WordPress Versus All-inclusive Website Builders
Launching your business is an exciting time with lots of decisions to be made. What is will your business name be? What will your brand look like? And ultimately, how will you build your website? Each decision is important because poor decisions can be costly down the road.
All-inclusive website builders such as Squarespace and Wix are popular choices due to their short learning curves, and minimal upfront costs.
While WordPress is a fairly easy platform to build on, it can be intimidating for the novice and requires a separate hosting provider.
WordPress Versus All-inclusive Website Builders
Launching your business is an exciting time with lots of decisions to be made. What is will your business name be? What will your brand look like? And ultimately, how will you build your website? Each decision is important because poor decisions can be costly down the road.
All-inclusive website builders such as Squarespace and Wix are popular choices due to their short learning curves, and minimal upfront costs.
While WordPress is a fairly easy platform to build on, it can be intimidating for the novice and requires a separate hosting provider.
WordPress Versus All-inclusive Website Builders -Pros & Cons
It’s no secret that we love WordPress for web design. Most of the websites we build, and design are in WordPress. We’re not WordPress groupies, we swear. In fact, we’ve seen some wonderful websites that were built in Squarespace and Wix as well as other all-inclusive website builders.
If you’re not planning on growing your business and want a simple, temporary landing page, then one of the many all-inclusive builders can be a great choice.
For business branding, growth, and scaling here are the reasons we recommend WordPress for Website Design & Development:
#1 - Design Flexibility
Squarespace and Wix all-inclusive website builders have a limited number of templates to choose from. Same thing for plugins. This makes your design choices limited.
WordPress is a crowd sourced platform that has over 27,000 free templates and 33,000 free plugins. In addition, you can find online tutorials for any feature or function you desire making your design choices limited only by your imagination.
#2 - Growth
As mentioned above, WordPress has over 33,000 free plugin options and countless paid plugin options. Maybe you’ll want to add affiliate marketing or online courses in the future. Maybe you’ll franchise in the future and have a need for a directory on your website. With WordPress, you simply find the right plugin and you’ve added a new revenue stream or a new feature.
#3 - Content Portability
Creating a website takes time. It’s not just a matter of cutting and pasting content onto a page. You have to build and design each page. Anyone who has ever built a website, or a blog knows the amount of time it takes to get a page to look just the way you like it. Once it looks good, you need to optimize the content so you can be visible on search engines.
Squarespace and Wix all-inclusive website builders have limits on what content you can download for use on another URL or platform.
Even then, the tools that are available to migrate a site are unreliable and, in most cases, websites have to be migrated manually. That means if you have 50 blog posts on Wix or Squarespace all-inclusive website builders, you’ll need to redo them if you decide to upgrade to WordPress later on.
With WordPress, if you outgrow your hosting provider or just want to make a change, you simply make a copy of your website and upload it to the new hosting provider. You can literally move an entire website to a new server in less than 20 minutes.
#4 - eCommerce
Are you going to sell something online? A product or a service? Then you’ll eventually need an online store.
With all-inclusive website builders, eCommerce is limited.
For instance, Squarespace only allows you to integrate with Stripe or PayPal for payment processing. Since Strip is only available in select countries, this limits your prospective customer base. PayPal has a $5,000 transfer limit, so once you hit the big time, PayPal will hold onto your money for 10-21 days.
Wix has more payment options, but the other issues surrounding their platform still makes WordPress the better choice.
WordPress allows you to integrate and use any payment processor or platform you want. PayPal, Stripe, Square, eChecks. You name it, and there’s a plugin to integrate with your online store.
Additionally, Squarespace has a limit on how many products you can sell within the plans that are offered. With WordPress, the sky’s the limit. Want to sell 2,000 products? No problem.
#5 - SEO
SEO is our passion. If we could shout from the rooftops and educate the masses on why SEO is critical and why ignoring it will cost you significantly, we would. What good is a beautiful website if your customers can’t find you? Or you have to pay thousands or more for ads?
SEO with all-inclusive website builders is extremely limited.
You’re using their servers so you will never have the ability to optimize your website’s load time. The only improvement you’ll be able to make for speed optimization is image optimization. Other than that, you have no control.
Image optimization can greatly benefit strategic SEO. The name you give your images is important for keyword and image ranking.
Squarespace renames every image you upload. That means if you upload an image that has a search engine optimized file name Squarespace will automatically rename it to something not search engine friendly.
If you’re publishing your blog on Wix, you won’t be able to set your own titles and descriptions for your post. They are auto generated, which means they may not be optimized for your niche. Other concerns include the use of “#” in the URL. You can’t change this.
Ahref’s has a great article on WordPress versus Wix SEO where they found that 46% of websites built in WordPress received organic search traffic compared to 1.4% of websites built on Wix.
WordPress has countless SEO tutorials and options for optimal on page optimization.
WordPress Versus All-inclusive Website Builders Conclusion
If you’re goal is to grow and scale your business and you want flexibility, searchability, and portability, then WordPress is the best choice, the solid choice.
What about platforms such as Etsy, LeadPages and ClickFunnels all-inclusive website builders?
Again, it comes back to your brand. Your website is your brand and with these platforms you do not own the URL, they do.
One piece of the “Google Puzzle” for ranking is the age and authority of your domain. When you’re building your reputation using someone else’s URL, you are building their brand, not yours. Any links that you get to your website, increases their online presence, not yours.
Putting a bit more time and energy into building the features you want with your own URL/domain on the right platform will pay off tenfold the long run.
There are plenty of tutorials that can help you if you choose to DIY your website but if you want search engine optimized web design, just fill out this quick form and one of our team members will send you a customized quote within 24 hours.
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