Over the years WordPress has been the quintessential website builder and Content Management System (CMS) allowing users to download and install its software for free. Thanks to its easy-to-use tools, you can easily add new pages, blog posts, E-commerce store, images and much more without any HTML editing software or knowledge required. Besides the ease of use, the code behind WordPress is simple enough for search engines to easily read and index the sites’ content. Additionally, you can build shareable referral links for outside of your website, like social media and even podcasts. In this article, I will share top WordPress alternatives to consider for your business website.
Why Many People Use WordPress?
WordPress continuously churns out themes and plugins to help improve content improve the learning curve when it comes to building websites. It is one of the leading website builders in the world with over 35% of all websites on the internet powered by WordPress. And one of the biggest reasons for this is WordPress is easy to get started with. You can add and edit images and text easily, and beginners can find it a straightforward CMS to use.
For small businesses looking to create a strong web presence, the WordPress CMS can be ideal. Whether you are looking for a fully hosted website or web building tools, WordPress offers a simple solution to create an online presence with little cost and a short period of time under its free plan.
WordPress Alternatives to Consider
WordPress is a popular CMS for publishing online. But there are alternatives. So, if you are looking to go with another CMS, a hosted website builder or CRM other than WordPress, this article is for you. You will find below a list of WordPress alternatives for your consideration.
1. Wix
This is number 1 on my list of WordPress alternatives to consider. The Wix hosted website builder offers users robust design customization and ecommerce store tools. It has an easy to use drag-and-drop site builder that comes with a side menu for adding images and apps. Considered the best alternative compared to WordPress, Wix ‘s web publishing platform has more than 500 design templates to customize your site. You can even add features as you progress including an online store or accept bookings online. Adding apps to your site from the Wix App Market works like WordPress’s plugins to give your site new features. Also, Wix has robust built-in tools for custom design and layout.
Besides being able to optimize your website to be mobile friendly, you get online storage for your site assets, SEO tools, e-commerce tools, video backgrounds, and more. If you are not sure how to go about building your site, Wix can build a personalized site with its Artificial Design Intelligence. Wix payment plans start at $4 a month. It also offers a limited free version for small businesses to build a site, however, it’s ad-supported.
2. Shopify
If your business is looking to sell products or services online, then Shopify is a great candidate. You can set up and manage your entire online store through Shopify. You also have a selection of over 70 themes and can start building posts and pages using Shopify’s drag-and-drop website builder.
Considered among the best WordPress alternatives, Shopify’s plan starts at $29 per month and comes with built-in blogging, customer reviews, ready-to-go payment options for your customers, abandoned cart recovery, and analytics on your web traffic and products.
3. BigCommerce
BigCommerce offers CMS features for blog posts, pages, and comes with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop page builder. This website builder is an all-in-one platform and a recognized brand like WordPress. And it is easy to get started with if you are a beginner.
This solution comes with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features, automated image optimization using Akamai Image Manager, and integration with several e-mail marketing services including Constant Contact, iContact and Mailchimp. BigCommerce comes with a free trial while paid plans start at $29.95 per month. You get unlimited products, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, and you can accept credit cards and PayPal.
4. Drupal
Drupal is a flexible open-source CMS with functionalities that include advanced menu management, polls management, a graphics modification tool, users’ management and much more. With these, users are able to create websites, a blog, discussion boards, and social networking pages with many customization options. Drupal does have the steepest learning curve. With Drupal you will need technical help to customize or update your website while WordPress is more intuitive and easy to customize.
To extend and customize the functionality of your Drupal site, you can select from the 46,000 modules available in Drupal’s directory. There are lots of different modules available that you can add to your site and they function similarly compared to WordPress plugins.
5. Webflow
Webflow helps you build professional, custom websites with no coding knowledge. Essentially Webflow is an all-in-one website builder, a CMS and hosting platform similar to WordPress. With Webflow’s designer, you get CSS, HTML, and JavaScript but you generate your code using the visual designer instead of writing code line by line.
Webflow’s Basic plan starts at $12 per month billed monthly and offers 25,000 monthly visits, 500 form submissions, content delivery network (CDN), Free SSL certificate and more.
6. Joomla
Joomla is an open source CMS platform popular for its ease of installation, variety of customization features, and built-in Access Level Control (ACL). This makes it easy to have multiple users for the site. Joomla offers a great tool to build your site. With its open-source platform, you can configure many of your site’s settings on the backend, modify articles, banners, menus, media, redirects, and SEO settings. Joomla is also a more beginner-friendly option than WordPress, making it the easiest and fastest way to create a site.
For additional functionality and control over your site, you can download any of the 7,000 extensions available on Joomla. The platform is user-friendly, extendable, multilingual and accessible.
7. Squarespace
Squarespace website builder offers useful tools to build attractive, functional sites for personal use or small businesses. The platform provides everything you need to start a site, including domain registration, web hosting, themes, designed templates, online store, and support. Once you’ve published your site, you can use the built-in analytics tool to learn where your website traffic is coming from.
This website builder has a drag and drop interface that includes landing pages and even eCommerce stores. Like other WordPress alternatives, it comes with several designed templates to choose from which are easily adaptable to mobile devices. Plans start at $12 per month with G Suite and PayPal integrations availability, plus SEO tools, and easy social media integration.
8. Weebly
Weebly offers the basic tools you need to build a business site or even an online store. It comes with customizable templates which are simple, stylish, and mobile responsive. A helpful SEO guide in Weebly’s help and support center also offers advice on coding, keyword optimization, and tips on boosting your site’s ranking.
Weebly offers a drag-and-drop site builder for creating a blog, image galleries and E-commerce. It also comes with video and music players, and other tools that are all included in the editor. And there are other useful applications, too, such as table of contents, calendars, social widgets and more to be found in the Weebly App Center. Though a basic free plan is available, Weebly’s Professional plan starts at $12 per month. The free plan places a small, gray Weebly banner in your website footer.
9. Tumblr
Tumblr is a blogging platform designed for visual blogging featuring posts with minimal text. The platform combines blogging with social sharing of content including photos, gifs, video, music, quotes, chats, links, and text. Once you sign up for a Tumblr account, you are prompted to create a blog. All users must have a primary blog, but they can also create a secondary one. A user might have a personal primary blog while having a secondary blog dedicated to promoting portfolios, products and more.
Like WordPress, there are many options to customize your blog on Tumblr. Because it’s easy to customize, some businesses actually use Tumblr as their site. There are paid and free themes, or you can create your own. Users can purchase URLs and redirect them to their Tumblr page.
10. Blogger
Blogger is a free blog service and comes with essential features for blogging including a commenting system, built-in social capabilities, templates, and the choice to use your own domain name. You have the option to get a free blogspot.com domain or buy a custom domain with just a few clicks.
You can also generate some revenues as well with Google AdSense automatically displaying relevant targeted ads on your blog so that you can earn income by posting about your passion.
11. Zoho Sites
Zoho Sites is a website creation tool that helps bloggers, businesses, and photographers develop websites with templates, insights, and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). You can create a blog and interact with visitors through comments. You cam also secure a better rank with SEO tools and traffic analytics.
Considered among the best WordPress alternatives, Zoho Sites comes with an intuitive, drag-and-drop builder where you create with elements and pre-built sections. You can also customize the look and feel of your site with the visual editor and invite colleagues to contribute to the site creation process. Zoho Sites pricing starts at $4 per month.
12. Constant Contact Website Builder
Constant Contact is known for its email marketing service. However, it also provides a website building and E-commerce platform. With this solution, you do not need any experience or design skills to create a professional site or online store. The Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered website builder does the heavy lifting for you to create a customized site.
Like other WordPress alternatives, this E-commerce builder also takes you through all the steps to design, add products, upload photos, add your payment providers, and everything else needed to get you ready to start selling. The starter plan of $10 per month comes with a mobile-responsive site, free web hosting, unlimited storage, SSL Certification, site analytics and blog.
13. Jimdo
Jimdo is another solid online web publishing platform that provides solutions to build your business site, blog or E-commerce store without coding. You have the option of an AI-powered builder (Jimdo Dolphin) that can design you a site in minutes. And it also has a basic drag-and-drop builder (Jimdo Creator). This web solution also offers hosting, custom domain name registration, an email account, editing tool, and some basic SEO.
Jimdo has five different pricing plans, which range from free all the way up to $39 per month. With the premium plan, you get your own domain, advanced SEO features and personal support to build your site.
14. Site123
Site123 website builder comes with a user-friendly interface, mobile-responsive templates and e-commerce features. The platform offers more than 180 website templates. You can scroll through the main templates page or click on one of 10 recommended template categories, such as Business, Blog, Event, Restaurant, or E-commerce.
With the website editing bar, you can add, edit, or delete site pages; upload photos and videos; add FAQs, galleries, or testimonials to any page; add an e-commerce block for products; change your site from single-page to multi-page; and add call-to-action buttons.
15. Ghost
Ghost offers a blogging platform that relies on a crisp and minimal user interface along with multiple options like WordPress. It comes in two variants: a self-hosted version that is free to download and use; and a fully hosted version on Ghost’s own servers.
Ghost’s Content API delivers published work on the web and can be accessed in a read-only manner by any client to render in a website, app or other embedded media. Ghost offers SEO settings and social sharing features so you do not need external plugins for that purpose. Ghost’s plan starts at $29 per month and accommodates 100,000 views. In addition, it allows signup of 1,000 members, email support, SSL+CDN and more.
17. WooCommerce
WooCommerce is a popular, customizable, eCommerce platform built on WordPress. It is an open-source ecommerce platform that helps you sell physical and digital products as well as affiliated products from certain marketplaces.
You have the option to install mobile-optimized templates or even develop your own template. You can also add a shop to your WordPress website with the free E-commerce plugin. WooCommerce has third-party integration with hundreds of solutions, including Facebook, Sage, Zapier, MailChimp, ShipStation, Square, Stripe, Fulfilment by Amazon and more.
18. Medium
Medium is a blogging platform that helps bloggers and creators focus on crafting content. Medium’s easy to use editor lets you add elements such as images, videos, embeds and separator lines to make posts more engaging.
Medium does have a partner program that rewards writers for the amount of time paying members spend reading their work. You have the option to get paid for all of your writing, some of it, or keep everything free and accessible to all.
20. Webnode
Webnode is an intuitive website builder that comes with an easy-to-use drag and drop editor and more than a hundred customizable templates. The plans come packed with features, even at the free level.
All users have access to forms, blogs, E-commerce, custom domain name, an HTML editor and more — all for free. You can build a WebNode site with an unlimited number of pages for free but your visitors will see ads. Paid plans start at $3.90 per month.
What Are The best WordPress Alternatives To Consider?
When it comes to website builders, there are many alternatives to WordPress that you can choose from. The best website builders are those that give you solid flexibility and are also affordable. Below are the best alternatives to WordPress.
- Wix: It offers thousands of templates for your website and all the templates are fully editable through simple drag and drop functionality. Users also have the option to install both free and paid apps on their website to improve its functionality and every website on Wix gets free SSL.
- Shopify: It offers an all-in-one fully hosted package and takes care of all the backups, updates, and software management. It seamlessly integrates with third-party payment gateways to accept payments from your customers.
- Squarespace: This comes with several options for website designs and themes to help you easily design your website. All website designs are completely editable, giving you full control over the customization of your website. You can use multiple templates at a time on your website which lets you pick the best elements of each. It also offers a plan to open your E-commerce store.
- Webnode: With Webnode, users get access to built-in SEO tools that can help sites gain visibility on Google. It easily integrates with Google Analytics to track the website’s performance and works with multiple languages. You can build an online store using attractive templates, manage orders and get analytics to track your performance.
- Weebly: This is another completely hosted website builder with a live page editor for creating your website and launching your e-store with ease. By using MS Excel, you can update prices and with the Weebly App Center you can add reviews to your E-commerce store.
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