A Comprehensive Comparison of WordPress v/s Wix v/s Squarespace: What Suits Your Website Best?
The dawn of digital age has come along with numerous advantages; out of which online presence with a quality website is the foremost one to be mentioned. Long gone are the days when one needed to take help of coders and techies to build even a basic website. In the last decade, the web tools have developed to such an extent that building a website has become easy and hassle-free. Web development and management platforms like Wordpress, Wix, Squarespace and others have enabled users to create quality websites of their own. Further, these platforms have also helped website builders in creating quality websites with added features.
Today, the three major platforms that have taken the online world in a storm are Wordpress, Wix, and Squarespace. All these platforms come with quality features like ease of use, design flexibility, search engine optimization, scalability, customer support, website management, pricing, etc. But they do differ in some aspects and that is how a user can select the most suitable platform for his website building.
Having a deep insight in all three platforms is just like a thrilling ride yet filled with knowledge and information that can help you decide the best option for building your platform. Let’s just know once what these platforms are before we start the comparison.
WordPress
WordPress has changed the complete web building scenario by giving an array of customizable options. This self-hosted software comes with unlimited coding capabilities. Furthermore, it’s worth mentioning at the beginning itself that WordPress comes with access to all kinds of third-party plugins. The two WordPress websites are – Wordpress.com (free blogging and website builder site) and WordPress.org (offers the latest version of WordPress for use on your website hosting service).
Wix
This Adobe-Flash based website builder is commonly known for being a free-website builder for one-page websites. Amongst major features of Wix, the templates provided by this open platform are attractive one and suits the purpose whether your field is business, designing, restaurant, hotels or others. Wix, as an open platform, offers more than 500 different templates.
Squarespace
This most creative open platform for website building comes with a lot of beautifully designed templates that suit any creative industry. But it’s worth mentioning that Squarespace comes with a steeper learning curve. Majorly the websites designed for e-Commerce, small scale businesses, and design and art portfolios depend on this platform.
Wordpress v/s Wix v/s Squarespace:
Third-Party Plugins: When it comes to third party plugins, WordPress is miles ahead of Wix and Squarespace. As one of the most flexible websites building open-source platform, designers and developers have created an array of tools specifically to ease up the website building process.
Availability of Themes: WordPress.org is unique in comparison with Wix and Squarespace. The themes and third-party plugins available with WordPress make it easier for blogging purposes. In terms of themes specially, WordPress is ahead of other platforms. Although technically, it’s not a drag and drop type of platform but with the integration of specific plugins like Qards, Themify flow etc. it can be turned into a drag and drop platform. The drawback of Wix in comparison with WordPress is that it comes with certain limitations as one can’t switch between themes after publishing.
Ease of tool Integration: Although Wix comes with the features like royalty-free images, video integration facility, pin to screen feature, Wix also provides Parallax 3D effects. Wix also provides visitor analytics that helps the user to view statistics of visitors on their websites. There are over 250 different apps that help users for SEO, email marketing, customer contact and payment gateways. Ease of integration makes Wix a better option out of all three.
Drag-and-drop features: the drag and drop elements and several other features, you can design your website as per your ideation. These are some of the features that makes Wix the best overall website builder amongst its competitors. Wix is user-friendly, simple in design, drag and drop website builder, which also offers website hosting, creating webpages and blogging, online scheduling, and managing online storage space. Squarespace and WordPress can also be deployed with drag-and-drop features but Wix gets edge over others in this feature.
Mobile Ready: WordPress as an open platform works as a marketplace for free themes, out of which most of the themes are mobile-ready. It is suggested that before one purchases a theme, its mobile version should also be checked. On the other hand, despite being a free platform, it does come with certain limitations, and therefore, if you have run out of options that Wix offers, you might need an expert to handle your website further from that point. Lastly, The best part of Squarespace is that all the themes are responsive and built-in blocks, which helps in the visualization of both desktop and mobile version of your website; still, it can’t get ahead of WordPress when it comes to create mobile ready websites and webpages.
Easy Ownership of Website: There are a number of eCommerce platform plugins and email Marketing platforms available with Wordpress. To summarize, WordPress gives full ownership of the website to the user and also provides advanced security features. Unlike Wix and Sqaurespace, WordPress is a self-hosted software. The drawback of Wix in comparison with WordPress is that it comes with certain limitations as one can’t switch between themes after publishing.
Creating E-Commerce Platform: The visual editor embedded with Squarespace helps in immediately reflecting what your website will look like as you edit the same. Each theme is optimized for mobile, and each page is built-in responsive blocks. The e-Commerce features of Squarespace post-integration permit unlimited products and designs. While, Wix moved to HTML5 in 2012, it has also become mobile-friendly aiding the developers to create a website that can present well on mobile pages as well, creating e-commerce platform is little tricky on Wix. Out of the three, WordPress still takes the crown, as creating even a large E-commerce platform is easy, compatible, and fast process on this platform.
Conclusion:
This would be best to suggest that first, the user should ideate the website and layout in their planning phase and then depending on their requirement and industry type, they should opt for the most appropriate choice. Although, the final conclusion that the Techie Geeks and expert Web Developers at Biz4Group give is in favor of ‘WordPress’, as this platform can serve as ‘One Stop Solution to All Requirements’.
Further, we suggest you to take a step ahead and reach out to us because Biz4Group can certainly make the right choice for your ideated website with its expert team of tech aficionados.