31 Aug Should small business owners use WordPress or a Website Builder?
WordPress or a website builder, what’s the best suit for small business owners?
One of the options is a little bit easier, the other offers slightly more design flexibility, but both paths can lead to a great looking, highly functional website.
In this article, we’ll learn what a website builder is, what WordPress is, and compare them. We’ll wrap up with a look at four things you should consider when you find yourself at this critical juncture in website ownership.
What is a Website Builder?
A few years back, designing and maintaining a website required in-depth knowledge of computers and coding. It’s gotten progressively easier over the years. All thanks to full-featured website builders and the site design help they provide; anyone can now build and maintain a website with basic technical expertise.
Generally, website builders are designed to help less technically apt people by giving them a graphical user interface (GUI) for the code that runs a website. Instead of manually writing lines of code, a website builder allows you to choose the components you want or use a template.
What Is WordPress?
WordPress is a content management system (CMS), meaning it provides a robust infrastructure for designing and maintaining your site, composing your content, and editing your pages. It gives you access to site design and implementation tools, similar to a website builder, but adds more sophisticated and centralized control over your site’s content.
Things to Consider Before selecting:
It is common to be on the fence about which platform is best, especially for first-time site owners. Some may anticipate needing a higher level of control over site design and functionality than WordPress can provide. Others may be drawn to WordPress because of its simplicity and the helpful support available to WordPress users.
Below are four factors that should help you decide between WordPress and a website builder.
Scalability:
WordPress makes it easy to scale a website to meet the needs of a growing small business. Although a website builder provides a simple means of getting a website up and running quickly, the resulting site may not meet your needs in the future. Website builder templates can be limiting, and you may run into issues as you expand your site.
In contrast, WordPress is almost infinitely scalable. If your business moves in a new direction and your website needs new functionality to support that, WordPress is much more likely to provide a scalable solution.
Customization:
If you’re building a new business or website, chances are you’re detail-oriented and have precise goals. WordPress is a great choice for this mindset as it allows about the same level of customizability as a website builder while being incredibly easy to use.
With WordPress, you can design and modify any element, and WordPress themes are fully customizable. This is not just an aesthetic concern. In terms of functionality and utility, WordPress offers a wide range of options for tools and features, thanks to the numerous plugins allowing for enhanced functionality without custom programming.
WordPress’ popularity resulted in an explosion of support from the developer community, which has created thousands of useful extensions for the already feature-rich platform.
Security:
Security is another WordPress advantage, but it requires frequent updates to the backend. The platform’s security is robust because it’s regularly updated to address the most current security concerns. As with the security for a site created with a website builder, WordPress security updates can easily be automated.
Level of Expertise you have:
Another consideration when choosing between WordPress and a website builder is your level of expertise. Even for those who are intimidated by technology, both approaches offer an easy path to get started. However, managing a WordPress site remains easy even as the site becomes more complex.
When using a website builder, as you add features, you could get out of your depth.
If you’re willing to take the time and effort to read tutorials and learn by experimentation, WordPress and a website builder are both valid choices.
Conclusion:
If you want to get a website up and running fast, both WordPress and website builders are good choices. While either can serve your needs as the site evolves, one of the options makes that part much easier than the other.
WordPress ensures that, without having to become a website development expert, you’ll be able to keep up with design and feature trends—your site can always be on the cutting edge.
Achieving that with a website builder is doable, and you could even squeeze out a little more flexibility than you would have with a WordPress site, but be prepared to take a more active role in keeping your site’s features and design fresh.
Whichever option you decide to go with, be sure to take advantage of bundled services and support often available from good hosting companies. When you know you’re getting a great deal on a full-featured hosting plan, and a team of experts ready to help when you need it.
Take Away:
Your website is the face of your business on the internet. It is the place where potential customers go to when researching your business, your services and the products that you offer. It is also the place where potential employees go in order to get a better understanding of your business, your credibility and your history within the local market.
Our professional website developers provide expert web design and web application development services to our clients. Nuun Digital offers website design and development services, from creating mobile web development solutions and responsive website designs to building customizable applications and year’s experiences using the latest and proven web technologies.