Over the years WordPress has been the quintessential website builder and Content Management System (CMS) allowing users to download and install its software for free. Thanks to its easy-to-use tools, you can easily add new pages, blog posts, E-commerce store, images and much more without any HTML editing software or knowledge required.
Besides the ease of use, the code behind WordPress is simple enough for search engines to easily read and index the sites’ content. Additionally, you can build shareable referral links for outside of your website, like social media and even podcasts.
WordPress continuously churns out themes and plugins to help improve content, blogging platforms, management systems and improve the learning curve when it comes to building websites. WordPress is considered one of the leading website builders in the world with over 35% of all websites on the internet powered by WordPress. And one of the biggest reasons for this is WordPress is easy to get started with. You can add and edit images and text easily, and beginners can find it a straightforward CMS to use.
For small businesses looking to create a strong web presence, the WordPress CMS can be ideal. Whether you are looking for a fully hosted website or web building tools, WordPress offers a simple solution to create an online presence with little cost and a short period of time under its free plan.
Is WordPress the best option for your business website?
Comparing the different types of solutions including headless cms vs WordPress is important for finding the best tool for your business. To decide whether WordPress is the best option for your business or whether another website builder or content management systems might be better, here are some questions:
Q. What key features do I need?
A: Depending on your business needs and goals, you might prefer using an open-source CMS, as opposed to a website builder or a publishing platform to establish your online business.
Q. How can I easily build my website?
A: The most important feature of a website builder or CMS is its functionality. A website’s user interface must be intuitive and easy to use. Good website builders use templates that automatically reformat your site for viewing on mobile devices. If you do not know how to code, look for website builders that offer easy drag and drop options to build your site.
Q. Can it offer Ecommerce capabilities?
A: If your business provides goods and services to customers, you will need an ecommerce component to your website. Choose a website builder that can process online bookings, reservations, sales, or sales inquiries.
Q. Does it come with customizable templates?
A: You should also check to see what kind of templates are available on the site builder. Take the time to check they aren’t all just slight variations of the same template. You will need templates specific to your business, so a builder with a diverse selection of templates is one that will give you more options.
Q. Are there additional features available?
A: All the best website builders offer a number of extra features to make building your website easier and better. These include setup wizards; drag-and-drop editors; SEO tools such as editing meta tags; marketing tools including email marketing; built-in analytics to track visitors’ demographics, location, interests; ecommerce tools that include multiple payment processor options, inventory tracking tools, product descriptions and more.
Q. Are free website builders worth it?
A: If you are looking to build a basic site without an online store, then a free website builder is one way to get started. Keep in mind very often free plans come with less storage, slower load times, and fewer SEO and marketing tools. If you know that you need Ecommerce features, lots of storage space, extra customer support, and/or a lot of webpages, free site builders are unlikely to work for you.
2o WordPress Alternatives to Consider
WordPress is a popular CMS for publishing online. But there are alternatives. If you decided to go with another CMS, a hosted website builder or CRM other than WordPress, read on. We’ve collected a list of WordPress alternatives for your consideration. Take a look.
1. Wix
The Wix hosted website builder offers users robust design customization and ecommerce store tools. It has an easy to use drag-and-drop site builder that comes with a side menu for adding images and apps. Considered the best alternative compared to WordPress, Wix ‘s web publishing platform has more than 500 design templates to customize your site. You can even add features as you progress including an online store or accept bookings online. Adding apps to your site from the Wix App Market works like WordPress’s plugins to give your site new features. Wix also has robust built-in tools for custom design and layout.
Besides being able to optimize your website to be mobile friendly, you get online storage for your site assets, SEO tools, e-commerce tools, video backgrounds, and more. If you are not sure how to go about building your site, Wix can build a personalized site with its Artificial Design Intelligence.
Wix payment plans start at $4 a month. It also offers a limited free version for small businesses to build a site, however, it’s ad-supported.
Why You Might Use It
Wix offers small business layouts that are ideal for restaurants, online stores, and creatives. What’s more, they are optimized for mobile devices and can be further spiced up with one of the numerous apps available from the Wix App Market. And for many users, the platform can be much easier than WordPress.
2. Drupal
Drupal is a flexible open-source CMS with functionalities that include advanced menu management, polls management, a graphics modification tool, users’ management and much more. With these, users are able to create websites, a blog, discussion boards, and social networking pages with many customization options. Drupal does have the steepest learning curve. With Drupal you will need technical help to customize or update your website while WordPress is more intuitive and easy to customize.
To extend and customize the functionality of your Drupal site, you can select from the 46,000 modules available in Drupal’s directory. There are lots of different modules available that you can add to your site and they function similarly compared to WordPress plugins.
Why You Might Use It
Drupal’s flexible CMS is well suited for businesses in retail, fintech, sports entertainment, online store operation and more. Drupal remains one of the more popular WordPress alternatives due to its mobile-native platform. Drupal Commerce module claims to power more than 80,000 sites, making it one of the most popular retail solutions for sites and applications of all sizes. Drupal is easily expanded by adding to its core files using modules to improve functionality and themes to control the site design.
3. Joomla
Joomla is an open source CMS platform popular for its ease of installation, variety of customization features, and built-in Access Level Control (ACL). This makes it easy to have multiple users for the site. Joomla offers a great tool to build your site. With its open-source platform, you can configure many of your site’s settings on the backend, modify articles, banners, menus, media, redirects, and SEO settings. Joomla is also a more beginner-friendly option than WordPress, making it the easiest and fastest way to create a site.
For additional functionality and control over your site, you can download any of the 7,000 extensions available on Joomla. The platform is user-friendly, extendable, multilingual and accessible.
Why You Might Use It
Joomla offers businesses multiple designed templates with creative design options along with all required pages and functions for a business website. When it comes to an online store, Joomla can handle processes that include products, categories, payments, pricing and many other intermediate processes that can be managed by the Joomla CMS.
4. Squarespace
Squarespace website builder offers useful tools to build attractive, functional sites for personal use or small businesses. Squarespace provides everything you need to start a site, including domain registration, web hosting, themes, designed templates, online store, and support. Once you’ve published your site, you can use the built-in analytics tool to learn where your website traffic is coming from.
This website builder has a drag and drop interface that includes landing pages and even eCommerce stores. Like other WordPress alternatives, it comes with several designed templates to choose from which are easily adaptable to mobile devices.
Plans start at $12 per month with G Suite and PayPal integrations availability, plus SEO tools, and easy social media integration.
Why You Might Use It
As a WordPress alternative, Squarespace offers built-in tools that support bloggers, small business owners, and creatives and is ideal for portfolios or image-rich sites.
5. Weebly
Weebly offers the basic tools you need to build a business site or even an online store. It comes with customizable templates which are simple, stylish, and mobile responsive. A helpful SEO guide in Weebly’s help and support center also offers advice on coding, keyword optimization, and tips on boosting your site’s ranking.
Weebly offers a drag-and-drop site builder for creating a blog, image galleries and E-commerce. It also comes with video and music players, and other tools that are all included in the editor. And there are other useful applications, too, such as table of contents, calendars, social widgets and more to be found in the Weebly App Center. Though a basic free plan is available, Weebly’s Professional plan starts at $12 per month. The free plan places a small, gray Weebly banner in your website footer.
Why You Might Use It
Weebly is ideal for small businesses looking for a WordPress alternative for websites, portfolio pages, a blog, and online stores. Best of all, it is easy to use and comes packed with apps and features to help grow your site, from SEO to E-commerce. Weebly offers a robust shopping cart with SSL encryption and all major payment options.
6. Tumblr
Tumblr is a blogging platform designed for visual blogging featuring posts with minimal text. Tumblr combines blogging with social sharing of content including photos, gifs, video, music, quotes, chats, links, and text. Once you sign up for a Tumblr account, you are prompted to create a blog. All users must have a primary blog, but they can also create a secondary one. A user might have a personal primary blog while having a secondary blog dedicated to promoting portfolios, products and more.
Like WordPress, there are many options to customize your blog on Tumblr. Because it’s easy to customize, some businesses actually use Tumblr as their site. There are paid and free themes, or you can create your own. Users can purchase URLs and redirect them to their Tumblr page.
Why You Might Use It
Tumblr is great for content curation used by retail and fashion influencers and creators to find an audience for their content. Tumblr is free and can be used even by beginners. The user interface is very easy to learn and interact with.
7. Blogger
Blogger is a free blog service and comes with essential features for blogging including a commenting system, built-in social capabilities, templates, and the choice to use your own domain name. You have the option to get a free blogspot.com domain or buy a custom domain with just a few clicks.
You can also generate some revenues as well with Google AdSense automatically displaying relevant targeted ads on your blog so that you can earn income by posting about your passion.
Why You Might Use It
Blogger is a good option for businesses on a shoestring budget and a viable WordPress alternative. You can post and reach a large number of people in a short amount of time because the interface is so easy and user-friendly.
8. Shopify
If your business is looking to sell products or services online, then Shopify is a great candidate. You can set up and manage your entire online store through Shopify. You also have a selection of over 70 themes and can start building posts and pages using Shopify’s drag-and-drop website builder.
Considered among the best WordPress alternatives, Shopify’s plan starts at $29 per month and comes with built-in blogging, customer reviews, ready-to-go payment options for your customers, abandoned cart recovery, and analytics on your web traffic and products.
Why You Might Use It
Shopify is particularly designed for businesses engaged in an online store and shop owners. You can create an ecommerce website backed by powerful tools to help you find customers, drive sales, and manage your E-commerce efforts. You can purchase a domain name within Shopify, or use an existing one.
9. BigCommerce
BigCommerce offers CMS features for blog posts, pages, and comes with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop page builder. BigCommerce is an all-in-one platform and a recognized brand like WordPress. And it is easy to get started with if you’re a beginner.
This solution comes with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features, automated image optimization using Akamai Image Manager, and integration with several e-mail marketing services including Constant Contact, iContact and Mailchimp.
BigCommerce comes with a free trial while paid plans start at $29.95 per month. You get unlimited products, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, and you can accept credit cards and PayPal.
Why You Might Use It
If you are looking to create multi-currency E-commerce projects or you need all the SEO features you can get, BigCommerce has it. It also integrates with Amazon, eBay and lets you sell on Facebook.
10. Zoho Sites
Zoho Sites is a website creation tool that helps bloggers, businesses, and photographers develop websites with templates, insights, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). You can create a blog and interact with visitors through comments. You cam also secure a better rank with SEO tools and traffic analytics.
Considered among the best WordPress alternatives, Zoho Sites comes with an intuitive, drag-and-drop builder where you create with elements and pre-built sections. You can also customize the look and feel of your site with the visual editor and invite colleagues to contribute to the site creation process. Zoho Sites pricing starts at $4 per month.
Why You Might Use It
Zoho Sites website building tool features built-in social sharing, built-in SEO tools, and traffic statistics. In addition to PayPal integration, you get a member portal and the ability to display up to 25 products.
You can add a customized search bar to your site and use Google Analytics to get insights into your visitors, traffic patterns, email marketing, and e-commerce.
11. Site123
Site123 website builder comes with a user-friendly interface, mobile-responsive templates and e-commerce features. SITE123 offers more than 180 website templates. You can scroll through the main templates page or click on one of 10 recommended template categories, such as Business, Blog, Event, Restaurant, or E-commerce.
With the website editing bar, you can add, edit, or delete site pages; upload photos and videos; add FAQs, galleries, or testimonials to any page; add an e-commerce block for products; change your site from single-page to multi-page; and add call-to-action buttons.
Why You Might Use It
The e-commerce tools include the ability to accept online payments through Stripe, PayPal, Square and AmazonPay as well as display an unlimited number of products.
12. Constant Contact Website Builder
Constant Contact is known for its email marketing service. However, it also provides a website building and E-commerce platform. With this solution, you do not need any experience or design skills to create a professional site or online store. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered website builder does the heavy lifting for you to create a customized site.
Like other WordPress alternatives, this E-commerce builder also takes you through all the steps to design, add products, upload photos, add your payment providers, and everything else needed to get you ready to start selling.
The starter plan of $10 per month comes with a mobile-responsive site, free web hosting, unlimited storage, SSL Certification, site analytics and blog.
Why You Might Use It
For small businesses looking to build their brand, sell online and grow their audience, Constant Contact offers an all-in-one website, E-commerce, and marketing tools solution.
Constant Contact helps to accomplish tasks, such as auto tax calculations, integrated shipping, and tracking.
13. Jimdo
Jimdo is another solid online web publishing platform that provides solutions to build your business site, blog or E-commerce store without coding. You have the option of an AI-powered builder (Jimdo Dolphin) that can design you a site in minutes. And it also has a basic drag-and-drop builder (Jimdo Creator). This web solution also offers hosting, custom domain name registration, an email account, editing tool, and some basic SEO.
Jimdo has five different pricing plans, which range from free all the way up to $39 per month. With the premium plan, you get your own domain, advanced SEO features and personal support to build your site.
Why You Might Use It
As one of the better WordPress alternatives, Jimdo is ideal for either personal or small business sites. It gives you the option to choose from a range of mobile-responsive templates just as WordPress does.
14. Webflow
Webflow helps you build professional, custom websites with no coding knowledge. Essentially Webflow is an all-in-one website builder, a CMS and hosting platform similar to WordPress. With Webflow’s designer, you get CSS, HTML, and JavaScript but you generate your code using the visual designer instead of writing code line by line.
Webflow’s Basic plan starts at $12 per month billed monthly and offers 25,000 monthly visits, 500 form submissions, content delivery network (CDN), Free SSL certificate and more.
Why You Might Use It
With Webflow, small businesses have the opportunity to design, build and manage marketing sites, landing pages, event microsites, and splash pages. It comes with an e-commerce platform that allows you to: manage your inventory and fulfill orders, enrich product listings through the CMS, customize your receipts and update emails, and create blogs and landing pages in the CMS.
15. Ghost
Ghost offers a blogging platform that relies on a crisp and minimal user interface along with multiple options like WordPress. It comes in two variants: a self-hosted version that is free to download and use; and a fully hosted version on Ghost’s own servers.
Ghost’s Content API delivers published work on the web and can be accessed in a read-only manner by any client to render in a website, app or other embedded media.
Ghost offers SEO settings and social sharing features so you do not need external plugins for that purpose. Ghost’s plan starts at $29 per month and accommodates 100,000 views, allows signup of 1,000 members, email support, SSL+CDN and more.
Why You Might Use It
Ghost is ideal for a multi-author blog, e-magazines, and portfolio pages. Through memberships and subscriptions, you can develop a direct relationship with your audience and generate predictable, recurring revenue to support your work.
17. Medium
Medium is a blogging platform that helps bloggers and creators focus on crafting content. Medium’s easy to use editor lets you add elements such as images, videos, embeds and separator lines to make posts more engaging.
Medium does have a partner program that rewards writers for the amount of time paying members spend reading their work. You have the option to get paid for all of your writing, some of it, or keep everything free and accessible to all.
Why You Might Use It
With over 170 million readers, Medium is a great option to get your work in front of people. And it is great for sharing stories or product reviews either through a standalone piece, a blog, or a publication.
18. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a popular, customizable, eCommerce platform built on WordPress. It is an open-source ecommerce platform that helps you sell physical and digital products as well as affiliated products from certain marketplaces.
You have the option to install mobile-optimized templates or even develop your own template. You can also add a shop to your WordPress website with the free E-commerce plugin. WooCommerce has third-party integration with hundreds of solutions, including Facebook, Sage, Zapier, MailChimp, ShipStation, Square, Stripe, Fulfilment by Amazon and more.
Why You Might Use It
WooCommerce’s backend gives you control of many cart functions including a one-page checkout and cart abandonment emails, however, these features are part of the paid plan.
Besides helping you design professional sites, WooCommerce provides detailed reports on orders, customers, inventory and taxes. For additional insights, you can also add Google Analytics.
19. TYPO3
Typo3 is an open-source enterprise content management system or CMS that is designed to be scalable and flexible. Typo3 helps users create and manage hundreds of sites in multiple languages just like WordPress. And it comes with more than 9,000 out-of-the-box features along with 1,500 extensions or modules.
Among the features Typo3 offers include: A web site creation wizard with templates; kick-starter for creating extensions; compatibility with Windows, Mac, Linux Firefox, IE, Opera, Safari; WYSIWYG and Rich Text Editor with spell checker; timeline of when content appears or disappears; SSL; caching; statistics; search engine friendly URLs and more.
Why You Might Use It
TYPO3 is compatible with other applications and software that can be used to manage a company’s digital marketing campaign. You can integrate business solutions such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and other ecommerce platforms to boost marketing.
20. Webnode
Webnode is an intuitive website builder that comes with an easy-to-use drag and drop editor and more than a hundred customizable templates. Webnode plans come packed with features, even at the free level.
All users have access to forms, blogs, E-commerce, custom domain name, an HTML editor and more — all for free. You can build a WebNode site with an unlimited number of pages for free but your visitors will see ads. Paid plans start at $3.90 per month.
Why You Might Use It
Webnode is ideal for individuals and small businesses wanting to create websites without a large initial investment. Webnode offers professional designs for more than 100 types of businesses.
Why should you avoid WordPress for your website?
Despite the popularity of WordPress as a CMS and due to its simplicity, the platform can sometimes have issues. These include:
Unreliable plugins: WordPress comes with more than 58,000 plugins for its CMS to increase functionality. However, most WordPress plugins are created by random individuals and sometimes crash. In certain cases, there might not be support options to help you get your website up and running again.
Software updates: In a bid to deliver a great service, WordPress has regular software updates for its platform. These generally need to be done often, every single month in some cases.
Slow Page Speed: WordPress can be a slow platform due to all the added plugins, oversaturated databases, and elements added to the pages. These include large images, wordy pages, and unreliable hosting which can impact your website speed.
What is the best alternative to WordPress?
When it comes to website builders, there are many alternatives to WordPress that you can choose from. The best website builders are those that give you solid flexibility and are also affordable. Below are the best alternatives to WordPress.
Wix: Wix offers thousands of templates for your website and all the templates are fully editable through simple drag and drop functionality. Users also have the option to install both free and paid apps on their website to improve its functionality and every website on Wix gets free SSL.
Shopify: Shopify offers an all-in-one fully hosted package and takes care of all the backups, updates, and software management. It seamlessly integrates with third-party payment gateways to accept payments from your customers.
Squarespace: Squarespace comes with several options for website designs and themes to help you easily design your website. All website designs are completely editable, giving you full control over the customization of your website. You can use multiple templates at a time on your website which lets you pick the best elements of each. It also offers a plan to open your E-commerce store.
Webnode: With Webnode, users get access to built-in SEO tools that can help sites gain visibility on Google. It easily integrates with Google Analytics to track the website’s performance and works with multiple languages. You can build an online store using attractive templates, manage orders and get analytics to track your performance.
Weebly: Weebly is another completely hosted website builder with a live page editor for creating your website and launching your e-store with ease. By using MS Excel, you can update prices and with the Weebly App Center you can add reviews to your E-commerce store.
Image: Depositphotos
This article, "Best WordPress Alternatives for your Small Business Website" was first published on Small Business Trends
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