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WordPress is a popular website building tool that lets you create any kind of website you can think of. It's extremely flexible, meaning you have complete control over the design and functionality of your website. You will need to be proficient at coding, however, to setup, use and manage WordPress.
Compare WordPress to the Best Website Builders
The best website builder for you generally depends on how easy you want the whole process to be. Do you want a builder that does most of the work for you? Or, are you willing to put in some work to get the precise look and setup you want?
If the latter, WordPress might be right up your alley. In fact, the control I have over my site while still keeping the back end clean and simple is one of the many reasons I love using WordPress.
I also appreciate its responsiveness across all platforms and its adaptability to your needs. You can literally build any type of website on WordPress, from a magazine site to a web portal and everything in between.
But if you have zero coding experience and want a true builder that lets you build a site from the ground up without ever diving into code, you’re not going to find that with WordPress.
Instead, Wix might be a better option for you. Whether you have no design experience or simply want an easy and quick website setup, Wix can handle it. Answer a few questions and Wix will build your site for you. From there, you can customize away.
There’s also Zyro, a website builder with ecommerce business owners in mind. Its drag-and-drop builder couldn’t be easier to use, especially for beginners, so you can whip up a web store much more quickly than you could by using WordPress with an ecommerce plugin.
WordPress: The Good and the Bad
The Good
Product Design and Functionality
When you use a website builder, you obviously hope to have a final product that looks and behaves how you expect. Otherwise, the builder didn’t live up to its job.
WordPress is superb in this area—that is, if you know how to use it to get your theme working properly. Theme tweaking can take some time to get used to, especially without a website builder plugin, like Elementor or Beaver installed. But once you make it happen, you’ll have a fully functional site and professional design.
As an example, QuickSprout is built on WordPress
You can also add functionality to your site in just about any way you want. Need an ecommerce site? Plugins like WooCommerce allow you to add a shop, collect payments, and organize your products. Want to add pop-up forms for email marketing campaigns? Constant Contact and similar plugins help you build a list and collect email addresses from visitors.
Best of all, you can manage everything from your WordPress dashboard, whether you need to change your menu navigation or make a quick theme edit.
Dashboard
The WordPress Dashboard hosts the back end of your site. This is where you’ll add plugins, publish posts, change settings, add pages, edit your navigation menus, and more. It essentially holds all the stuff your visitors don’t need to worry about, but you do.
The WordPress Dashboard is extremely simple to use, even if you aren’t an experienced website designer or builder. On the left side of your screen, you’ll find navigation links to everything you’ll need to work with on your site, from monitoring comments to adding media.
As you add plugins, theme framework, and other tools to boost functionality, you’ll see spots for them on your dashboard, too. You can also add Dashboard widgets to enhance your Dashboard’s main overview with social media integrations, analytics, and more.
Right out of the box, WordPress has several default Dashboard widgets, including post activity, WordPress events and news, and a QuickDraft tool for adding new posts quickly.
Customizability
The customizability of WordPress extends far beyond themes, although a theme is the primary way you’ll tweak the look and feel of your site. But you’ll also have settings, plugins, menus, and widgets to help you get everything looking the way you want. There is absolutely no shortage of personalization in WordPress.
The settings are right in your WordPress Dashboard. This is where you’ll edit your general site settings, like your WordPress URL and site language, plus reading, writing, discussion, and privacy options. Everything is relatively self-explanatory here.
With menus, you’ll edit your site’s navigation. Appoint a primary menu and secondary menus, depending on how your theme is set up. Again, there are numerous ways to move menus and change links to help people move around your site.
Now, plugins and widgets are what will really change how your site works. Widgets allow you to customize your footer, sidebar, and other areas in which your theme allows widgets. Add your social media feeds, contact forms, search bars, and other widgets to increase functionality.
Plugins have multiple uses, from improving search engine optimization
to adding image sliders for featured blog posts. You can add plugins and widgets through your Dashboard, either by browsing their libraries in WordPress or downloading them from a developer and installing their files.
Publishing Tools
Many people consider WordPress a blogging tool, and that’s probably because it was one of the first platforms of its kind, somewhat pioneering the content management system (CMS). WordPress offers incredibly easy page and post drafting, editing, and publishing straight from your Dashboard.
Manage post categories and tags, too, with separate links to these sections. They’ll help you categorize your posts to make them easier for visitors to find and let Google know more about your content. WordPress also has a bulk editing tool to manage the settings for multiple posts at once, like placing them in a specific category or moving them to the trash.
Other notable WordPress publishing features include:
Managing contributors, editors, administrators, and other publishing roles
Making posts private—including password protection—or public
Revision history for all posts and pages
Changing publishing dates and times when you update pages and posts
Automatic archiving to use with a calendar or site archive
Turning commenting on and off
Switching between text and visual editing modes
Formatting tools, including font colors, block quotes, numbered or bulleted lists, and headings
WordPress gives publishers the option to use its Classic editor or Gutenberg editor for publishing. The Classic editor is simple and familiar to most, but it’s also a little lackluster in terms of flexibility. Gutenberg takes a little getting used to, but its design lets you create blocks of content for a more visual experience of how your final post or page will look.
Although you will probably ultimately stick with one or the other, it’s still nice to have options.
Media Management
Keep your images, videos, files, and other media in one spot within WordPress with the Media Library
WordPress Pricing And Options
WordPress’s prices won’t break the bank. The WordPress platform is 100% free to install, use, update, and tweak to your needs. Unfortunately, your website builder isn’t the only cost that goes along with your website.
While other website builders, like Wix and Squarespace, roll all the costs of the platform, your hosting, and your domain into one convenient price, you’ll need to buy anything outside of the WordPress platform separately. WordPress isn’t technically free when you consider your other necessary costs.
Still, you can have an affordable website on WordPress when you choose the right hosting company. I strongly recommend pairing WordPress with Bluehost, which has dedicated WordPress hosting plans. Bluehost designs its WordPress plans to be fully optimized for WordPress sites with free and simple installations, updates, and security.
Bluehost even offers 24/7 support, so if something does go wrong with your WordPress installation, you can rely on Bluehost’s support to help.
Comparing The Best Website Builders
If you have some website building and code experience, WordPress can give you endless flexibility to create the site you want. Open source coding lets you see everything that goes into making your site what it is. An in-depth knowledge base and support forums assist WordPress users with just about any task on the platform.
But WordPress isn’t for complete beginners who might find themselves overwhelmed with options for content creation and theme customization, plus figuring out what plugins are necessary for their site.
We’ve spent a lot of time reviewing website builders to highlight the best ones. If WordPress feels too difficult or you just want to learn more about other available site builder options, check out our review of the best website builders. We’ve even included a summary of our top picks below:
Wix – Best website builder for most users
Squarespace – Best website builder for creatives
Zyro – Best for simple online stores
Web.com – Fastest way to build a new website
Shopify – Best ecommerce website builder
WordPress – Best for bloggers and content creators
Weebly – Best free website builder