There are are myriad different options when it comes to choosing a website platform, and a whole host of reasons to choose any one of them (maybe not ANY of them. Wix is on the BDS list.) The key question you need to answer is strategic: What do you need it to do?

This connects to our recent post about learning to think of your organization as a system, with different parts designed to work together. What pieces do you need to create your system, and how does your chosen platform support them?

The tradeoff is generally ease of use for flexibility and control, so let’s take a look at each of those things

Ownership

It’s similar to the question of social media vs email marketing – yes, social media gives you access to a huge audience for free (more or less) but you’re at the whim of the algo, and ultimately all your content is owned by someone else. With email marketing you have to do the work to build your audience yourself, but you own all your content and no one is going to hide it from your subscribers. It’s also similar in that there are still pros and cons to each, and both are valid options depending on your strengths and your needs.

With website-as-a-service platforms like Squarespace, your site only exists while you’re paying your monthly subscription. To change website services, you need abandon your website and start from scratch at the new one.

With WordPress, you can download and store both your theme and your site database, move them to a different host or work on them independently and decide when you’re ready to re-launch. When we were baby developers way back in the day we used a company called Bluehost. When we learned that the company was supporting Prop 8 in California (the attempt to ban marriage equality in the state) we changed hosting companies and took all our websites with us. There are lots of reasons you might want to switch hosting companies, and for us this ownership piece is important.

Flexibility

WordPress is open source software, which means it’s free for anyone to use, modify and redistribute it. From a values perspective, we really get behind this one. WordPress was created to democratize online publishing, and thanks to the talent and creativity of people all over the world, it has grown into a huge ecosystem of design and functionality. Hooray for open source software!

What that means for clients is that there are thousands of WordPress themes to choose from, and when it comes to designing and building a theme especially for you, the sky’s the limit. Little pleases us more than working with you to dream up the perfect pairing of visuals and functionality and them build you a custom theme to bring it to life. We frequently choose WordPress because we can create beautiful custom designs, made use of a simple and familiar dashboard for clients to use to create and update content, and take advantage of a large community of designers and developers supporting open-source software.

This is a big one for us — custom code means more control when it comes to accessibility. When we write the code ourselves, we can ensure it meets all our accessibility standards, and we’re in charge of when we make updates, meaning we’re in charge of ensuring we keep up with accessibility advances. It gives more control over SEO too, but there are definitely ways to manage your SEO on Squarespace, it can just require some workarounds.

Squarespace and Shopify have both moved to live page-builder editing, which allows for more flexibility than previously when you had a choose a fairly rigid theme and stick with it. Squarespace in particular has a handy grid system to help you with well aligned layouts, and both have brand kits where you add in your colours and type to make it easier to pick and choose what to use where. They have lots of great themes and patterns, but at the end of the day they’re all based on whatever both companies deem trendy and appealing at a given time, and after awhile they all start to look pretty similar. Shopify allows for custom themes, but only in their proprietary language. Squarespace doesn’t allow for custom themes.

Ease of use

We said above that with WordPress, the sky’s the limit for your design, but if you’re hoping to DIY it, learning curve can be steep.

They have in recent years added what they refer to as FSE–Full-Site Editing–which opens up greater flexibility for custom theming with little or no code, but there’s no denying that, when compared with our two example website services, the user experience just isn’t there. It’s not intuitive, it’s easy to forget where to access different features, and the pre-built patterns aren’t quite as slick. The FSE base theme does allow for custom CSS (WordPress always has) if you have the skills to tweak your site that way, but it’s not easy to find.

For our smallest website package we use an extremely robust and flexible third-party WordPress theme, and we’re working

In many cases, more options aren’t necessarily better, and you may very well decide it’s worth the extra money for a better experience and just enough options.

Cost

Squarespace starts at $20/month and Shopify starts at $40. Each has several tiers above the basic.

WordPress hosting generally costs around $100-$150/year if you’re doing it on your own. (We put our clients on our hosting account, which lets us bring the cost down a little, $60-$75/year.) There are paid plugins for things like advanced shop functionality and image optimization that tend to follow the same pattern — with increased price comes increased simplicity and/or lower barrier to entry in terms of the technical aspects.

The Recommendation

If a website service fits your needs the best, we usually recommend Squarespace. It’s pleasant to use with useful features like a built-in layout grid, pre-built sections, a brand kit and great starting themes, and fairly easy-to-use integrations like shop and newsletter. Their donate function, with options for one-time or monthly, is pretty helpful. If you’re in a hurry, want to DIY it, need an internet home that looks good and helps you sell, Squarespace could be your winner. If selling online is your primary goal, a Shopify site might be the ticket. It has a similar page-builder functionality to Squarespace and simple, secure payment processing. It also has the option of integrating with things like shipping services.

If you’re priority is custom design and functionality (and this will often come as the second iteration of your website, once you’ve gathered more information about what you want and need) we will almost always recommend a custom WordPress theme. (And if you’re REALLY ready to go big, odds are we’ll recommend headless WordPress, but that’s a whole other post.)