Three services come up most frequently when a small business thinks about their website: WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix. Each has their fans, and each has their situations where they trump the other services. In the honest opinion, the answer really depends on what the business wants their website to accomplish and how much autonomy they want over what happens afterward.
Now, here’s a look at each service explained in a way that makes it easy to understand.
WordPress
WordPress is responsible for about 43% of all running websites, and that makes sense. It has an impressive ecosystem and intuitive framework that are the product of over 20 years of work. For most developers, it’s easy to work with.
For a small business, WordPress is a great option to use as a foundation for your site. Whether your site grows from 5 pages to 20, or beyond, you can scale WordPress to large levels without losing your rich content. What makes WordPress great is that you own your site. It is not dependent on a third-party hub that may change unreliable terms in the future.
The reason some people may not like WordPress is the maintenance. To keep the site secure, you have to update it. Because of the nature of WordPress, if you leave updates for too long, security become a big issue. A big part of the maintenance is done by the developers, but with practice, members of your team can do it.
Ranking on search engines is easy with WordPress, and a lot of that has to do with plugins. Great content is much more visible since the code behind the platform is clean.
Squarespace
Squarespace is quite simple to figure out. Their templates are well designed and have a ton of customisation options. This means there is very little you need to do regarding mitigating problems and configuration.
Squarespace is typical for businesses who want to have a reliable site in the shortest amount of time. They use it most for digital flyers instead of functional websites. This is because Squarespace has limitations for customisation and plug-in usage when compared to other web development sites.
While Squarespace is great for sites quickly, as your needs grow, so does Squarespace’s limitations. Most people find more developmental possibilities on plug-in enabled sites. Also, Squarespace is built on Squarespace’s infrastructure. This means, in the event that something happens to the Squarespace platform or pricing changes, moving your site becomes more challenging than usual.
The pricing, for most people, is predictable, and this is why most businesses like it. Plans will cost you anywhere from £13 to £35, but you can find all the plans e-commerce related at the upper end.
Wix
Wix has the least hassle for building the fastest site of the three. The drag-and-drop site building technology removes most of the barriers of building a site for non-techie users. It is really easy to use.
Wix is really best suited to small business and individuals wanting to build an online presence and who do not want to hire someone to build it for them. Wix’s SEO performance is the worst of the three. This is likely due to old coding and site architecture. While it is improved somewhat, this coding is still likely not the best choice for a business that wants to invest heavily in SEO and organic searches.
Like Squarespace, Wix hosts your site and moving your site to another hosting service is more complicated than most people would think.
I have many years of SEO experience in Austin and would be happy to provide a referral for a top provider that can help you customise one of these site builders for maximum SEO benefit if you hire one.
Which One to Choose
WordPress is the platform most SMEs adopt when they want to raise their online presence. It does take some time to learn and requires more effort to maintain, but it has high developer adoption and brings very strong SEO capabilities to the table. This reduces the likelihood of issues that may impact the business in the future.
Squarespace is perfectly suited for businesses looking for something simple and clean to manage, that doesn’t require too much developer input, and is more about looking credible than using its site as a primary traffic source.
Wix, although not a great platform for businesses that intend to grow, is great for simplicity and especially great for speed. It also ranks below both WordPress and Squarespace for SEO.
One thing worth mentioning is that moving from Wix to WordPress or to any better platform is a challenge that most businesses will end up regretting, and for that reason a little more consideration should be taken when making the decision.