I’ve had many customers over the years come to me needing help with websites that they started to design using platforms like Wix and Squarespace.
Overall I think Wix and Squarespace are fine for people who want to create their own websites. But they’re not as user friendly as you might think and there are other drawbacks to using them as well, which I’ve listed below.
Cost
Let’s first talk about the cost of having a website with Wix and Squarespace.
When it comes to Wix their plans range from $14-$49 a month.
For Squarespace, their plans range from $12-40 a month.
There are some hosting companies like Namecheap, Bluehost and others that charge $2-10 a month for hosting your website. When you build your website with companies like Wix or Squarespace, you don’t have any flexibility in what you will pay for hosting your website. You are stuck paying them one rate. Whereas if you use WordPress, you can shop around for your hosting and pay a lot less by using any company you want, whether it’s Go Daddy, Host Gator, etc.
Another expense you have is purchasing your domain name(s). Wix charges around $12 a year and Squarespace charges $20 a year. If you use a registrar/ hosting company like Namecheap you will spend between $8-10 a year.
No matter what, I think Namecheap is the best place to purchase a domain name because even companies like Google and others will charge between $15-40 a year for domains. No one can beat Namecheap’s prices.
No coding is not a good thing
Wix and Squarespace love to market the fact that you don’t need to learn to code to create a website with them. The same actually goes for WordPress. You don’t need to know how to code to create a site with WP. But, the nice thing is, if you want to have more flexibility in designing your website(s) you can learn CSS, HTML and/or PHP and you can create beautiful websites with WordPress.
When you use a platform that doesn’t give you the ability to add code, it will only hurt your design.
SEO
Wix and and Squarespace now have their own Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tools, which is great. But with WordPress being an open source platform where any web developers can launch their own plugins, the SEO tools on WP are much more powerful because you’re not limited to what Wix or Squarespace has to offer you.
You might be wondering, why do I need good SEO tools?
Well, if your SEO tools aren’t strong enough and if you’re limited in what you can use, it will be more difficult for your website to rank higher in Google or Bing’s search engines.
Good SEO plays a major part in whether or not people will find your website.
Customization
There’s nothing that Wix or Squarespace can say or do to combat the fact that because WordPress is open sourced there are an endless amount of plugins and themes that you can use to design your website and create anything you want.
Plugins also give you the ability to increase your page speed which helps with SEO and the experience of people visiting your website. They allow you to customize your website in any way possible.
With WordPress you can create an online store, a real estate website, a travel agency website. You name, you can create it with WordPress.
Hosting
Now I went over one benefit of being able to choose your own hosting company in the cost section above. There are others.
Another benefit of not having your website stuck on Wix or Squarespace’s servers is that you can move your site around to different hosting companies whether it’s for cost purposes, customer service or if you want your site to be on a faster server in order to help with SEO.
Addressing WordPress concerns
The only concern I hear when it comes to WordPress is security because PHP is not the most secure coding language. Honestly this is overblown in my opinion.
I’ve been using WordPress since 2010 and only had one security issue and that was early on when I was playing around with websites before I started my own business.
As long as you keep your website updated, don’t use outdated themes and/or plugins, don’t use “admin” as your username and use strong passwords your site will be secure.
If that’s not enough for you, there are plugins that will add a firewall as well as other security features to beef things up.
Leave a Reply