The argument has run for about five years and is most often waged by people who make their living on one of the sides. Let us go parameter by parameter, with no conclusion stated up front.
1. Load speed
Next.js builds pages ahead of time and serves ready HTML from a CDN. A typical LCP on mobile 4G is 1 to 1.5 seconds.
WordPress assembles the page on every request: PHP hits the database, runs the hooks of every plugin, renders the template. Without caching, 2 to 4 seconds. With good caching and a light theme, 1.5 to 2.
The gap is real, but smaller than people tend to claim. A tuned WordPress beats a badly built Next.js with no contest. On a typical site most of the weight comes from images and third-party scripts, and those are the same on any engine.
Score: Next.js, with a caveat.
2. Cost to launch
A marketplace theme plus configuration is ₽30,000–80,000 and two weeks. Next.js development starts at ₽150,000, because here the interface is written by hand instead of picking a ready theme.
The difference is threefold, and it does not go away.
Score: WordPress, decisively.
3. Cost of ownership
Here the picture flips.
WordPress needs updates to the core, the theme, and the plugins. Every update is a risk of conflict. Twenty plugins on a site mean twenty sources of breakage and vulnerabilities. Realistic maintenance is ₽5,000–15,000 a month if you do it seriously.
Next.js is updated once a quarter, has fewer dependencies, and breaks less often. Static hosting costs pennies against a PHP server with a database.
Over three years the launch difference gets eaten up.
Score: Next.js.
4. Security
WordPress is the most widespread CMS in the world, and that makes it the most attacked. Mass scanning for vulnerable plugins runs constantly. The vast majority of hacks come through a plugin whose author abandoned it two years ago, while the core itself stays intact.
Next.js has a smaller attack surface simply because there is nothing to hack in a static page. Vulnerabilities move into the API, and there you have to hunt them separately.
Score: Next.js.
5. Content editing
Here WordPress wins big. The editor is clear to a person with no training, the media library works, previews exist, and plugins cover almost any need.
Next.js needs a separate CMS: Strapi, Sanity, Directus, and that is added budget and one more system to maintain. Or the content lives in the repository files, and then only a developer can edit it.
Score: WordPress, big.
6. Hiring a contractor
There are many times more WordPress developers, rates are lower, and a replacement is found within a week. A Next.js specialist costs more, and the market is narrower.
On the other hand, quality on WordPress is far more scattered: the entry bar is low, and some of the work is done by assembling plugins with no grasp of what happens inside.
Score: WordPress on availability, a tie on quality.
When WordPress is the right choice
- A content site: a blog, media, a corporate site with news.
- A budget up to ₽100,000.
- Non-technical staff change the content every day.
- You need to launch in two weeks.
- Traffic up to 50,000 visits a month.
When Next.js pays off
- The site is part of the product: a personal account, calculators, interactive features.
- Speed affects revenue directly: advertising, a shop, lead generation.
- Many integrations with external systems.
- Load above several tens of thousands of visits.
- The site lives for years and will keep being developed.
On migration
A separate question is whether it is worth migrating a working site. The short answer: the move on its own speeds up loading and almost never lifts search rankings enough to pay for itself.
A migration makes sense when you hit the ceiling: you need functionality that plugins cannot assemble, or maintenance has become more expensive than development. Speed for its own sake is cheaper to get by tuning the cache and compressing images.
If you do migrate, keep the page addresses one for one. Changing the link structure together with the engine folds two risks into one and leaves you with no idea what exactly dropped the traffic.