If you’ve decided to build your own website, you may be wondering what’s the best route to go. You’ve probably already figured out that WordPress is the best content management system (CMS) available. But, you’ve probably also considered a website builder like Squarespace or Wix.
Choosing the right platform should be your top priority when establishing your own website. Both WordPress and website builders can be effective tools for building your site. But, I’ll show you why WordPress is better and why I believe it’s the way to go.
What’s the Difference Between WordPress and a Website Builder
WordPress is likely the easiest CMS available on the web, particularly if you have little to no tech experience. A CMS is a software that’s used to create, publish, and manage digital content. While WordPress’s intuitive and user-friendly design makes it great for newbies, it’s also favorited by professionals who work in the digital industry.
It’s also open source, which essentially means that the code is written so that anyone can modify the code. The advantage of this is that a volunteer community of WordPress users and developers are constantly creating, updating, and improving the site.
With WordPress, you can create your own website or blog. The design of WordPress allows you to customize your site through thousands of widgets, plugins, and themes. In just five minutes time, you can install the WordPress software and create your own web pages, even if you have very little to no tech experience. All it takes is a few clicks.
A website builder is also an easy tool to create and manage your website content, but you have less control to do so. With a website builder, you build your website by dragging and dropping the features you want.
There are no complicated features with a website builder. You just choose your template, modify your layout, upload your content and publish. This sounds wonderfully easy and it is. It’s great for someone who isn’t very ambitious about their website.
The problem lies in that you can’t adjust the code or add plugins to create a more personalized website or experience. You’re stuck with the template you choose and no amendments can be made. Whereas, the design of WordPress allows you to think long-term and make ongoing plans to improve your site.
Let’s do a more in-depth comparison of WordPress and website builders to make further assessments:
- WordPress is more flexible. The popular CMS powers almost 30% of the entire internet, running everything from personal blogs to e-commerce and many major media sites. You could say that WordPress dominates the web. In fact, 59% of all websites that use a CMS use WordPress. This is a testament to WordPress’s popularity and flexibility. It was designed to accommodate most any kind of website. Whether you plan on having a small blog or a large-scale, complex site, WordPress is great at both. On the other hand, website builders have pretty limited functionality. They’re better at building small business websites. If you want a site that has a lot of content or a commerce store, website builders won’t accommodate it like WordPress will.
- WordPress allows you to choose your web host. You can decide whether to allow WordPress to host your site or go with a host that offers you more for less. This helps to ensure that you always have the type of service you’re looking for. If you need more bandwidth to accommodate increased traffic to your site, you can always switch hosts or upgrade. The problem with website builders is that they usually allow for a maximum amount of traffic and it’s usually not enough to grow your site. Most website builders have built-in hosting on their platforms. If you’re not happy with their service, you’re stuck.
- WordPress is the best platform for SEO. Search engine optimization(SEO) is crucial to get traffic to your website. There are many elements where WordPress is tops in its game for SEO, so much so that search engines tend to gravitate more towards sites that are powered by WordPress. The CMS is always updating its platform to remain relevant and the search engines love this. WordPress also has permalinks, title tags, and headings that help search engines understand what your page is about, provided you put the right keywords. The best part is that it’s already built-in to the design. All you have to do is fill in the relevant information and create high-quality content. You also have the ability to optimize your images in WordPress by using ALT tags and descriptions. WordPress has all the tools right there to help you create content that will help your site rank higher. And, those are just the basics. With the many plugins WordPress offers, you can up your game even more. Some website builders offer a few functions to help you optimize your content, but none do it to the extent of WordPress.
- WordPress allows you more control over your site. You can have nearly any kind of website you want, whether it’s a simple blog or a major commerce site. You also have more control over the design of your site than you would with a website builder. With WordPress, there are literally thousands of free themes and plugins available. You can create your own layouts with WordPress and the available plugins can add more features and functions to your site. With a website builder, some have a few plugins available, but they come at a price, usually fixed or subscription-based. And, even if you add the best available within a website builder, it hardly ever comes close to the bells and whistles you can get with WordPress.
- WordPress is reliable. Most website builders are relatively new and if you run into a hiccup, chances are you’ll have more of a challenge to find a solution. On the other hand, you can count on WordPress. It’s been around since 2003 and because of its success and popularity, there’s an answer for nearly every problem ever encountered with the site. If you run into a problem, and it’s very rare that you will, chances are you can Google the solution. WordPress also has a huge community of followers who are eagerly willing to help and advise you.
Why Would You Want Anything But WordPress?
The point of having a website is to drive traffic to your brand or service. If your website is a simple blog, a basic WordPress site is absolutely free, so why would you want to pay for a website builder?
The point is if you’re going to create a website, why not choose a platform that’s time-tested, trusted, reliable, and proven itself to be the best?
WordPress has all the tools accessible for you to create the type of website you want, at little to no charge. You’re able to exercise maximum control over your site from every angle. There are so many reasons to choose WordPress over website builders. WordPress is the obvious choice to create and manage your own website.