TLDR; WordPress.
If you use a VPS or cloud hosting, with OpenLiteSpeed and Oxygen Builder, you can create a custom website that loads very very quickly, has great SEO (though you can use RankMath).
A lot of people think wordpress is slow or bad becuase they often see it on shared hosting bogged down with bloated plugins. This doesn't have to be the case. I have made and seen sites load very fast, with photos etc.
You can also use Custom Fields and Custom Post Types to fully customise your pages, categories and apperance as well as improve backend management.
I use a Lindode VPS, and they have a one-click WP install (though I don't use that), I use CyberPanel (free cPanel) and OLS as mentioned. There is also Closte which run OLS on google cloud, and many other excellent providers. What you choose ultimitley depends on how many users you expect.
Some of the biggest and busiest websites run on WordPress, for exmaple:
TechCrunch.
The New Yorker.
BBC America.
Bloomberg Professional.
They all rely on CDNs, that will be your best weapon if you have hundreds of thousands of visitors or more.
WordPress can both be set-up quickly and managed and improved in the long run.
The only people not using it are nay-sayer hipsters or big companies who both have the time (and knowledge) to make something custom. If you're a small-medium buinesses, then just use WordPress, at least to start with.
But I will say, Oxygen Builder will make your life much easier and it isn't bloated and won't slow down your page(s), it can achieve "349 millisecond load times" and that's without the OLS cache.
Don't forget to compress images and serve them from a CDN as well, makes a huge difference.
Good luck!
