Why millions of people decide to use WordPress to create their websites is understandable?
Thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes combined with a drag-and-drop block editor make it simple and quick for users of all skill levels to create custom websites with WordPress.
Thanks to WordPress’s built-in functionality and extensibility, you can do a lot of things, like add live chat and forms to your website, customize the look of each category page, use different themes on different pages, and much more.
However, not every website owner’s needs can be satisfied by WordPress.
In this post, we’ll examine some WordPress alternatives in-depth in order to assist you in finding a solution that fits the needs and objectives of your company.
Before delving into these options, let’s first go over a quick summary of the various ways you can create web assets.
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Drupal
Drupal is an extremely adaptable content management system with countless customization choices. Developers and other users who are familiar with HTML, CSS, and PHP are the best candidates for it.
You can choose from the 46,000 modules in Drupal’s directory to increase and alter the functionality of your Drupal website.
To alter the look of your website, you can also select from thousands of premium themes at ThemeForest or thousands of free themes in Drupal’s official theme repository.
Drupal offers a more customizable theme and module selection than WordPress, despite the latter’s greater selection. This implies that you have fine-grained control over the way your website looks and works.
The process of setting up a Drupal website is more involved and takes longer than setting up a WordPress website because of the overwhelming number of customization options available.
But in the end, there will be a highly customized, safe website that can manage a lot of traffic and data.
These factors make Drupal a great choice for major organizations, governmental institutions, and academic institutions with devoted development teams. Drupal is used to build the NCAA website.
Joomla
Joomla aims to bring together some of the flexibility and power of Drupal with the ease of use of WordPress.
Compared to WordPress, Joomla offers more features right out of the box. Numerous settings for your website can also be adjusted on the backend, including those related to articles, banners, menus, media, redirects, and SEO.
Any of the 6,000 extensions in the official directory can be downloaded for more power and control over your website. These will also need to be installed through the backend, just like your settings.
Because of this, learning Joomla can be challenging for new users. Individuals with a basic understanding of web development will be able to utilize Joomla’s inherent flexibility to construct more intricate websites straight out of the box.
You can create custom post types, manage hundreds of users, and publish in multiple languages with Joomla thanks to its advanced user and content management options and built-in multilingual support.
These factors make Joomla perfect for creating membership, social networking, and community websites similar to Harvard University’s.
Blogger
Blogger is a free blog hosting service from Google that offers hosting, an SSL certificate, and templates—everything you need to quickly create and launch a blog.
Blogger is a well-liked platform for beginners to create basic blogs and business sites because of its affordability and ease of use.
But you will have to give up almost total control over your website. Similar to Tumblr and Medium, you may always suspend your site if you are discovered to be breaking any of the community guidelines set forth by Blogger.
You also don’t have much control over how your website works and looks.
You cannot alter the layout or even the content’s order on your blog’s default homepage, which is a feed of your posts arranged in reverse chronological order.
Additionally, you are unable to create custom post types or pages, such as portfolio pages.
Wix
Wix is a hosted website builder that helps you create and manage your website with free, dependable web hosting, top security features, SEO tools, and a committed support staff.
You can quickly create your website by editing over 500 pre-designed templates with the simple drag-and-drop Wix editor. To make these pages come to life, you can add animation, scroll effects, and video backgrounds.
Alternately, if you are familiar with HTML and CSS, you can create the page from the ground up and customize every element.
Wix provides a limited-time, ad-supported free version for individuals or small businesses to create websites. You’ll need to switch to a premium version in order to give visitors an ad-free experience.
Wix is perfect for agencies and other small businesses building stylish websites as well as for individuals building online portfolios because of its affordability and ease of use. Art Director Sonja van Duelmen is a fantastic resource for a Wix portfolio.
Magento
Similar to Prestashop, Magento Open Source is a self-hosted platform. While the core program is free to use, you will need to pay for Magento extensions and hosting, which can be costly.
Similar to Drupal for e-commerce, Magento is a very secure, highly flexible platform with a steep learning curve. You can create any kind of store design you want if you know how to code.
However, before you can set up your store, you will need to spend some time learning about all of the platform’s extensions and integrations in addition to its built-in features.
You can install or integrate over 3000 add-ons and apps with your website by exploring Magento’s Extensions Marketplace.
Do you want to add the most recent stock and delivery information to your website or track and segment your customer base in a CRM? It’s simple to add this kind of functionality to your website with extensions.
Magento can also support your growth over time because it enables you to manage multiple stores, use multiple international shipping providers, and transact in multiple countries, languages, and currencies — all from the same dashboard.
For this reason, businesses such as Landrover choose to build expansive stores filled with a wide variety of merchandise.
Shopify
You should use a hosted e-commerce platform like Shopify if you want to start selling goods or services online.
Shopify allows you to set up and maintain an entire store. Using Shopify’s drag-and-drop website builder, you can create posts and pages after selecting one of over 70 ecommerce themes.
Built-in blogging, customer reviews, ready-to-use payment options for your customers, abandoned cart recovery, and analytics on your website traffic and products are all included in Shopify’s lowest plan, which costs $29 per month.
At every price point, there are two more plans with more resources; however, before you upgrade, be sure to take a look at Shopify’s app marketplace.
Numerous apps facilitate integrations between Shopify and other platforms, such as HubSpot, to cover any gaps necessary for managing your business.
Shopify is appealing to businesses who would rather not customize every single aspect of their stores, as well as first-time shop owners, because it will handle security issues, manually back up your website, and ensure the software is updated.
Webflow
With Webflow, a “visual” content management system, web designers can build fully functional websites without worrying about performance, security, or hosting.
You have total control over the look of your website when you use Webflow. You can start from scratch and create every single detail yourself, even if you can choose from hundreds of pre-built templates and modify them.
You can create a fully customized website by dragging and dropping HTML elements onto a canvas and styling CSS properties with the Webflow Designer, which is similar to Photoshop in a web browser.
You have two options to expand the functionality of your website, and none of them are as easy as just installing a WordPress plugin.
The first thing you can do is create an integration (the process will differ depending on the platform) between your website and other platforms.
Suppose your goal is to keep tabs on and oversee every contact that has signed a form on your Webflow website.
You can manage the integration between your HubSpot CRM and Webflow forms by registering for a Zapier account.
To increase the functionality of a page on your website, you can also embed custom code or code from third parties. To learn how to add unique HTML code blocks to your WebFlow site, watch this video.
Building your website is totally free; you only need to buy a site plan and a custom domain when you’re ready to go live. Monthly cost of the CMS hosting plan is $20.
