Picking Your Platform: Wix or Weebly vs. Squarespace or WordPress

Author: Carolyn Menz Category: Web Design Date: July 26, 2019

It’s time to build a new website for your business. So where are you headed? WordPress or Weebly? Squarespace or Wix?

If you choose to follow the pack, you’ll likely look at WordPress, Wix, Weebly and Squarespace. And, most likely, you’ll land on WordPress – the most powerful website development platform on the market. Currently, 34% of all of the websites in the world are built in WordPress (including this one), making it the global industry standard. So if you’re anything like Google, Disney, Facebook or The New York Times—just a handful of the thousands of businesses that use WordPress to power their sites—you’ll probably end up building your site there too.

But while WordPress is the clear fan favorite, it’s certainly not the only platform available. Wix, Weebly and Squarespace are among the most popular alternatives.

WordPress Is King – But Why?

While they each possess their own attractive qualities, the differences in the features and functionalities offered by Wix, Weebly or Squarespace compared to WordPress are quite vast.

For a web design newbie, platforms like Squarespace, Weebly or Wix can be attractive options because of their one-stop-shop, drag-and-drop functionalities. In that way, there are many similarities among Wix compared to Squarespace and Weebly. All three platforms are fully hosted – which means you don’t have to purchase a separate hosting plan in order for your site to live on the web – and the page building software used by each of them is fairly intuitive and user-friendly, making them approachable to beginners and the non-tech savvy in particular.

But these platforms are also somewhat limited in the features they offer, and they lack scalability. If you’re building a website for a growing business, this is where Wix, Weebly and Squarespace begin to show their limitations and WordPress shines. WordPress is an open-source platform that provides you with maximum control over every aspect of your website, and it can be used to build any type of site – big or small, simple or complex, template-based or custom coded. And because of its widespread popularity, its support options are second to none.

WordPress vs. Wix vs. Squarespace vs. Weebly

Along the way to becoming the industry standard, WordPress has set the bar for all other website development platforms to measure up against. Below is a brief overview of some of the key distinctions between WordPress versus Wix, Weebly and Squarespace, and how they each stack up.

Wix vs. WordPress

One of the most notable differences between Wix and WordPress is the discrepancy in the number of plugins they offer. There are approximately 200 plugins in the App Market on Wix compared to WordPress, which has more than 55 thousand free plugins available to its users. Chances are, if you can think it up, you can find it in WordPress.

Weebly vs. WordPress

With WordPress, if your business requires a particular feature that isn’t immediately available in one of the 55,000 free plugins mentioned above, you can hire a web developer to create and implement it for you. Not so with Weebly. With Weebly, you’re locked into the limited features the platform offers, and that’s that.

Squarespace vs. WordPress

Squarespace offers lots of great design options and is highly regarded for its ease of use. But where it begins to fall short in comparison to WordPress is in its limited integrations with third-party services. Squarespace’s eCommerce plans, for example, allow payment processing through only three different companies, while WordPress can integrate with just about any third-party resource on the web.

At Paradigm, we work extensively in WordPress because it allows us to build professional, responsive websites – whether basic, complex, or e-commerce – that are designed to support your individual business goals.

Contact us, and we’ll get your website up and running on the ideal platform for your business.