Almost every small business website in Kenya runs on WordPress. It's cheap to set up and there's a developer on every corner who knows it. For a lot of use cases, that's fine. For e-commerce, we usually push back on it.
WordPress e-commerce (typically WooCommerce) means a PHP stack, a plugin dependency chain, and a hosting bill that scales awkwardly once you add a payment gateway, a CDN, and security plugins to stop it getting hacked - which, at Kenyan hosting price points, happens more than people admit.
Sanity paired with Next.js gives us a headless CMS - content lives in Sanity, the actual website is a fast, static-generated Next.js front end deployed on Vercel. The client gets the same "log in and edit a product" experience as WordPress, but the website itself loads faster, costs less to run, and isn't one abandoned plugin away from a security hole.
The tradeoff: it costs more upfront to build than a WordPress theme install. For a brand that's going to run real product marketing and ad traffic - like GWETHBTL - that tradeoff pays for itself within a few months of not fighting the website's own infrastructure.
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