December 11, 2019

First, the title is slightly misleading. It really should be “WordPress vs Squarespace, Weebly, Wix and/or any other non-open-source web publishing tool.”

Ugh, too wordy.

So let’s break it down into a single word:

Ownership.

With WordPress you own your site. With every other commercial service, you don’t. It’s just that simple.

With WordPress you can move your site to any hosting company and it’s always under your control. You could even take it offline for a year and then put it back up again when you’re ready. But with these other commercial services, your site only exists as long as that company survives and/or you pay your monthly bill.

We understand the temptation.

Ok, we’ll admit it — we have a few clients that migrated over to using one of these other services, because on the whole, they’re easier to use than WordPress. Undoubtedly, Squarespace has a beautiful and (relatively) simple interface. Making it easy to build and launch a site in a matter of hours.

But the problem, in our humble opinion, is that once you launch a site based on a commercial service like Squarespace, you’re locked in. If the company goes out of business, your site will be gone. If your enterprise grows, requiring a unique and customized technical solution, you’ll be stuck with whatever default tools they offer.

But with WordPress, the sky is very nearly the limit. We’ve been able to hack countless solutions into client sites that would never have been possible on these other services.

This is mostly because WordPress is an open source system built by tens of thousands of contributors around the world. Obviously, with an open system like this, that means things can also get messy. Plugins, themes, updates, databases… there’s a lot to understand. We won’t dispute that you may not be able to manage a site like this on your own. But at the end of the day, ask yourself the following question…

“Do I want to own my website or rent it?”

Photo by Nikita Kachanovsky on Unsplash