Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, WordPress – What’s the Difference?

January 6, 2023

I am tackling a doozy of a topic today. 

Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, WordPress – What’s Best?

I’m going to help you figure out which is right for you. 

If you’re doing a complete overhaul on your website, then you’re asking yourself a lot of questions. What type of website should I even have? Should it be on Wix? On WordPress? Somewhere else? Where should I build this thing? 

My goal is to help you get a big picture view of the differences between these systems and their features. Hopefully, this overview will jumpstart your decision making process, so you can pick the right type of site that will ultimately help you grow. 

Those who’ve visited our blog before know I am a complete and crazy dorkapotamus. When I go down a bunny trail, and I start researching something, I really dig in because I want to know the answer. Darn it. 

MayeCreate builds in WordPress, and people have been asking me for a while now, why WordPress? What about Wix? What about Weebly? What about Squarespace? What about all these different things? 

So why am I answering that question now? 

I started journeying through building our Better than DIY Website Program, where we’re helping program participants build a professional quality website in five weeks, without learning to code or taking out a second mortgage. Participants customize their design with a designer. Then, train them to write and build their site page-by-page. 

Aaaand….that’s kindof what all these other systems do, too, so I wanted to know the difference between what we’re doing on WordPress and all these other systems. 

Now, it’s a little bit tricky to compare all these systems, because they’re not super forthcoming with all of their details. You’ve kind of got to dig in there to find exactly what you’re getting in each one. 

Lucky for you, I did all the digging.

I put together this overview showing you how the platforms are similar and how they are different. 

How are Wix, Weebly, Squarespace and WordPress the same? 

Feature Rich

Each platform is very feature rich. I’m not I’m not gonna lie to you, it looks like you can build really pretty things in all of them. If you know how to do it, it looks like you can do quite a bit of customization as well. 

Customization

Every system I reviewed allows you to choose custom fonts, which means you can match your brand fonts to your website. They also allow you to do custom CSS, so if you know how to do CSS, you can customize the way that the template looks within reason. 

Metrics and SEO

Each system also offers website metrics. You’ll be able to see who’s going to your website, but I’m not sure how deep the metrics will go.

Every platform I looked at said they offer advanced search engine features, which will help you optimize your website to be found on search engines. 

Additional Features

All of the systems offer some pretty robust additional features, including 

• Portfolios
• Blogs
• Event Sections
• Shopping Cart integration

And, all of them allow you to have a custom domain. So you’re not stuck with the generic domain you may be assigned when you start building your site. 

Now, on to what you really came here for. 

How Wix, Weebly, Squarespace and WordPress are different. 

Popularity

WordPress is the winner of the web system popularity contest. 

As of December 2022, WordPress powers over 43% of the websites on the internet, and over 65% of websites people can edit on their own use WordPress. 

The second most popular content management system (CMS) is Shopify, and its market share is just 6.6%. 

Then Wix, Squarespace and Joomla are next with 2.8,  2.7 and 2.6% respectively. 

So, what does this popularity contest mean to you? 

We’re not just voting for prom queen here, we actually want to pick a CMS that will power the website you need to grow your business. 

One positive thing about picking a system built on WordPress is, if you are hiring a web developer to create your website for you, you are 100% likely to be able to find someone to replace your current WordPress developer, should they get hit by a bus or need to be fired. 

Neither of those things is something we want to plan for, but your website is an asset of your business. We need to make sure you can find somebody to work on it. 

If you are the person who’s working on your website, I don’t necessarily know if system popularity matters as much as the support out there for the system you choose. 

Support and Knowledge Base

If you are trying to do your website on your own, and you’ve decided WordPress isn’t the right solution for you, then do a deep look into the support offered by other systems. 

Forums

One of the reasons I started building websites on WordPress is I found so many free resources out there to teach me what I needed to learn. Those resources were instrumental in my ability to learn how to build an amazingly functional website for my clients. 

With WordPress, when we run into challenges building websites, we can easily search for a solution. 

I can find trails upon trails of forums, including the WordPress support forum itself, telling me how to do what I’m trying to do. WordPress does have hands-on tutorials to learn how to use the system. And they have a support forum and a support library. 

Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Weebly and Shopify all have a knowledge base where you can go look for answers to your questions. They also all have a forum, like WordPress. 

Live Chat

Where these platforms begin to differ is live support. Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Weebly and Shopify all offer a live support chat. 

WordPress does not. You can’t go out to WordPress and chat with an expert to get your answers. You’ll have to go to Google and find them on your own. 

Phone and Email Support

• Squarespace does not offer phone support.
• GoDaddy does not offer email support. 
• WordPress.org does not offer email or phone support.
• WordPress.com does offer email support.

If you want email support or phone support, then you’re going to need to get your website through Wix, Shopify or Weebly. 

Some you rent…WordPress.org you own.

There are two ways to build a WordPress site. We developers distinguish them by calling them “WordPress.com” and “WordPress.org”.

If you’re building your website on your own, you may not be using WordPress.org. You might be using WordPress.com, which is different. 

WordPress.org is a self-hosted downloadable version of WordPress. You put it on your own server and you can do whatever you want with it. It’s open source. 

It’s what almost any web developer that you buy a website from is going to be building in.

WordPress.com, is a place just like Weebly, or Squarespace or Wix. You can build your website out there on their platform, and they do have live chat. They do have email support. 

It’s a different universe. One of them you’re hosting on your own, the other one you’re hosting on their platform. 

Owning

With WordPress.org, you own your site. You download the software, you install it in the home hosting space, it is yours. You can do whatever you want with it. 

You can build your own custom theme. You can create your own plugins. You can modify it to the nth degree. It is mega modifiable. 

You get to pick your hosting company, and your hosting plan. 

It’s just like owning a house. You own the lot. You want to paint the walls, paint the walls. You want to remodel the kitchen, remodel the kitchen. It’s your house, you own it, and you get to take care of it and do what you want to with it. 

The other cool thing about a WordPress site, is that unlike your house, if you become unhappy with your hosting provider, you can pick up your website and move it to another hosting provider altogether. It is your site. You own it. 

Renting

Other systems, WordPress.com, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace and GoDaddy, are all rented systems. You pay monthly rent for the system you built your website on, and you can’t move your site over to another server. 

If Squarespace goes out of business, and they’re no longer going to host websites anymore, (heaven forbid that happen), then, you’re kind of SOL. Your website is probably gone.

There are ways you can migrate your website to another style of website, but that’s a topic for another day. 

System Updates

Some hosting providers include basic WordPress.org software updates. But some updates you’ll still need to do on your own.

If you have a great hosting service they will do some system updates for you. It should be part of your hosting package. 

If it’s not, then you should find a new hosting provider, because they’re getting real savvy about how to make this streamlined and awesome, but there are still some you’ll have to do yourself if your site is a WordPress.org site. 

You might have to go out and update some of your plugins. You might have to go and do some tinkering. 

You really do have to keep the WordPress system updated, or your site will get hacked. You never want that to happen. It is really bad and sad. It is way better to update your WordPress system than it is to let it get hacked.

The other systems are going to do those updates for you. The updates will be part of your rented plan. 

Think about it like if you have a landlord, your landlord is going to fix your appliances for you. Your landlord is going to pay for your snow removal. One of the benefits of being on that rented platform is all of the landlord services they will provide for you. 

Extendability

The challenge with a rented system comes when you don’t approve of the landlord services, and you want them done better, faster or more robustly. You want more features, which indicates the rented system doesn’t work as well for you anymore. 

Now with WordPress.com, you can extend it to some degree.

With WordPress.org, you can extend it into infinity, and make it do almost anything. 

When I say that you can extend WordPress.org to do almost anything, it’s because of plugins. Should you have it doing almost anything? I really don’t think so. But that is another conversation for another day. 

All of the web building systems have apps or plugins you can add to extend the functionality of your site, but WordPress leads the pack. 

WordPress has over 70,000 plugins you can use to extend the functionality of your website. Wix has over 600, and Weebly has over 200. Squarespace has 14 plugins.

That’s not to say these other systems are not incredibly robust. 

I was impressed with the level of availability for some features Squarespace and Wix and Weebly offer right out of the box, like:

• Payments and Shopping carts
• Integrated Email Marketing
• Posting to Facebook
• General Marketing Services

If this is your first foray, and you don’t need anything customized, then one of those systems could work great for you. 

I don’t want to lead you astray though, there’s going to be setup regardless of what system you use. Setting up functionality, like a shopping cart on your website is not like magic. 

Future-Proofing

The challenge I see with the non-WordPress systems is if down the road, you want to add something else to your website, and it’s not supported in that system, then you’re hosed. You’re going to have to move your website to a system like WordPress. 

An Example

I just had a conversation with somebody the other day, and they run a nonprofit campground. They accept reservations on a system that’s external from their website. They also want to be able to accept donations from people using the same payment processor that their external booking system requires on their website, because they use the payment processor and the booking system jointly to be able to manage all of their donor data. 

Wouldn’t it be great if they could do that? 

Here’s the deal, they can’t. 

There isn’t a ready-made solution to connect Wix, where their website is built, with the payment processor so they can accept donations, or even integrate with a form inside of the booking software. 

They would need serious programming, but they’re a nonprofit. They don’t have the money to pay for custom integration. Even if they did, the second that the booking engine adjusts the way it works, they would be hosed because their API isn’t going to work anymore with their website. 

It just made me so sad that I could not solve this problem for them. 

They’re going to have to set up PayPal and take donations there, then manually enter the information over in the other system. 

As they grow as an organization, that solution might not be sustainable anymore. 

So they’re going to have to move to a different system like WordPress that already has those capabilities and features to be able to join the two systems together. 

I run into situations like this all the time. 

People are like, “I don’t really want to rebuild my website, because it’s in this other system, and it’s already done. But, it doesn’t really do what I want it to do.” 

I don’t want you to have that conversation with a developer ever. I want you to be able to say, “I built my website in a system that works for me and does the things that I want it to do.” 

It doesn’t matter if it’s WordPress or if it’s Wix or if it’s Weebly. Definitely look at the features that you need, and try to plan into the future. 

So how do you know which software is right for you? 

Let’s take it right back to the very beginning, and break it down step-by-step. 

The right platform for you is one that allows you to develop a site you can do what you want to do with it now, and it will grow with you in the future. 

1. Think about what you want to do with your website in the future, and create a rubric to evaluate each one of these systems against the next thing. 
2. If the systems are stacking up right next to each other, go set up a free account. Every single one of these softwares offer a free trial, except WordPress.org, but you can try WordPress.com. See how each one works for you and what the user interface is like. 
3. Once you set up your free trial, set a timer for like 15 to 30 minutes and try to create a page or create a post and type some stuff on it. See how it feels. You want to pick the one that’s right for you. If the functionality components of the site match up to what you need, then it all comes down to your usability preferences. 
4. If you are building your site on your own, see if there is a training program or what other support may be available. 

Set aside a few hours and set up these free accounts. 

Play around in them, and the second you start thinking, this kind of stinks, this is hard, you have found a system that is not right for you. Don’t force it, and keep moving on. 

This is what I do when I pick software for my company. I’m handing you my tried and true system for making this decision.

If you choose to take on this journey in the DIY fashion, hopefully I’ll get to meet you in the Better Than DIY Website Program. 

Signup opens for the Better than DIY Website Program on February 7, 2023. So if you’re reading this, and it’s between February 7 and February 16, 2023, then you can join the program and work with the whole group. We’ll get you a customized design and all the training you need to get an awesome website up for your company.

If you’re not going the DIY route, feel free to give me a call 573-447-1836. We do free consultations and we will help you plan out your website, then build it the good old fashioned way. 

Regardless of how you choose to go forward, I hope this conversation will help you jumpstart your decision-making process.