Small businesses usually have too much to do already, and managing a website doesn’t figure high in the list of priorities. There are competing products for solving this problem, but they come in two primary flavors: website builders such as Squarespace and Wix; and self-hosted CMS such as WordPress. Generally, as you move from website builders to a CMS, you will get a more feature-rich website and a harder to manage website. Which you choose depends on your business needs.
Is a Website Builder Right for Me?
There are a lot of website builders out there. They have one job: get you up and running with a website as fast and efficiently as possible. Website builders do this job well and work for many small businesses, but they aren’t perfect. They don’t give you much flexibility, aren’t very scalable, and lack control. That’s where you need to start developing a unique website, and almost every business can benefit from taking advantage of these opportunities.
The most popular website builders are Squarespace, Wix, and Shopify. They each have their own benefits and pitfalls. As its name implies, Shopify is a website builder for e-commerce sites. It lets you quickly and easily get a web store up and running with the ability to take payments and ship orders. Wix gives you the most creative control, but that control comes at the cost of making it harder to make a good-looking website. Squarespace is the best all-around web builder.
If you are a new company or have simple needs, website builders are an excellent option. They allow you to get a basic website up and running quickly. Basic features like contact forms are included at no extra charge, and marketing packages, including email marketing, are often available. Having these features available from a single source is convenient as well.
The problem with website builders
As I mentioned, website builders aren’t perfect. While they are easy to use, as a rule, they still have a learning curve. Learning how to design, build, and maintain a website is required. For a small business, this is both the best and worst feature. You can make changes yourself without relying on anyone else, but it’s a time investment many small businesses can’t afford.
Even the best builders don’t give you much flexibility. The easiest way to quickly get up and running is to use a pre-designed theme. This will provide you with a good-looking website, but it won’t be very original. Design elements may be hard, if not impossible, to change. For instance, you might have a contact form available, but the form is limited to a few different styling options. This can leave your website looking remarkably similar to other websites that use the same builder. Creating a brand or company identity is difficult if your website looks too standard.
Money also quickly becomes an issue as you grow. Some features are locked behind a paywall, costing extra in order to take advantage of them. Sometimes they even penalize you for growing, such as an e-commerce plan that increases in price as your order volume grows. This is great for a new small business; it becomes more expensive than other options once you are established, and your orders increase. If you stop paying, you lose everything. Some builders let you export your data and save it locally, but it is questionable if you’ll be able to import this at a later date. If you use a CMS such as a self-hosted WordPress instance, you always have the option of saving all your data. You can then move this data to a different host and get your website back up and running. The data is always yours.
You Should Use A Self-Hosted CMS
The next step up from a website builder is a self-hosted CMS, or content management system. A CMS is similar to a website builder. A lot of the work, such as database design and coding, is done for you. You can edit this code if you want (not common), extend it with more features (common), and change how it looks (almost a necessity).
The most common CMS is WordPress. Technically you can use their service at wordpress.com, but that’s more like a website builder, and it suffers from the same problems as other builders. WordPress is different because they also offer the option to download the code for free and hosting the website elsewhere. This is an excellent middle-ground between a custom-coded website’s flexibility and the ease of a website builder.
I recommend WordPress to most anyone. The platform is easy to use, has a big community of people extending its functionality, and is easy to support. Since it is relatively easy to make it into any website you need, it is the default option. Theming, or changing the appearance of the website, is also a built-in function. This allows you to make the website reflect your brand. Most of the shortcomings of website builders are overcome with a WordPress website.
It’s important to remember that WordPress isn’t the only name in the game. Two other popular CMS platforms are Drupal and Magento. Drupal starts as a more barebones website than WordPress. This allows you to extend the website to do exactly what you want to do. However, it is also much more challenging to work with and doesn’t have as big a community developing plugins. Magento is a CMS built specifically for e-commerce. It is truly great at this. However, most of the essential functions can be integrated with a WordPress installation, and WordPress is much easier to use. Most small businesses would not benefit from a Magento installation’s extra features and would be harmed by the steeper learning curve.
CMS websites aren’t perfect
You may read this and wonder why you’d ever use a website builder. Using a CMS has a lot of benefits, but it also has some shortcomings as well. The biggest is probably money. Taking advantage of the extra features of a CMS often requires hiring a separate web developer. Website builders usually include some level of customer support, whereas you’ll have to hire support separate if you use a CMS (or spend a lot of time digging through forum posts). They also have a steeper learning curve than a website builder.
If you’d like to explore the options of using a CMS but don’t want to spend time learning it yourself, you can save money by hiring someone to manage the installation for you. Some web hosts offer a managed service themselves which will provide a lot of the support you need. There are also a lot of freelancers that will support and maintain your CMS installation. I offer a couple of WordPress maintenance plans that include the support you need, including training so you can take control of day-to-day operations yourself should you desire.
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