Why WordPress Is Better for Your Business Than Wix or SquareSpace

If you are to survive in the modern marketplace, your business needs a website.

The current pandemic has made it clear that the ability to communicate with customers via the Internet is critical for even small, local businesses that might have relied on walk-up business before. Although restrictions will loosen along with the vaccine rollout, online shopping habits are likely going to prove hard to break for many shoppers, so it’s critical for businesses of all sizes to have a website that helps them reach their customers no matter what. But once you start researching building a website, you realize that there are dozens of website builders out there. So how do you pick the best one for you? The three leading builders are WordPress, Wix, and SquareSpace. Among these three, WordPress is the clear winner, offering benefits for building and maintaining your website.

Control and Flexibility

The most important things WordPress offers are control and flexibility. Wix and SquareSpace are builders that have a framework already installed for your website. While there are options for customizing many aspects of the appearance and layout of the site, much of the basic functionality is already determined when you choose Wix or SquareSpace. On the other hand, WordPress starts as a much more bare bones framework. It’s an open platform that programmers around the world tinker with to create better website designs and functions. You can build your website in a completely free fashion. You can also draw from tens of thousands of themes to get a dramatic appearance to your website with little to no work. And then expand the functionality with about 60,000 free and paid plugins (essentially apps) that help your website work the way you want. Think of it this way: choosing Wix or SquareSpace is like choosing a Ford or a Chevy. There are many body styles that you can further customize with colors, options, and detailing packages. Underneath, though, it’s still a Ford or a Chevy. Choosing WordPress is like being able to build your own car using the best components from all the car parts from all the car companies in the world.

Cost

Another benefit is that WordPress sites can be essentially free if your willing to put in some leg work. You can find free software, free themes, and free plugins to build a great website. All you have to pay for is your domain name and hosting, which can be a relatively tiny expense. Even if you want functionality from paid plugins or themes, they are inexpensive. If you dont want to go through all the work, a web development company like us can help put everything together for you! Wix and SquareSpace, on the other hand, charge you for using their software to build your site. Then many of the apps and themes have additional costs. Plus, you have to keep paying monthly to maintain your website. This adds up over time, which can make your website a significant, ongoing expense. Free options for Wix and SquareSpace are very limited, and may come with display ads that they sell on your site–ads that might even be for a competitor!

eCommerce

One place where the limited flexibility of Wix and SquareSpace hits worst is in terms of ecommerce. Both of these platforms are set up to accept only a few types of payment. SquareSpace, for example, only accepts Stripe, ApplePay, and PayPal. Wix starts out only accepting Authorize.net and PayPal, with additional functionality coming at a higher cost. WordPress integrates easily with WooCommerce, which has more than 60 different extensions for taking payments the way that will be easiest for your customers. But, again, you have dozens of other choices for ecommerce plugins that can help your website serve customers more easily.

Portability

Once you choose Wix or SquareSpace, you’re stuck with them essentially forever. There is no easy way to migrate your site to another platform. You can do it, but the results are often so buggy and broken that it’s easier to start from scratch. In addition, the licensing agreements give the builders some rights to the content you create using their platform, which means it isn’t just hard to move your content–it might be illegal. On the other hand, it’s easy to move WordPress sites around. You can disable and replace plugins, alter themes, and more with little effort. Your content is clearly your own, and you are free to back it up, download it, and move it as you want.

SEO

Wix and SquareSpace create challenges in terms of SEO. Both platforms make it harder for Google to find the information it needs to index and rank your site. This means that your website is less likely to show up high in the search results, even when potential customers are looking for the service or product you’re selling. This means that you’re likely to lose sales to competitors with better-ranking sites. Although Wix has worked to improve this for their sites, they remain behind WordPress. WordPress is designed to be open to Google and the other search engines. This means that they can find your quality content and rank it where it belongs so that you can more easily rank higher in the search results.

Limitations of WordPress

Despite all the benefits above, WordPress does have its limitations. The biggest is that it can be a bit harder to work with. Plugins and themes mean you aren’t really designing your website from scratch, but it can take time to learn how to find, install, and customize the different parts of your website. It’s like our analogy of the car parts above. You have access to so many options that figuring them all out can be a challenge. And not all the parts work together easily: sometimes you have to pick the right ones or tweak them to make them work right.

Let Us Build the Best Site for You

Many people understand why WordPress is the best way to build a website, but either can’t get their site to work or can’t design a site that takes full advantage of the benefits. That’s where we come in. We have experience and expertise working with WordPress, and have built dozens of beautiful, powerful, and profitable websites for our clients. We can build a website for you that maximizes the benefits of WordPress to make your company look good while offering your customers the best user experience. This can lead to more sales–and more repeat sales. Please contact us today to start building the best website for your company.