Today 60% of all the websites that are being created are with WordPress, a CMS (Content Management System) that, due to its great versatility and excellent learning curve, has been placed as the main chosen by many developers and those who are not.
But we not only have WordPress to create a web page in no time, but there are many more alternatives such as Blogger, Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, Shopify or 1 & 1 Ionos. The big difference between them is the solution they provide and everything you can do and the time and effort required to achieve it. We will start with the simplest to go towards the more complicated options.
Wix
Wix has currently become in one of the best alternatives for create a web page easily in a matter of minutes. It is an online platform that saves you the effort of programming, learning a little CSS or knowing HTML for some purposes.
You will simply have to choose some of templates (high quality by the way), choose to take your own domain and go to drag and drop to set up a basic website in a matter of minutes. Another of the greatest virtues of Wix is that it is optimized for mobile, so you will have everything done with a base template.
The only handicap is that Wix is coming great for basic pages type landing page or those that show our services, but if we already want something more complex, such as creating an ecommerce or one destined to make reservations and then make physical purchases, we will have to find another way.
Blogger
If we just want build a blog we have it very simple, since Blogger allows us to have a blog in a matter of minutes. Of course, it will be hosted on Google's servers and the name of the platform will appear in the URL.
Still, it is a perfect solution for those that does not want to spend a penny, want to have a blog published in minutes and can even add more features with templates and some basics. Do not try to create something super cool with Blogger, although if you have to offer quality content, it is a more than excellent way to reach many users.
1 & 1 Ionos
Another alternative to create a web page, although it is not free. But it does allow us to scale our business thanks to its templates, although they are not sufficiently worked out like those of Wix.
It's easier to build a website with 1 & 1 Ionos than with WordPressEspecially if we have a small business that needs to have its site on the network of networks and we have no idea of programming or we have never gone through a CMS like WordPress.
This solution has three payment plans to build your website, like one focused on ecommerce. As we have said, if you have to sell a small repertoire of products, it can be an interesting alternative if you don't need anything complex.
Weebly
Weebly is another great deal for small businesses and that is characterized by taking good care of the SEO issue. You have to give great importance to search engine positioning, since if your website depends on user input from searches, as long as you don't have your site optimized for SEO, you will have it very difficult, if not impossible.
Weebly is also characterized by its ease of use thanks to that drag function and drop it offers. Of course, forget about being able to restore the websites you have and get ready to pay a little more than expected, especially if you go from the free plan, which has it. Plans range from $ 8 to $ 38 a month.
Nor does it lack templates, although it is far from those of Squarespace and Wix. Of course, you can enter code matters to give a special touch to your website.
Shopify
Shopify has now become one of the most comfortable platforms to run our business selling all kinds of products on the Internet. It is not as complicated as setting up an ecommerce in WordPresss, where we will need plugins like Woocommerce, but it can be limited in some aspects; If we don't put SEO (Search Engine Optimization) aside, surely WordPress is a better option.
All that said, Shopify is right now one of the most liked ecommerce and used by many businesses. It is characterized by a brilliant inventory system, something vital for an ecommerce in which it has to handle hundreds or thousands of products. Today Shopify has more than 600.000 active stores around the world.
Its great benefit is that all technical aspects are left to the platform and so you can practically focus on organizing your store, your products, create hooks and plan marketing strategies to sell.
Unlike WordPress Woocommerce, it has a monthly cost that varies between 29 and 299 dollars.
Squarespace
Another great site to build your website, although it is not as easy to use as the ones mentioned so far. That is of the ones with the best design and offers high quality templates available to the user. It also has a good repertoire of features with which to tackle our first web page.
At Squarespace we could nailing it between how easy it is to create a website with Wix and between a greater difficulty to do it with WordPress. It is halfway so that a user with more time and skills, takes their effort to create a great website.
The plans are not cheap at all, but because they offer exquisite templates, it can be understood. It is also characterized by being mobile responsive; that is, adapted to the sizes of smartphones and tablets, something vital today if you want to set up a website.
Squarespace plans pass from 12 to 40 dollars a month. We repeat that like the rest of the alternatives said, if we want something more specific on our website not even Squarespace will be able to give it to us.
WordPress
With WordPress we move on to a whole CMS that if we put it next to Drupal, one in which the learning curve is much slower and it is necessary to enter PHP programming (although not necessary), it is easier. The best thing about WordPress is that you can go easy, install a free quality theme, take a hosting and in a matter of hours you will have an amazing quality website.
Or, you go hard, take a clean base theme and start programming to create your website dedicated to blogging, ecommerce or any type of website, since the WordPress possibilities are endless today. You may wonder why you can choose to program your site with WordPress, and it is simply because of the SEO theme, one of the reasons why many choose to put in a little effort and learn to use WordPress.
And is that WordPress, thanks to its great and huge community, and through its themes and plugins, has been able to grow exponentially in recent years. If you want to get fully into the world of WordPress, we recommend a theme and a drag-and-drop page builder:
- ocean wp- It has passed 1 million installs and is currently the best WordPress theme. Responsive for mobiles, perfect to use with Woocommerce (online sales platform with the basics) and clean both in the code and in the possibilities it has to increase its characteristics through the developer's own plugins and extensions.
- Elementor: is the best current layout for WordPress. In conjunction with Oceanwp they form a beastly duo to create excellent quality websites at all levels. That is, optimized for both web loading speed, various functions, optimized in SEO and complex in different elements. We have to say that you get the best out of it by acquiring the Pro elementor version, especially due to a greater variety of widgets to create all kinds of websites.
Other issues to consider and which are currently the best they are GeneratePress and Astra Theme They are at the level of Oceanwp. In any case, it is to try one or the other to see which one suits us best for the solution we are looking for.
WordPress offers a wide range of plugins for all kinds of tasks such as the security of your site, backup and migration of your website to another URL or a copy of it as a backup, dynamic content to create dealer pages and even allows us to customize the desktop so that we can have it as we want.
Some of the most famous WordPress plugins These are and they even allow you to create websites with dynamic content:
- Advanced Custom Fields: allows you to create dynamic fields with which to create all kinds of pages for any kind of products. In conjunction with Elementor it is simply beastly.
- Yoast SEO: one of the plugin par excellence to position our website fully optimized. It even allows you to create sitemaps so that Google crawlers can inspect our website in a better way.
- WooCommerce: the perfect system to create your ecommerce and characterized by having everything we need to have our online store. Thanks to the great community in WordPress, there are many other plugins that extend its characteristics.
- All in One WP Migration- The perfect tool for migrating entire websites and creating backups just in case.
- GDPR Cookie Consent: to keep up to date on everything concerning the new European data protection law.
- WP Rocket: the best plugin (although paid) to optimize the loading of your website, all automatically.
Finally tell you that too you can use the web version of WordPress that, although it is quite limited, it also offers many possibilities; Like Blogger, since it has many similarities in the solution it gives and in a matter of minutes it allows us to have a blog.
Drupal
Drupal is another CMS, but as we have said, the learning curve is going to take you longer. Apart from that programming knowledge is required, although it is true that to launch basic websites we can pull the modules without going through programming. Although of course, to get to the level of some websites that we will do with Squarespace, we will need to work hard and have knowledge of CSS.
Drupal is a CMS used by companies in which they have programmers and the truth that reaching that level can create any web page that comes to mind. It is a free CMS like WordPress and it is also characterized by its modular appearance, although what has been said is one of the most complex.
You have NASA websites and other places such as Casablanca. Although they have finally launched a new website with WordPress; things of evolution.
Create the web from 0
And always, we will have the option to learn HTML, PHP, CSS and JavaScript (don't forget that here we have many resources for HTML, CSS y JavaScript) in order to have enough skills to create a web page from scratch. The best thing about going through this path is that the written code will be dedicated to everything we need. Very distant from WordPress in this sense, since by installing numerous plugins, we will have code that certainly has no place for what we need. For this reason, it is easy to load a website and the page load is slower, with the problems that this same provides for SEO.
Of course, the effort will be considerable, as well as the time in knowing how to handle those languages. If we succeed, we can choose to publish websites that will be scary and that will be perfectly optimized. We too We can build a life as a web development professional and that, by the way, they don't charge anything cheap. We recommend that you look more for what it means to be a stack developer.
The final surprise: create your website with Github
github, apart from being the platform par excellence for collaborative development By allowing you to host a project using the Git version control system, it also allows you to host your own website at no cost.
The great benefit of using Github for launching your website is zero costYou will have to create a static HTML website though. The best of all is that you have a desktop app with which you can take your first steps with HTML to have a basic website. And it's not that difficult either!
We will have to install the GitHub Desktop app for macOS or Windows, create a new project, copy the basic files for the web and publish it. If we want to embroider it, we can acquire a domain in a hosting (they do not exceed 10-12 euros a year) and redirect it to have that website at the lowest cost.
We recommend it for those of you who are starting to code in HTML and so you go creating your own site little by little. It is the good thing that it has, that it is free. And you would be surprised what some can do with this way of publishing a website with Github.
Y this is how we finish this review of the different options we have in our hand to create a website and launch into the network of networks. Of all the current options WordPress wins out for several reasons. Its great community, the thousands of plugins, high quality free and paid themes and how easy it is to start programming based on a theme.
Of course, if you don't want to waste time and launch a basic website or ecommerce With a not very extensive number of products, you have alternatives that will make things much easier for you. Now there is only the desire to do it.
Seriously?????????????????????????
Wordpress for a professional website ????????
Really?????????????????
For the creation of a website minimally different from a blog with pretensions, the minimum is Drupal or Joomla. Without scares, without conflicts, without excessive consumption, without thousands of sales gurus behind….
With all the flexibility of well thought-out, well-designed CMSs with powerful, solvent cores that don't have to be plugging in plugins from unknown parents.
Please don't keep fooling people. WordPress is a one-table blog; that is his great virtue and his enormous Achilles heel. It is not, by any means, a solvent CMS for creating pretentious websites or online stores. That thousands of indolent agency cartoonists do not want or do not know how to learn a simple manual for Joomla, Drupal, Prestashop or EE (for example) says more about themselves than about the tools they use.
Of course, if you understand websites as something more than a few pages with buttons and colors to dazzle your client.
At this point it is really doubted that with WordPress you cannot make professional web pages?
I understand that with Drupal you can perfectly create a fully optimized website without that load of WordPress plugins, but for many users who do not want to go through PHP and who do not have a high level of programming knowledge, WordPress is a more than perfect solution.
In fact WordPress is now found on more than 34% of published websites and 60% of CMS. And Drupal? Does it stay on 1,5% of all websites? (Data of W3Techs)
That I am with you that for a dedicated and optimized website, Drupal, but for many other solutions, ecommerce, blogs, landing pages and more, WordPress is a more than successful solution.