When hiring someone to build your website, it’s important to do your research on the different content management systems (CMS) available.
Here at Bizzuka, WordPress is our personal favorite for several reasons. There’s a reason why it powers 41% of the world’s top 10 million most-visited sites.
But today, we’re going to take a fair look at some of the other options on the market.
Squarespace
If you listen to any “influencer” these days, you’ll likely hear them give a brief ad reading on Squarespace. This platform is handy for creatives that are looking for snazzy designs that don’t require a lot of work.
Squarespace designs are also automatically responsive, meaning that they’ll instantly conform to the screen size of the visitor–without the need to manually create mobile-friendly pages.
Unfortunately, Squarespace is not great for blogging and SEO. This platform does not allow you to tweak meta titles and descriptions for blog posts, which is crucial to helping you rank in search engines. It’s also not very user-friendly, making it more difficult to use than most platforms.
Wix
One of the biggest advantages of Wix is that it’s simple. All you have to do is move the elements around with your mouse and drop them where you want them. It’s also good for optimizing SEO, and particularly great for building portfolio pages with ease.
On the downside, once you’ve selected your Wix template, you have to stick with it–there’s no going back. With the free plan, you’ll also be forced to have the Wix branding displayed on your site. These sites are not transferable.
Weebly
Weebly has a very intuitive platform that’s great for online stores. It’s simple to customize and comes with pre-designed templates. It’s also easily integrated with other apps and is affordable, with a free plan available.
The only issue with its free plan is that, like Wix, it leaves an annoying grey “Weebly” banner at the bottom of your website that cannot be removed. Some other disadvantages include the fact that there’s no forum option and backups are extremely complicated.
Domain.com
Domain.com is ideal for small businesses without an experienced design person onboard. Its drag and drop interface is easy to use and comes with customizable templates. It also offers website analytics and has blogging and eCommerce capability.
One of the greatest downfalls of this platform, however, is that WHOIS privacy is not included. Many platforms offer this for free, but Domain.com isn’t one of them. You will need to pay extra for it. Another con is that there is no real onboarding process, so you’re pretty much left to figure out how to set everything up on your own.
Shopify
Shopify is an incredibly popular alternative to WooCommerce, likely because it’s the easiest way to build an online store. Similar to Squarespace, it offers responsive designs that help your site look good on all devices. Shopfiy allows you to create and manage product variants, shipping, and taxes easily.
On the downside, however, it is not good with multiple currencies. You’ll be charged a 0.5% – 2% transaction fee for each sale processed (both online and offline), unless you set Shopify Payments as your default payment processor.
Joomla
One of the greatest advantages of Joomla is its security and content management abilities. It has built-in 2-factor authentication, making hacking pretty difficult. It also allows for more native content than other competitors and can manage multilingual web pages.
Unfortunately, these features are not easy to set up. Joomla is far more complicated than WordPress, and we do not recommend it for beginners. It also has a very small number of free plugins: 8,000. When compared to WordPress’s 54,000 free plugins, this number is laughable.
At Bizzuka, making the shift to WordPress has been one of the best divisions we’ve ever made. Because all of our new sites are created using the CMS, we can create stunning websites faster than ever before.
If you’re interested in a redesign or looking to create a new website altogether, our professional web developers can help you build the website of your dreams. Schedule a free 45-minute strategy session with us today to learn how we can help!