Your website is your digital home, and choosing the right platform for it is one of the most important decisions you’ll make. At Weave, we’ve been working with WordPress since 2004. In that time, we’ve built and supported hundreds of websites across New Zealand, from science research hubs to funeral homes to consultancies. It’s why clients come to us as their trusted WordPress experts when they need a site that works and lasts.
We’ve also worked with just about every other CMS out there, including SilverStripe, MODx, CraftCMS, ExpressionEngine, and Joomla. After two decades of testing, building, and supporting different platforms, both our clients and our team consistently prefer WordPress. Here’s why.
Open source power
WordPress is free, open-source software licensed under GPL. That means no vendor lock-in, total transparency, and a global community constantly improving the platform.
For small businesses, science organisations, and funeral homes alike, open-source freedom means you’re not locked into a proprietary system or at the mercy of one software provider. You own your content, and your website can grow with you.
Clean, well-structured code
WordPress is built on modern coding standards, making it easier to maintain, extend, and optimise. That matters when your site needs to load fast, meet accessibility standards, and keep up with SEO best practice.
For us, it also means we can customise without breaking things. Clean code keeps your site stable, secure, and ready to scale.
A CMS that grows with you
One of WordPress’s biggest strengths is flexibility. You can start small and scale without limits. From marketing websites to e-commerce, membership portals, resource libraries, and custom integrations — WordPress can handle it.
At Weave, we design every site to be future-proof: you might just need a simple website now, but you won’t outgrow the platform when new needs appear.
Trusted by the web – and the numbers back it up
- WordPress powers over 43% of all websites worldwide in 2025.
- Market share sits around 60–62% — more than all other CMS platforms combined.
- Trusted by organisations like NASA, publishers like Time Magazine, and global media outlets like TechCrunch and The New York Times.
- The White House also runs on WordPress. If it’s good enough for them, it’s probably secure enough for your business too.
- A thriving ecosystem of plugins, themes, and developers means it’s never standing still.
The short version: if it works for the world’s most high-profile organisations, it’ll work for yours.
Why not Silverstripe CMS (or others)?
We often get asked about Silverstripe — especially since it’s a New Zealand-developed CMS. It has its place, particularly for government projects that need very strict compliance frameworks. But for most businesses, it’s limiting.
Here’s why we don’t usually recommend Silverstripe:
- Smaller developer pool: it’s harder to find experienced support.
- Limited ecosystem: fewer plugins and themes, so most features need to be built from scratch.
- Lower flexibility: scaling often requires more custom code, which adds cost and risk.
- Slower adoption: with only a fraction of the global CMS market, innovation lags behind.
And it’s not just Silverstripe, we’ve worked with MODx, CraftCMS, ExpressionEngine, and Joomla too. They all have their strengths, but again and again our clients tell us the same thing: WordPress offers the right balance of flexibility, scalability, and ease of use.
Security, performance, and hosting
WordPress sometimes cops a reputation for being insecure — but that usually comes down to poor hosting or lack of regular updates. With the right setup, it’s one of the most secure, stable CMS platforms out there.
And if you’re wondering whether it’s secure enough? As we said earlier, the White House runs on WordPress. That should answer the question.
At Weave, we run WordPress on a premium hosting stack we’ve refined over 20 years. Add in daily backups, performance monitoring, and proactive security updates, and you’ve got a site that’s safe, fast, and compliant.
Why WordPress still wins in 2025
- Fully customisable — your CMS works the way you need it to.
- Future-proof — no vendor lock-in, no hidden costs, no dead ends.
- Thriving ecosystem — tens of thousands of themes, plugins, and integrations.
- Loved by editors — if you or your team can use Word or email, they can use WordPress. That’s why our clients, from science programmes to consultancies to funeral directors — consistently choose it.
Put simply: WordPress gives you freedom, flexibility, and peace of mind.
Ready to build on WordPress?
At Weave, we harness the open-source flexibility, clean architecture, and vast ecosystem of WordPress to create websites that reflect your brand and support your goals.
Every project includes tailored training, custom walkthrough videos, and ongoing support so your team feels confident managing content. Most of our clients stay with us for years — some for over a decade — because their websites keep evolving as their needs grow. That’s the difference between a one-off build and partnering with real WordPress experts you can rely on.
Whether you’re a small business in Christchurch or a national organisation, we build sites that are easy to use, easy to update, and ready for the future.
Want to see what WordPress can do for you? Connect with us
- About the Author
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Transforming technical complexity into business clarity is what Gareth does best.
Gareth has been building for the web since the mid-90s, from the early mono screen hand-coded days to leading large ISPs and telcos, and now as co-founder and technical lead at Weave Digital Studio with his wife, Liz.
At Weave, he helps professional services, science organisations, and agritech teams turn complex, data-heavy information into clear, compelling digital solutions that engage the right audiences and support informed decision-making.
Through HumanKind Funeral Websites, Gareth brings more than a decade of specialist experience in the funeral and death-care sector. Having built over 70 funeral, cremation, and embalming websites, he understands the unique compliance requirements, audience sensitivities, and industry best practices needed to create dignified, reliable platforms for families and communities.
An advocate for open source, online privacy, and high-performance hosting, Gareth also manages a custom WordPress hosting stack powering hundreds of sites across New Zealand and Australia.
He’s fuelled by single origin coffee, vinyl records, calisthenics for fitness, and a steady supply of bad dad jokes – plus the occasional game of netball to keep him honest.