7 Reasons SMBs and Startups Should Choose WordPress over Squarespace
So you created your own business and want to share it with the world. That’s great, congratulations! Now what? You need to go to market. You secured your unique URL and have decided to put together the website on your own to save some costs, or so you think.
Typically, solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, partnerships, and other SMB and startup entities start with a shoestring budget and look for ways to save money, cut costs or whatever you need to tell yourself to think you’re being responsible. Choosing a website built using Squarespace, Wix, Weebly or GoDaddy are affordable and professional-looking solutions for you – if you never plan on growing your company. Those are all short-term solutions if you plan on scaling and growing your business in revenue, services, products, or staff in the next 24 months. The foolgold of those solutions is they don’t require a web designer and development team, they have simple templates that anyone can use to launch their new venture and they look almost as professional as other websites you’ve looked at on the internet. With these simple and professional-looking templates, there are hundreds of websites out there that will look exactly like your company. If you want to customize your website to match the unique brand you created choose WordPress.
But don’t just take my word for it. USA Today recently published an article about choosing between WordPress and Squarespace: SPOILER ALERT – they choose.
WordPress as the best website for your business.
At Core Digital Consulting, WordPress is our default CMS solution we use to build client websites. For e-commerce clients, we provide both WordPress with WooCommerce and Shopify as e-commerce solutions. It depends on the client’s specific preference and how they will scale their company and products which will determine which platform to choose. Forbes recently published an article comparing WordPress with Woocommerce to Shopify which you can find here. Again, another strong supporter of WordPress.
Now our web team has been together since 2005, through different agencies, serving almost every vertical and we have narrowed down our reasons why SMBs, Startups, Associations, Municipalities and mid-size enterprise companies should choose WordPress.
Surely you have heard of other CMS platforms, stop calling you Shirley, like Drupal, Concrete 5, Magento, and Joomla. All are like WordPress, but you will have difficulty finding developers fluent in those platforms and they are more expensive to develop because fewer and fewer people are using those platforms. If you want an expensive solution with few developers to help you when the site crashes, then choose one of those. If your job or promotion depended on your CMS solution, why take a risk with anything other than WordPress? Let me put it this way, you can always find a mechanic to work on your Toyota, or in this case a web developer with WordPress experience. However, if you have Drupal, Magento or Joomla, it will be like owning a Fiat – difficult to maintain and expensive to fix, if you can find a mechanic in town.
WordPress is your CMS choice because:
1. WordPress is Open Source. Meaning you can modify and use the source code to accommodate what your business needs. You can find a million people to help you with WordPress. You want to customize your Squarespace site – you might as well have chosen WordPress in the first place.
2. 43% of all websites on the internet are built on WordPress. Squarespace is 3%
3. Divi is used on over 3.8 million websites, making it the most popular theme.
4. WooCommerce is the world’s most popular e-commerce platform with 36% market share
5. 810 million websites are powered by WordPress
6. There are approximately 60,000 free WordPress plugins
7. Why are you considering another website or e-commerce solution?
I am not saying WordPress is the perfect solution for every company because it is not. If you have a lot of custom scripts and functionality for your unique business that is not common business practice, then you will need a different solution – but those are rare. Even eBay, that owns Magento, uses WordPress for their blogs.
Why Squarespace, Wix & Weebly are bad solutions for growing companies
If you need a cheap and nice-looking website template then Squarespace, Wix and Weebly are solid website solutions. These sites are not meant for growing companies but for one person with a cause or a company that is small and just wants a quick and dirty website, actually they look quite professional but you know what I mean. The templates look nice and you are likely to have someone else with the exact same website, but hey it can go live in 30 minutes and you do not need a programmer or designer to create it. However, once your business or organization grows and you need to add eCommerce or improve organic traffic you have outgrown that web platform. If you are a company of more than 5 people and you have been tasked with finding a new website platform then WordPress will serve you better in both the short and long term.
As a consultancy that develops WordPress websites for clients, in addition to ensuring they receive traffic from our best practice SEO, SEM, email marketing and paid social media, WordPress has been the best CMS solution to address our clients’ needs since 2005. From Discover Forest Grove to Galahad to SakeOne to WPI, WordPress offers the best functionality and flexibility to empower companies of all sizes from Fortune 100 to SMBs and startups. But what does ‘best’ mean? By best, I mean technologically relevant, easy to use, easy to maintain, and flexible in creating custom designs – or use an existing design template.
There are at least 7 reasons why which are listed below but WordPress truly allows clients to manage their own websites once they have been built. We chose 7? Because everyone likes seven, James Bond was 007 so we stopped at 7 reasons. Custom themes can be developed to reflect your brand, off-the-shelf themes are also available, and most of the changes you will ever make can be done by your internal team, which saves you time and money.
Here are 7 compelling reasons to consider choosing WordPress as your next website platform.
1. Easy to Use – Do you want a website only a programmer can support, or do you want a website that is easy to use and affordable to maintain? I’ll assume you want to keep your job post-launch and need a website that is easy to use. WordPress got it right by making a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) platform that is intuitive and simple to use. Once the site is built, you can add sections for content, update videos, blog posts all without a master’s degree in HTML or PHP. Tons of tutorials are online and anyone in your marketing department can do it.
2. E-commerce Capable – WordPress WooCommerce is the most popular e-commerce platform on the World Wide Web, with 36% market share. Shopify is the only other solution you should consider. If you choose Magento or Drupal you just bought yourself a Fiat.
3. WordPress is Popular – for all the right reasons. WordPress is not an exotic CMS. There are other options to WordPress, but they are not as popular or widely adopted for a reason. Do you use WordPerfect or Microsoft Word? Lotus Notes or Excel? WordPress is popular because it serves 90% of website needs and is trusted by some of the biggest brands. WordPress is the most used CMS platform. In 2023, 43% of all websites on the web are built using WordPress.
Who really uses WordPress? These brands:
- The Walt Disney Company
- TechCrunch
- Microsoft News
- Mercedes-Benz
- Sony
- Play Station
4. Multi-User Platform – In WordPress you can easily collaborate and work with an extended team to power your website. You can vary the access levels to team members and work efficiently to create and publish your website content.
5. Design is Flexible – You do not need to use a template; you can create a custom design that is unique to your brand. (If you need help, I know a team.) We do not recommend using an existing template for the reasons I listed above about Wix, Weebly and Squarespace. But if you must go with an existing theme, WordPress provides thousands of ready-to-use design themes. WordPress is also feature rich and flexible with functionality because of the plug-ins available on the platform. With almost 60,000 plugins organizations will find an existing feature to simply plug in and make your website more effective and efficient.
6. WordPress is Responsive and Mobile Friendly – Unlike that email you sent to your boss about vacation, WordPress is responsive – which means the website will scale to conform to any mobile device.
Why is that important? That’s important for two main reasons:
a. 92% of Internet users are using their smartphones to search the Internet
b. Google penalizes you for non-mobile websites – ouch! This shouldn’t be much of an issue now in 2023 but there are some antique websites still in existence.
7. WordPress is SEO friendly – Being digital marketing experts focusing on driving revenue, sales, and website traffic, the importance of SEO is the most overlooked asset of choosing WordPress. A new website is worthless unless you drive the right traffic – this is where WordPress as an open-source platform pays dividends. In this case with the development of the SEO plug-in Yoast. Squarespace, Wix and Weebly are ‘closed systems’ which makes it more difficult to rank organically for SEO keywords and get new customers to your website.
Core provides complete and comprehensive e-commerce website design. Learn more about our web design & development services today, or feel free to contact us.