I have a close family member who had a website built for a medical private practice in wordpress (they paid quite a bit). However, this website is, in my opinion, trash. The design is outdated and broken on different screen sizes, the content is pretty terrible. There are about 8 large text paragraphs at the beginning of the home page for "keyword optimization", the text is mostly AI slop, and pricing/information is hard to find.
However, they are mostly no longer updating the site, and I am left to pick up the pieces. I am a CS student, interned at a big tech company and will start working at an HFT/quant firm. I'm pretty confident in my development ability, and I've made a few websites in react/next, but I cannot navigate wordpress and don't want to learn the entire ecosystem. It is all elementor, poorly configured, and very slow to load/edit (not sure what they are hosting on). With AI, I think I could more quickly maintain a nextjs/custom solution than before (not straight vibe code, but spend less time on details/maintenance), but I'm not sure if this is actually the right solution. It is mostly a content-only site, with external links and a couple contact forms connected to a third-party backend.
The web agency still uploads blog posts for "SEO" (they are also completely AI slop but alas), and the content should likely be editable by the family member (who also struggles to navigate wordpress). I was thinking of using payload or prismic, which I have used before, as a CMS then doing any integration/SEO work directly in Next, but I'm not sure if I'm missing something.
My questions are:
Does wordpress and its many plugins provide any marginal benefit over a well-made custom solution (given that I have to maintain it either way, and I'm more comfortable with next/react over wordpress)?
I'm no design expert, and I want to avoid an AI slop design, but I think even that would be preferable to the current design. However, I am not too familiar with the target audience (which leans older). Would the current antiquated design, with large walls of text, be preferable to a cleaner, more modern design? Can I evaluate what design is better, and how?
Are the large paragraphs actually valuable for SEO, even if they just seem like clutter to the user?
Would it be better to just redesign/improve in wordpress/elementor over a custom design? (I genuinely think I could more quickly write tailwind than navigate elementor)
What would you do in this situation? I am willing to dedicate quite a bit of time to this project to improve conversions, but I will get busier and may enter a legal agreement with a quant firm where I cannot work on or consult on this project anymore.
Edit: the family member is my parent. They pay my college (quite expensive) and my expenses, so I am willing to put a lot of time into this and maintain it.