Would you recommend page builders like Wix, Webflow, SquareSpace, Framer, Elementor, Divi, Gutenberg to build a website? When you say "it depends..." what does it depend on specifically? What if we also want an online shop, what about Shopify, Shopware, and WooCommerce? What about AI-assisted website builders?
As I figured out by using WordPress as a developer, despite all its idiosynrasies, bugs, and shortcomings, I keep coming back to WordPress sooner or later, at least for smaller customer projects like startups, that I occcasionally work for apart from large corporate projects.
Wix/Webflow/Squarespace etc. vs. WordPress for Web Designers, Developers, and Customers
Startups often already have a WordPress website and need a relaunch or someone to take over abandoned maintenance, or they want to break free from third-party vendor lock-in, be an opinionated WordPress page builder with subscription costs, or another service like Wix, Webflow, or Shopify. All of those seemingly beginner-friendly solutions tend to cause unexpected running costs, technical debt, and practical limitations like not being able to edit two pages in parallel at the same time, at least in my experience.
Iconick's blog post about "the cool kids leaving WordPress for Framer" has a point, although I doubt that "the cool kids" care about PHP, Python, or whatever programming language is involved, when the promise is "no-code", "AI", and a "look". Yes, WordPress (core) has been quite stable and accessible, and most critical vulnerabilities used to come from plugins, which are also responsible for the inconsistent backoffice. However, with the Gutenberg block editor, WordPress introduced its own Framer/Wix/Divi/Elementor equivalent with the exact same problems: an inconsistent and immature UI somewhere in between the shiny no-code solutions and the old-school classic WordPress.
"I neeed a Website"
Customers often say something like "I neeed a website" (- What kind of website?) "similar to this or that" (completely different) "other website". They might tell an AI assistant or find a lookalike theme ready to use in some one-click-installer library, and a nice drag-and-drop, no-code interface to replace placeholder content with their own text and images, upload their logo and customize a color palette matching their corporate identity.
Voilà! A complete website made in a few hours, so what do we even need web developers and designers for?
What's an Individual Website?
What makes your website individual after all? There are some necessary ingredients like content (Who are you? What do you offer?) and design (your colors, your logo, your brand), and a lot of optional ones that might become more important once you try to sell an expensive service or product or when you want to outshine your competitors.
That's when we start talking about user experience, fun and creativity, accessibility, search engine optimization, quick loading speed, no serious errors, and not sacrificing one aspect when optimizing another.
I was part of teams that built 100% individual software in projects that ran several years, and I can write 100% individual HTML and CSS code from scratch for a simple individual website. In most projects though it wouldn't make much sense to reinvent the wheel instead of reusing existing default software components or services and accepting their quirks and limitations.
Customizing Existing Solutions
I will focus on free and open-source software like WordPress in this post, because of its potential advantages, like more control and a lower total cost of ownership, but in practice, WordPress isn't the same as WordPress, and I know some customers who pay an incredible bill for plugins, themes, and traffic every month, no matter if their website makes a lot of money or none at all.
What is WordPress anyway?
"WordPress" has become an umbrella term for many completely different approaches to web development, some of which don't differ much from Wix, Webflow or Squarespace as simplified and thus limited third-party solutions with managed hosting for regular subscription fees.
Managed Hosting
"Managed Hosting" is another unclear term that might mean paying a lot for hardly being able to change anything on your own website to a customer-friendly hosting service that comes with pre-installed plugins for backup, caching, cookie consent, and image compression and that automatically updates all of those and most of your custom plugins, like contact forms, image galleries or an online shop with WooCommerce, Germanized, and some popular payment providers.
When I have the chance and the budget to build a custom theme, following best practices and optimize it for efficiency, accessibility, search engines, and social sharing, my customers get a custom website, but I can still save some development time and point them to free online resources to learn how to add and edit content, upload a video, or manage their incoming messages.
Measuring the Benefit
Some advantages of one technical solution versus another are opinionated or anecdotical, so I built a practical example of a typical startup landing page and a minimal online shop to compare different solutions based on facts and numbers.
Pricing
Can I even compare WooCommerce to Wix, Webflow and Shopify without paying money just to test? WordPress hosting starts at about 2,- € per month, however cheap plans might trigger hidden costs like signing up for a minimum of 12 months or more! To keep it cheap in the long run, we must be careful to avoid freemium plugins that turn into costly monthly subscription when we exceed a certain number of pages, users, or purchases.
Likewise, website and ecommerce services can start cheap and get more expensive once your business or marketing volume grows. That said, the most basic web shops start at about 5,- € both for WordPress and Shopify, and at least 15,- € for Wix and Shopware, while we'd rather use the latter for complicated setups with dedicated managed hosting and professional support way beyond the price range that we look at here.
Developer Experience
Backend usablity is hard to quantify, although we could compare some typical use cases like adding and publishing a new page, replacing in image, or collaborating remotely while working on the same document. We might count necessary clicks, server response time and availability, or the statistical the risk of an error.
While I'd prefer a slow and akward backend that works over a better one that's unreliable or breaks my installation, but still it's no fun to work with either.
Developer experience beyond the backoffice dashboard: is it easy to customize features? Are there official APIs and up-to date documentation? Are we allowed to override core code or do we need a plan upgrade just to paste two lines of inline JavaScript?
SEO and Accessibility Best Practices
We can hardly measure success, as anything related to user engagement and search engine optimization is hard to attribute to specific changes to the website itself or external factors like backlinks, marketing campaigns.
Technical SEO and Structured Data
Structured content with semantic markup also depends a lot on content editors. Sub-headlines, lists, captions, invisible metadata, and schema attributes help search engines and assistive technology to understand a website. Deciding on what to write where using which keywords is an art hard to master and measure, and as a web developer, I can only provide you the appropriate tools and advice to make that possible.
On the other hand, choosing the wrong technology might make your good content hard to discover and discern even if you put a lot of effort into getting everything right.
Tools to Measure SEO and Accessiblity
However, there are checklists of best practices and official (legal) requirements like sufficient color contrast, and we can simply count the number of failed or passed checks to get numbers to work with.
Frontend Performance and Usability
Let's focus on the frontend and measurable metrics that can be compared and repeated empirically with automated audits.
Tools
- Lighthouse/PageSpeed audit (incl. tech. SEO, and accessibility)
- EDPB (WEC) website-audit (by the European Union)
- WAVE accessibility (a11y) audit
- Ecograder
- Websitecarbon
- Webpagetest (WPT)
Aspects and Metrics
- Time to Interactive (ms)
- Interaction to Next Paint (ms)
- Initial Page Weight (KB)
- Accessibility Compliance (number of errors)
- Ecological Footprint (CO2e)
- Green Hosting (boolean)
- SEO/Best Practices (percentage)
- Overall Lighthouse/PageSpeed Score (percentage)
Synthetic Data Analysis
I had created and published the following websites for the sake of this experiment. They were all hosted on the same server and contain similar content, as far as possible. At this point, I nearly gave up already.
I didn't compare specific online shop performance metrics yet. That's probably worth another case study, including Shopify and Shopware for an e-commerce-focused feature.
There is no free e-commerce option at all, and free plans of website builders like Wix or Webflow only offer limited functionality, and Squarespace onl offers a short free trial period, so it's hard to compare website projects realistically.
Even if I wanted to spend the money, I don't have enough time and motivation to do this properly, setting up test environments, ensuring comparable server performance and caching options etc. and so I have my gut feeling from working with several of those components eventually. Maybe it doesn't even make sense to compare minimal installations and then the whole endeavour becomes even more complicated.
A More Pragmatic Data Analysis Approach
So, I downsized my original experiment ideas to a pragmatic WordPress vs. WordPress experiment just by switching themes and plugins on the very same server instance (Prelovedshop.de) with the same pages, posts, products, and images, and run a small set of audits on the home pages that features a selection of products and post teasers:
- WordPress + WooCommerce + Elementor
- WordPress + WooCommerce + Divi
- WordPress + WooCommerce + Twenty Twenty-Five
- WordPress + WooCommerce + Twenty Twenty-Five Child, optimized
Audits:
- Lighthouse (page load, accessibility, privacy, SEO)
- SEObility (free plan)
That's a more hands-on scenario, and additionally, I could compare some of those values to real customer projects, "heavier" with more data, including images and even video, but also crafted more thoroughly than a quick tech demo like the half-baked second-hand shop without any real business value.
Key takeaways so far:
- Don't overthink and overengineer demo sites!
- My optimized WordPress theme wins for sure, but only marginally.
With no content at all, the default Twenty Twenty-Five WordPress theme reaches an overall 93/100 Lighthouse performance score, slightly topped by my custom theme's 99/100, but both have 100/100 accessibility and best practice, and most real websites profit most from properly using and optimizing images and videos.
Real World Use Cases
While the above examples can be compared and measured quantitatively, they might not convince customers as much as real websites do. I maintain other customer projects that I don't want to mention here, as they still use Webflow or WordPress page builders that I wouldn't recommend to use for a new project. I have also worked on corporate projects using React, Shopware, or Java-based software.
Conclusion
It might come as no surprise, that I prefer not to work with Wix, Webflow, Squarespace, or WordPress page builders as a web expert. I'd rather build a static website from scratch, use tools like Astro, Eleventy and React, or build a custom WordPress theme as a compromise between ready-made elements and customizability.
As a web designer, WordPress spares you from learning web development details, while stille offering more freedom of choice for a lower price compared to purely commercial hosting services. You can focus on your design or share development tasks between web designer and web developer.
Many business owners know WordPress or are willing to learn how to edit their content, and if set up correctly, we can keep running costs low for everyone and focus on what makes our designs and business ideas special.
Compared to Webflow and Wix, WordPress is the clear winner according to my metrics and my professional experience. And compared to page builders like Elementor or Divi, and an umodified default WordPress block theme, my optimized individual (child) theme wins within the WordPress ecosystem.
Top comments (1)
Being privacy-focused, I’ve explored platforms like WriteFreely. Ghost is interesting, but WordPress still feels like the easiest full-featured CMS for a site that can grow.
This post is really comprehensive - there’s a lot to unpack, so I’ll be coming back to it. I joined DEV this year as an easy way to share my learning journey, and this kind of content makes the platform so valuable.