Are you about to build your website, and you don’t know which tool to choose from among Wix, Shopify, Squarespace and WordPress?
Being WordPress experts, we tell you more about this platform and how it stands out from its competitors.
Usage
No, WordPress isn’t just a blogging tool! From Sony Music to Best Buy, UPS, The New York Times and Spotify, many companies of all profiles and industries are using it. WordPress is the most widely used CMS, or Content Management System. Indeed 35% of websites in the world use it, according to a study by Netcraft!
Open source
WordPress is open source. Software is said to be open source when its code is accessible to the public and can be modified or improved by all users. In general, there is no charge to pay to access or use it. This is the case with WordPress which uses the GPL license giving you the right to do whatever you want with its code. On top of that, WordPress has a great community. This makes it easy to find help, documentation and a host of online resources quickly. Our team is also one of the contributors to this project.
Easily customizable
WordPress has more than 55,000 plugins, and thousands of themes to customize it to your liking according to your technical needs and the nature of your business. It adapts to any type of website: online store, showcase site, etc. Creating a page or managing content is a snap with WordPress. You can also connect many marketing and accounting tools, have a multilingual site, etc.
Accommodation of your choice
If you download the tool for free from WordPress.org, you will need to own your own hosting. This allows you to choose perfectly according to your needs the solution that suits you according to your budget, your activities and future objectives. The different types of web hosting available for your WordPress site are described in our article of the same name.
Performance and reliability
WordPress is updated very regularly, so bugs or security vulnerabilities are fixed as soon as they are discovered. New features are also emerging, allowing the platform to remain in constant evolution. The majority of themes are also designed to be responsive in order to adapt to all tools.
WordPress provides access to excellent plugins to get a fast website or improve your SEO on search engines.
Security
No software is 100% secure. We advise you to have an increased maintenance strategy to limit your chances of seeing a hacker breaking into your website. Safety is your responsibility! You should know that, despite the myths, WordPress is completely safe.
Marketing
WordPress is an important ally for your marketing strategies. It allows in particular:
- add CTAs to your blog posts
- to identify keywords in your pages for better web referencing
- create landing pages to sell / present your products and services
- to easily connect your social networks
- schedule your publications
Add to that multiple user access which makes teamwork easier when writing a blog post, for example!
How does WordPress stand out from Wix?
Wix has been used by 3.8 million websites since its creation in 2006. Wix is a website builder unlike WordPress which is a CMS, as explained above. The major difference is that a website builder is basically made to build the front end of a website, that is, the visual part. Personalization is therefore more limited.
Wix provides 300 free templates, less choice than with WordPress and Wix does not allow responsive mode. This is a major drawback when you consider that in 2019, 56% of users used their phones to browse websites.
How does WordPress differ from Shopify?
Shopify has been used by 1 million websites (October 2019) since its creation in 2004. This CMS only provides 100 free and paid models. A more limited choice for customization than WordPress, which with the WooCommerce e-commerce extension, offers more than 1000 themes. The blog section is present but offers much less possibility than WordPress. Shopify charges a transaction fee of up to 2% of sales, which is in addition to the monthly usage fees.
What to say between Squarespace and WordPress?
Squarespace has been used by 3 million websites since its creation in 2004. More limited in terms of creation than with WordPress which is much more flexible than the latter. The platform is self-managed, but does not allow you to customize your site as easily as WordPress.
What about Joomla and Drupal?
Joomla and Drupal are both CMS like open source WordPress. They offer services quite similar to WordPress, however the latter surpasses them in terms of customization options, accessible themes and plugins or even in its ease of use.
Conclusion
Either way, there is no such thing as a perfect solution. A website is an essential investment in your business and the choice of the tool to achieve it must be made according to your reality, your present and future needs as well as your budget. WordPress stands out from its competitors in many aspects: personalization, reliability, flexibility, marketing, etc. However, your needs will determine if this is the best platform for you. But if WordPress powers 35% of the world’s websites, it’s certainly not for nothing…
