If you’re a freelancer or small business owner, you know how important it is to have a website where you can showcase your work and promote your business. With so many website builders on the market, how do you know which one best suits your needs? Is WordPress the right website builder for you? Will Webflow meet all of your expectations?
In this blog, we compare two of the most recognised website builders on the market, WordPress and Webflow, to help you decide.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a free, open-source blogging platform that has become one of the most popular content management systems on the web.
Since it launched in 2003, WordPress has helped small businesses, bloggers, and large corporations build and manage their sites. It’s easy to use, and it’s cost-effective. WordPress (open-source) is free and can be installed on your own web server or hosting provider.
It can seem pretty complicated at first, but WordPress really simple once you get the hang of it. All you need to do is pick a design, write some content, and you’re good to go. Once you've familiarised yourself with WordPress, you can create your blog or website in no time. Also, because WordPress is so popular, there are thousands of tutorials online to help you set up your site in less than 30 minutes.
Why should you choose WordPress?
- Flexible and powerful : Highly customizable themes and plugins allow you to create almost any kind of website you can think of.
- Easy to use : user-friendly interface, no coding required.
- Cost effective : Free to download and use, no long-term contracts or additional costs.
- Add unlimited content. The number of posts is only limited by the amount of storage your web host provides
Sites actually built on WordPress
- wordpress.com
- blog.playstation.com
- bbcamerica.com
- geeksforgeeks.org
- css-tricks.com
What Is Webflow?
Webflow is an intuitive web design tool that allows you to build responsive, mobile-ready sites that can be viewed on any device – and Webflow will even host your sites for you. The user interface is easy to get to grips with and you get the ability to build websites for any device without having to write a single line of code. Webflow is a great tool for beginners who are just starting out with web design because it will get you up and running in no time.
This tool is a great alternative to using a WordPress website with a custom template, as you have full control over each and every element of the page, from the type of colour scheme to the placement of elements.
Why should you choose Webflow?
- Very simple to use, even if you're not a web designer.
- No coding knowledge is required.
- Able to create both static and dynamic websites
- Exports clean code for developers
Sites actually built on Webflow
- upwork.com
- hopin.com
- metamask.io
- formstack.com
WordPress vs Webflow
Webflow and WordPress both get you a physical presence on the internet, but each tool has its own unique strategy.
Webflow works great right from the start, but it’s best for designers and developers. If you’re interested in streamlined performance and simplicity without always needing to look at templates, this might be the perfect tool for you!
WordPress is easy to get started with and it offers built-in templates that suit any project scope. It’s great for people who like customising their site and want an extremely user-friendly experience.
Customisation
WordPress has a reputation for being great in terms of the customisation it offers its users when it comes to both content and design. While WordPress isn’t exactly the easiest platform to get into, Webflow builds sites from scratch based on your ideas giving them a sense of originality.
If we were looking purely at design freedom then Webflow would win hands down but WordPress wins this battle due to sheer number of plugins, themes and overall flexibility of the platform.
Maintenance
In terms of maintenance, Webflow gives you complete freedom to design your site while they take care of security and updates in the background, whereas with WordPress you would have to open up a dashboard to manually update plugins and themes on a regular basis.
Webflow takes the win in the maintenance battle, but I wouldn’t count WordPress out just yet as they’ve been taking steps to make maintenance easier by allowing users to auto-update their plugins as soon as they’re made available.
Price
For pricing, WordPress is a lot more cost-effective in comparison to all-in-one solutions like Webflow which costs a minimum of USD 15 to have more than two pages on your site. WordPress pricing is hard to pin down but you could easily publish a site on the internet for as low as 99 cents per month, almost 94% cheaper than Webflow’s cheapest plan.
Where Webflow beats WordPress is the quality of hosting (AWS vs cheap shared hosting), automatic SSLs, automatic backups, updates and security fixes. So if you want to spend the least amount of money, go WordPress but if you'd prefer to focus on your business then I'd suggest going Webflow.
Conclusion
Webflow is a rather innovative product that gives you complete control over the design of any site you wish to create, whereas WordPress is restricted by how it lays out content depending on whether or not you are using one of its default templates.
They’re both excellent options … the thing I would say about Webflow though is that the exported code can become overwhelming for beginners as they wouldn't know what they need to keep and what they can throw out when adding new features.
That being said, WordPress does have an issue with plugins because there are so many different ones – but this problem could be circumvented by deciding on which ones are essential to your needs before beginning your project.
If you are looking for a digital agency that’s familiar with both Webflow and WordPress, please feel free to send us a message, view our portfolio or view our pricing packages.
