This isn't a style debate
Google publishes exactly what it measures: how fast your largest content element loads (LCP), how quickly the page responds to interaction (INP), and how much the layout shifts while loading (CLS). These Core Web Vitals are ranking signals. They are measured on your real visitors' devices, and they are brutally sensitive to how much code a page carries.
That's where the WordPress conversation stops being about preference. A typical theme plus a page builder plus 15–25 plugins ships hundreds of kilobytes of CSS and JavaScript that your page never uses — every visitor downloads it, parses it, and waits on it anyway. On a mid-range phone on cellular data, which is where most local searches happen, that's the difference between a sub-second load and a four-second one.
What static, hand-written code changes
A statically generated site pre-builds every page ahead of time and serves it as finished HTML from a global edge network. No database query on every visit, no plugin chain executing, no render-blocking bloat. The only code on the page is code the page uses. That's how our builds hold perfect or near-perfect Lighthouse scores — not through optimization tricks, but because there's nothing to optimize away.
There are second-order wins too. Static sites have effectively no attack surface — no wp-admin to brute-force, no plugin vulnerabilities to patch at 2 AM. Hosting costs collapse. And structured data, heading hierarchy, and internal links are written deliberately into the source instead of hoping a plugin gets them right.
When WordPress is fine
Honesty matters here: if you have a content team publishing daily and no developer, a well-maintained WordPress site with a lean theme can work. Plenty of big publishers make it work with dedicated engineering. But that's not the situation most local businesses are in. Most local businesses got a template site from an agency, and that template is quietly failing the exact measurements Google ranks by — while the agency charges monthly to maintain it.
If you're not sure which situation you're in, test it: run your site through Google's PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile score and Core Web Vitals assessment. If it fails, you now know one specific, fixable reason competitors outrank you.