If you need to build a website and are debating between WordPress vs other CMS options, we’ve got you covered.

In today’s digital age, having a website is crucial for businesses, bloggers, and individuals looking to establish their online presence. That’s why there are plenty of articles titled “Best CMS 2022,” in an attempt to draw you one way or another. With the abundance of website builders available, choosing the right platform can be a daunting task. Among the popular options like Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy, and more, there is one platform that consistently rises above the competition: WordPress.

So, if you’re considering building a website or looking to migrate to a new platform, join us on this exploration of why WordPress should be at the top of your list. Let’s dive in and discover the numerous advantages that make WordPress the unrivaled option for creating an exceptional website that captures your vision and achieves your goals.

How is WordPress better than other CMS options?

Why does everyone use WordPress? In this blog post, we will delve into the reasons why WordPress stands head and shoulders above its counterparts. We will explore the unparalleled flexibility and customization options, scalability and growth potential, ownership and control, SEO friendliness and optimization, developer-friendly environment, cost-effectiveness, and more that make WordPress the ultimate choice for creating a website that truly reflects your vision and meets your specific needs.

While platforms like Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy, and others have their merits, we believe WordPress offers a unique blend of power, versatility, and control that sets it apart from the pack. Whether you are a small business owner, a creative professional, or an aspiring blogger, WordPress provides the tools and capabilities to bring your online dreams to life.

What Are Your Website Builder Options?

In today’s digital era, the demand for user-friendly site builders has skyrocketed. Individuals and businesses of all sizes are seeking accessible and efficient solutions to establish their online presence. While several website builders have emerged to cater to this demand, it’s important to understand the key players in the landscape before making an informed choice. In short, most businesses have a website and it’s easier than ever to create one.

Among the notable CMS options out there, we have:

• WordPress
• Squarespace
• Wix
• GoDaddy
• And many more

Each platform comes with its own set of features, advantages, and limitations. To make the best decision for your website, it’s essential to evaluate these options comprehensively.

WordPress, the undisputed leader in the field, has gained a loyal following due to its extensive capabilities and adaptability. It powers over 40% of all websites on the internet, showcasing its dominance in the market. On the other hand, platforms like Squarespace, Wix, and GoDaddy have also gained popularity with their simplified user interfaces and drag-and-drop functionalities.

While all these platforms offer solutions for website building, it’s crucial to explore the factors that set WordPress apart from the competition.

Customization

How is WordPress different from other websites? One of the biggest reasons why anyone should go with WordPress vs any other website builder is because of flexibility and customization. You can do just about anything you want with a WordPress build. In fact, it may be the best option when it comes to customization, outside of a custom HTML site (which would take a long time to build, with the help of an experienced developer in the build process, as well as during any change that’s needed after launch).

Here are the primary differences between WordPress and other CMS options:

• Themes – With thousands of free and premium themes available, WordPress provides a wide range of design options to choose from. Whether you’re looking for a sleek and professional layout or a vibrant and creative design, there is a theme for every style and niche. Moreover, these themes are highly customizable, allowing you to tweak and personalize every aspect of your website’s appearance to make it truly your own.
• Plugins – WordPress boasts a vast library of plugins, which are like apps that extend the functionality of your website. Whether you need to add a contact form, integrate social media feeds, optimize for search engines, or enhance security, there’s a plugin available to meet your specific needs. The extensive plugin ecosystem of WordPress enables you to expand the capabilities of your website and add features without the need for complex coding or development skills.
• Innate Customization – Compared to Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy, and other platforms, WordPress offers a level of customization that is unmatched. While these platforms may provide a selection of templates and limited customization options, they often fall short in terms of flexibility. With WordPress, you have complete control over your website’s design and functionality, ensuring that it truly represents your brand and meets your unique requirements. We can’t tell you how many times a potential partner has asked if we could do something on their site, and our response was, “With your current CMS, that wouldn’t be possible.”

At the end of the day, regardless of the size of your business, WordPress is a powerful website-building tool that offers a measurable advantage over other CMS tools.

Scalability

An important item to look at before building your website is how a CMS can grow and adapt over time. This, specifically, is where WordPress beats its competition, offering incomparable scalability and growth potential compared to options like Squarespace, Wix, and GoDaddy.

WordPress is built on a robust and scalable framework, allowing your website to handle increasing traffic, content, and functionality as your online presence grows. Whether you’re starting with a small blog or launching an e-commerce store, WordPress provides a solid foundation that can scale seamlessly to meet your evolving needs.

One of the factors contributing to WordPress’s scalability is its extensive ecosystem. With thousands of themes and plugins available, you can easily enhance your website’s capabilities and adapt it to new requirements as your business expands. Whether you need to integrate a payment gateway, implement advanced analytics, or introduce multilingual support, there are plugins and resources readily available to facilitate these enhancements.

Moreover, WordPress’s open-source nature enables a thriving community of developers and contributors to constantly improve and innovate the platform. This means that you can rely on regular updates, bug fixes, and security patches, ensuring that your website remains robust and up to date with the latest industry standards. On top of that, if you can’t find a plugin that meets your needs, any developer who knows their stuff can work in WordPress to solve the issue. Basically, it’s not a matter of if something can be done, but how long it’ll take.

In contrast, platforms like Squarespace, Wix, and GoDaddy often come with limitations in terms of scalability. While they may be suitable for small-scale websites or basic online portfolios, they may struggle to handle significant growth or complex functionality. Upgrading to more advanced features or accommodating high levels of traffic can be challenging or even restricted in some cases. There are often specific requests that “just aren’t available”.

Control

This is where a digital marketing firm like Sixth Media really relies on WordPress vs everything else. More than other site builders, WordPress does an incredible job at allowing users to control elements on the front and back end.

Here are a few examples of how WordPress allows you better control than other options:

• Hosting – With WordPress, you have the freedom to choose your own hosting provider, giving you full control over where your website resides and how it is managed. This means you can select a hosting service that aligns with your specific needs, whether it’s for performance, security, or specialized features. In contrast, platforms like Squarespace and Wix host your website on their servers, limiting your control over the hosting environment.
• Content – Furthermore, WordPress allows you to own and control your website’s content and data. You have the ability to export your content and move it to a different hosting provider or platform if you ever decide to do so. This portability is essential for maintaining ownership of your intellectual property and ensuring that you have the freedom to switch platforms or migrate your website without any limitations.
• Backup – Additionally, WordPress provides robust backup and security options, enabling you to safeguard your website and its data. You can implement various security measures, install security plugins, and regularly back up your website to protect against potential threats or data loss. This level of control over security measures is particularly valuable for businesses and e-commerce websites that handle sensitive customer information.

Comparing the above to options like Squarespace and Wix, those builders often impose limitations on data ownership and control. In some cases, you are forced to store your data on specific servers. Moving from one to the other can be extremely frustrating (and in some cases, either not possible or restrictive at best).

Developer-Friendly Environment

WordPress stands alone when it comes to its developer-friendly environment. In fact, WordPress is known for being an ecosystem by which developers and designs flourish. WordPress has an open-source nature, impressive documentation, and a welcoming community that make it perfect for anyone who wants customization (as mentioned above), along with advanced options (like improved functionality and integration).

Being open-source means that WordPress’s source code is free to all, allowing developers to push the needle when it comes to what’s possible to create. Because of this, there are new custom themes, plugins and extensions created every day, all of which cater to general and niche needs. Plus, with the availability of numerous third-party libraries, APIs, and integrations WordPress acts as a versatile platform for developers. Whether you need to integrate payment gateways, social media platforms, analytics tools, or other external services, WordPress offers a wide range of options to streamline the development process and enhance the functionality of your website.

Along with that, there’s thorough documentation and support that make it easier than anything else to operate inside. This documentation is constantly updated so website owners have the best product.

Looking at the other CMS options compared to WordPress here is quite bleak; they often have more limited customization options and developer support. The short of it is this: Other CMS options prioritize user experience for non-technical users. This allows for an easy-to-use produce that frequently restricts the level of control and customization that developers need.

Online Traffic Growth (SEO Optimization)

All of the above leads us to the primary sticking point of this article. WordPress, more than any other CMS out there, will set you up for SEO success in the long run.

In the highly competitive online landscape, search engine optimization (SEO) plays a crucial role in driving organic traffic to your website. WordPress has long been recognized as a platform that excels in terms of SEO friendliness and optimization, providing users with the necessary tools and features to enhance their website’s visibility and ranking in search engine results.

WordPress offers a variety of SEO plugins, such as Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack, which empower you to optimize your website’s content, meta tags, headings, URLs, and more. These plugins provide valuable insights and recommendations, helping you improve your website’s on-page SEO elements to align with best practices. You can easily optimize your pages and blog posts for target keywords, create search engine-friendly URLs, and generate XML sitemaps to assist search engine crawlers in indexing your site effectively.

Moreover, WordPress is built with clean and semantic code, which is favored by search engines. This means that the structure and underlying code of your website contribute to its SEO performance. WordPress’s adherence to industry standards and its focus on clean code provide a solid foundation for search engines to crawl and understand your website’s content efficiently.

Another advantage of WordPress is the availability of numerous SEO-friendly themes and templates. These themes are designed with SEO principles in mind, ensuring that your website follows the best practices of search engine optimization right from the start. By selecting a well-coded and SEO-optimized theme, you can give your website an edge in terms of its technical SEO aspects, such as site speed, mobile responsiveness, and structured data markup.

Here’s just one example:

The other day, we had inherited a website that was built on Shopify. As a product, Shopify allowed our partner to easily create products and category pages on the fly. In the past, that meant they could quickly generate a front end experience that showcased what they could do for their customers. The problem was the URL structure. Every single product page was forced into one section of their site. This created an illogical hierarchy that didn’t make sense from Google’s perspective, as product pages seemed to be unrelated to their parent category pages. Because of this severed relationship, it made it difficult to understand what exactly the partner’s website was for, and which pages where the highest priority.

Cost

WordPress is often your cheapest option to build websites. As mentioned above, it’s a free and open-source platform. Outside of the cost of your domain name and hosting option, you can easily create a website for free. Where you will run into costs is if you want to pay for a plugin that offers specific customization that other plugins (or a developer) can’t give you.

This is different from other platforms because they typically have tiered pricing that give you different options based on how much you pay. Plus, as mentioned above, you’re also forced into things like hosting; this leads to either inflated hosting costs outside of your control or limited control over important efforts (like site speed) because you’re locked into a hosting option.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Disadvantage of WordPress?

There are just a handful of reasons why you may not want to choose WordPress:

• Learning curve – The customization can be a blessing and a curse. While, basically, anything is possible, it can sometimes require a bit of work on your end to figure out the problem and implement.
• Manual efforts – If you use WordPress, there are certain things that need to be manually done (updates, backups, etc.)
• Complexity – Similar to the learning curve, there are some complex things that may require outside help. For example, some plugins may not be compatible with other plugins (or your theme), which can cause certain elements on your site to look off.

Is anything better than WordPress?

From our perspective, nothing is better than WordPress outside of a custom-built website. With a custom build, you have complete control, but it comes at a cost (both in actual dollars and complexity).

Should I make my own website or use WordPress?

Proceed with caution. It can be extremely difficult to build a custom website on your own, and potentially more difficult to find a developer you can trust. As a digital marketing firm that focuses on SEO, we’ve seen plenty of custom sites go wrong, being built with a focus on a few things that make it difficult to grow over time.

Do professionals use WordPress?

All the time! WordPress is our #1 CMS option.

Is Squarespace better than WordPress?

Emphatically, no. We would suggest WordPress over Squarespace every time.

Additional Resources to Check Out

• WordPress.org: The official website of WordPress provides extensive documentation, tutorials, and support forums for beginners and experienced users alike. Visit https://wordpress.org/ to access resources on installation, customization, themes, plugins, and more.
• WordPress Plugin Directory: Explore the vast collection of free and premium plugins available in the official WordPress Plugin Directory. Discover plugins for SEO optimization, security, e-commerce, performance optimization, and various other functionalities at https://wordpress.org/plugins/.
• WordPress Themes: Browse the official WordPress Theme Directory (https://wordpress.org/themes/) to find a wide range of free and premium themes suitable for different industries and design preferences. These themes are designed with WordPress’s best practices in mind and are regularly updated.
• WordPress Support Forums: Engage with the WordPress community through the support forums (https://wordpress.org/support/forums/). Ask questions, seek advice, and find solutions to common issues. The active community of WordPress users and developers can provide valuable insights and guidance.
• SEO Plugins: Explore popular SEO plugins for WordPress, such as RankMath,Yoast SEO, and All in One SEO Pack. These plugins offer extensive features and guidance for optimizing your website’s SEO elements.

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