What is the best platform for your website? Is it the one you see advertised the most? Let’s take a look at four you’ve probably heard about the most.
Choosing the right platform for your business or blog is one of the most critical things you can do when you are getting started. Keep your long term vision in mind when choosing your platform.
All platforms have limitations, but each offer something different for the new website owner.
First, a disclaimer. This is not my research, it is from an article I just read. I am merely going to summarize it and then refer you to the full article when you can get more details.
Wix
Wix is simple to use and that is a big positive for anyone wanting to launch a web site. It’s heavily marketed, just watch a few Youtube videos after you’ve searched for “how to start a blog” and you’ll know what I mean. They do make the idea of creating your own website a simple process.
While Wix does have some features that make it easy to get started, if you want to do something “out of the box” you’ll be hit with another fee and those fees can add up quickly.
To have your own domain connected will cost you about $4/mo US & that still requires you to display their ads! Upgrade to the next level, $9/mo is required to remove their ads. Want to sell your own e-book, that will cost you $16/mo.
Let’s put that into perspective, to have your own domain with Wix it will cost you $36/year, where purchasing your own domain runs around $10 to $15 depending on where you purchase the domain.
Wix, in the author’s opinion, doesn’t give you the flexibility you will find with other services and for their monthly prices, you can easily find other more flexible options.
Also, it’s tough to rank using SEO, page load issues slow down your site, and you’re on their platform, so you don’t have complete control over your content.
SquareSpace
If you’re focused more on offering services and selling some products or programs Squarespace could easily work for you.
It has an easy-to-use interface with some very nicely designed templates.
Squarespace is pricey though and does have limits to how many pages you can have. Need more you’ll need to upgrade. If you’re thinking about offering a membership program or even courses, you’ll want to look elsewhere or you’ll need to use a third party service to make that happen.
Weebly
Weebly offers a way to create your website, build an e-commerce platform and the service also includes some marketing features.
You can get started with a free website, but you’ll be stuck with .weebly.com in your domain name, but that’s pretty much the same for all of the free versions. It will cost you at least $120/year to be able to use your own domain & remove the Weebly ads.
Weebly does offer some membership features which is nice for someone thinking of adding a membership to their website. The negative though is it will cost you at least $168/year.
Weebly also offers a pretty good collection of integrations so you can add more functionality to your website. You’re still limited to what they choose to integrate with.
WordPress
If you want to monetize your website, then you’ll want to use the self-hosted version of WordPress. WordPress.com is NOT self-hosted and has a lot of limitations. WordPress.org IS self-hosted and that means you have a lot of options, though you do need to pay for hosting.
Not only is WordPress on very friendly terms with Google, no matter what you dream up you’d like to do with your website you can accomplish it with WordPress. It has a learning curve, but it also offers the most flexibility, adaptability and it’s the most scalable of any website platform.
Read the full article here: WordPress vs Wix.
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