Every week, at least one agency asks us: 'Should we rebuild our site in React?' The honest answer is: it depends. And anyone who gives you a definitive answer without understanding your business is selling you something.

Here's our framework for choosing the right tech stack. It comes down to three questions: What are you building? Who's maintaining it? What's your budget?

For simple brochure sites and blogs, WordPress is still hard to beat. It's mature, content teams can manage it, and the ecosystem is massive. We optimize WordPress sites to score 90+ on Core Web Vitals — the platform isn't the problem, the implementation usually is.

For interactive web applications, dashboards, and portals, React with a modern backend is our go-to. The component-based architecture means we can build faster, test better, and hand off cleaner code. Most of the custom tools we build for agencies use React.

For SEO-critical marketing sites that need both performance and dynamic content, Next.js strikes the right balance. Server-side rendering gives you the SEO benefits, and the React foundation gives you the interactivity.

The worst mistake we see is choosing technology based on what's trendy rather than what's appropriate. We've seen agencies spend $50k rebuilding a perfectly good WordPress site in a JavaScript framework — only to realize their content team can't update it anymore. Technology should serve the business, not the other way around.