. You can read the whole source of any page and understand it in a minute — which is the point being made, not a gimmick.

The argument it makes is narrow and I try to keep it that way: a five-page brochure is a document, and documents do not need an application underneath them. Everything here is an attempt to show that with figures rather than assert it with adjectives. Where those figures come from is set out below.

What I am not saying

That WordPress is bad software. It runs an enormous share of the web because it is genuinely good at publishing. Webflow, Squarespace, Wix and the rest all solve real problems for real people. The argument here is narrower: a five-page brochure is not one of those problems.

I am also not saying you were foolish to end up with one. The default answer to "I need a website" has been an application platform for as long as I have been doing this, and every incentive in the industry points that way — a platform generates recurring work, and a folder of files does not. Blame the default, not yourself.

How this site is built

One HTML file per page, one stylesheet, one small script that copies code blocks and filters the archive. The header and footer are duplicated into every file, and when they change I change them with find-and-replace. That is a real cost and I am not going to pretend otherwise — it is the cost I chose over having a build step.

Fonts come from Google Fonts. Nothing else is loaded from anywhere. There is no analytics script, no tag manager, no A/B test, no chat widget, no consent banner — because there is nothing to consent to.

About the numbers

I have been building websites for 14 years. In that time I have watched a lot of people pay a great deal of money for a five-page site to be a WordPress install — or a Webflow, Squarespace, Wix or GoDaddy subscription — when what they actually had was a document.

The figures on this site come out of that. They are illustrative composites: real numbers I have seen, assembled into representative examples rather than lifted from one client's invoices. I am not going to publish somebody's billing history to make a point, and I am not going to invent a figure to make it land harder. Where a number appears here, it is the kind of number I actually run into.

So read the tables as "this is what it tends to look like", not "this happened to one named business on these dates". The argument does not rest on any single invoice. It rests on the pattern — and the pattern is consistent enough that I stopped being surprised by it a long time ago.

Where a figure is exact, it says so. The page weights are measured, the hosting limits are quoted from the providers' own documentation with the date they were checked, and anything I could not verify is not printed.

Getting in touch

Corrections are welcome and get made. If a number here is wrong, or a free tier has changed since a post was written, tell me and I will fix the post rather than quietly leave it. Work enquiries go through webdens.com.