Recently I have been having a lot of internal conversations with myself about CMS platforms, and the various page builders they can be associated with. A large part of this is due to the fact that recently I have been building a lot of websites—and have developed some objective opinions about website building as a practice, as well as the respective tools that help designers make websites efficiently and professionally.
To preface: I am not a website builder, per se. Sure, I can make websites, but when it comes to the higher levels of coding and development required to make tailor-made, enterprise-grade experiences, I recognize that there are actual web developers out there who represent the highest levels of this particular practice.
And I’m fine with that.
After all, my thing is communications production design—which converges the written word with 2-dimensional design, video, and photography. Put another way, my specialty is content design. While the practice of communications production design certainly converges with online experiences, rarely for me does it extend to a website’s actual ground-up development. Nonetheless, when it comes to websites, I have serviced many small to medium-sized businesses—and over time have worked in a lot of page builders.
For the last several months, much of my time has been broken between three page builders. The first two, Cornerstone and Elementor, are designed to work with WordPress—and actually, work quite well. The third, WebFlow, is more intricate than Cornerstone and Elementor—and is characterized by a steeper learning curve—but can be a satisfying experience for designers and coders alike.
While I am not a web developer, using these tools I have been able to create beautiful page experiences for clients as small as coffee shops and therapist offices, to as large as national law firms, and Las Vegas casinos. This is to say that when applied correctly, these tools are excellent.
Hell, these tools are more than excellent: These tools fuck.
So when 9/10 people ask me what they should be using to make their website, I tell them to get a WordPress, and call it a day. Between the themes, plugins, and diversity of tools that will help you create a website, there are few platforms as modular, open-ended, comprehensive, or well organized, as WordPress.
Scratch that, there are none.
But that doesn’t stop prospective clients from floating page builders they already use and asking if I can incorporate it into my workflow, or use it to enhance their current online experience. Some of these things have been great systems to learn. Webflow and Cornerstone are certainly some of those systems. All the same, however, it is not uncommon to be approached by someone every few years who wants me to try and work in a consumer-grade page builder platform, such as Wix—or even worse, SquareSpace.
For a long time, I would never recommend either of these platforms and for good reason. But in recent years, both of these page builders have become useful tools for businesses that did not have a designer on their team, but still needed a website that was replete with all of the modern conveniences of up-to-date online properties, such as a full-featured CMS suite for blog posts and gallery images. For such reasons, I have supported their existence—and have over time eventuated my opinions to the stance of telling people to build on what they can use, even if I still thought WordPress was the best.
More recently, however, I actually had to use these steaming piles of shit to build out some web pages for a client, and I’m just going to be honest with you and say that the experience was absolute-fucking-cancer. And that’s hardly me being hyperbolic (ok, maybe it is), but listen: elements are limited and fixed, UI systems are confusing and convoluted, server memory is low as piss, color schemes kill creativity. Logo applications are dumb, and just about everything “cool” that you would want to do with a website today—and could do in about 5 minutes on WordPress—is only ever the product of clicking through menu after menu of redundant options, terrible dialogue screens, and perilous save points that could send you back to the beginning of your design.
And I couldn’t help but think that if I’m someone with almost 14 years of experience, and I can’t use these platforms very easily, how the hell is a rank amateur going to get even remotely close to the vision of a website that they are being sold on TV, or in YouTube advertising slots? And if this is the state of page building almost 20 years since the advent of web 2.0, then page building really hasn’t moved very far, and truthfully, the question beckons if these are even real alternatives to WordPress at all. This, ultimately portends a potentially uncomfortable answer to another question: All business’ today should be running their pages off of WordPress, plain and simple. Let’s talk about why.
What Wix and Squarespace Sell Businesses
I think to get a better illustration of why WordPress is an essential service for business, we should first evaluate what it is exactly that Squarespace and Wix purport to offer their customers, and comparing that to what customers actually get. In a nutshell, both of these services claim to offer websites that are attractive, cost-effective, as well as easy to deploy, and easy to use. By focusing on these feature points, Wix and Squarespace have—for a few years now—tried to position themselves as legitimate alternatives to services such as WordPress, which many will rightfully claim requires a degree of indoctrinated knowledge. For such reasons, both Wix and Squarespace have introduced and popularized no code website design, or the use of page builders to create online experiences, and with the sole intention of targeting those that are traditionally not designers or coders.
If we are being completely fair, no-code design tools such as Wix and SquareSpace are also most likely responsible for more sophisticated tools that would later come down the road after it, such as Elementor, Cornerstone, and Webflow. And the reasoning behind why this is the case is pretty clear: no code design tools pose a significant degree of value proposition to not just non-designers, but also trained designers that are not trained coders. Therefore, with page-building tools that can appeal to the repertoire and sensibilities of experts, the process of web design is thus more transferrable between creatives of vastly different backgrounds.
Wix and Squarespace, however, do not sell robustness so much as it is that they sell accessibility and ease of use within the space of web design. Functionally, they are selling the idea that everybody needs a website, and for such reasons, they are the every-mans web builders. The problem is that what they deliver are experiences that either treat their users like idiots, don’t make sense, or are simply cumbersome, ram-intensive monstrosities that take forever to load, and generally end up producing page results that are more effort than they are worth. So far, every page I have made in each of these services has taken 2-3 times as long as they would to build in a WordPress-based page builder.
In the end, I think there is a strong argument behind saying that neither of these services functionally offer what they are claiming to provide. Sure, they are cost-effective, and easy to sign up for—but their attractiveness, ease of use, and deployability are entirely subjective to the needs, and ultimately skills, of the user. If you need a basic informational website, I am sure that either of these platforms would work just fine. But the moment that you may find yourself in need of a blog, a store, or more sophisticated features such as carousels, portfolios, and sign up forms, both Squarespace and Wix manage to rear their ugly heads as what they truly are: consumer-grade web design services that are trying to compete—with all of their limitations—in a professional-grade, or even production-grade, page builder marketplace.
Why Business Owners Can Sometimes Prefer These Platforms Over WordPress
Business owners, nonetheless, will still gravitate to these services for one reason, and one reason only: because they present themselves as alternatives to hiring experienced professionals to deliver a website. All the same, the tools recommended by these professionals are presented as being more complicated, harder to use, and infinitesimally more “fuck-up-able” than these very consumer-grade platforms that still end up producing more ugly websites for their customers than they produce functional, pretty ones.
To be fair, if it weren’t for amateur designers incorporating expert-level platforms—and then proceeding to completely shit all over their production—business owners wouldn’t feel as if the best person to take on the website design was themselves… And I don’t know if you’ve looked out there, but a whole lot of business owners think that they are qualified to make a website.
Of course, they’re not, but I’m sure you can guess what happens at this point: another ass-ugly website is built, and an angel gets its wings.
The truth of the matter is that I have had to go into WordPress-powered webpages that are built with page builders, where it is pretty clear that the design was either improvised by the client, or by a designer that did not fully know what they were doing. In these instances, it is pretty clear to understand that using page builders is not a silver bullet to getting quality and professional page designs for your website. Business owners are becoming hip to this, so it is natural that some would try taking a site build into their own hands as a cost-saving measure—particularly, after a “Designer” completely ratfucks an online business’ webpage with tools that they claimed would “make the process easy” but instead, has now left their client’s customer-facing brand looking like a mismatched Mr. Potato head.
Here’s the thing: for as much as I may bitch and moan about having to build webpages in Wix, or Squarespace, I can still make attractive web pages using these tools. And the reason why is because even though these services are each respectively flaming trash heaps, the suite of tools on offer are not by any means a replacement for my skills. The same applies to more robust tools that I prefer to use by comparison. Ultimately, the incorporation of platforms such as Elementor, Cornerstone, or WPToast, into my workflow is not a replacement for hard and fast knowledge of how webpages work as a product, and ultimately how design works as a discipline. Not knowing these things, or thinking that by simply having access to the tools of production, that you no longer need these things, not only produces additional work for whomever business owners hire to fix their mistakes, but they also do the work of damaging a brand that exists with the purpose of making that person money.
Why These Platforms Suck
While I believe that it is the responsibility of the designer to be clear in communicating what they are competent in, as well as where they lack skills, it is the responsibility of the client to trust the designer in their communicated competencies. That is why over-promising, and under-delivering on technical capabilities can be so damaging to businesses, and designers as a whole. Because when it comes time for people to receive advice, even if someone is hearing the correct information, they can be resistant to implementing it because of times in the past when they had been burned before.
Ultimately, clients that are using websites on Wix and Squarespace should want a designer that knows how to use WordPress, and for the fact that WordPress simply offers a level of modularity that allows for each client’s page—and even page backend—to have a tailor-made feature set that is specific to each business.
Now, if you do not have a designer, and consumer-grade page builders are working well for you, then great! But ultimately, these platforms end up producing more problems than they solve for designers because we are used to having access to a certain level of flexibility so that we are able to truly create the things that we want. The pain points associated with Wix and Squarespace tend to present themselves most of the time as features that make the page building process easier—and from a beginner-level view, I can see that—but when it comes to applying the efforts of experts, many of the quality of life features that are designed to make page building easy for regular people, end up making life frustratingly hard for those that have a clear idea of what they are looking for.
Drawbacks Of Running a WordPress Page
This isn’t to say that WordPress doesn’t have its own drawbacks as well. Some of the criticisms of the platform are that there are avowedly no-code solutions on the market that are more streamlined while still being feature-rich. Webflow is arguably one of these solutions that have come up in recent years—and does have measurable speed advantages over WordPress in the realm of page building. A more common criticism of WordPress, however, is that it is hard to use, and is arguably “more CMS than the average user wants, or requires.”
While both of these criticisms are valid, I want to take a brief moment to discuss the second point: that WordPress is more CMS than the average user wants or needs. I think that if we are looking at webpages from the stance of updating them, then yes, this very well may be the case—as keeping a webpage updated may likely require the continued involvement of a designer, be they third party or in house. But if you are trying to utilize these sites for their content management functionalities, be they portfolio management, blogging, or galleries, WordPress is an entirely digestible platform for even unindoctrinated users to understand. Furthermore, it is the gold standard of content management.
Another drawback that is oftentimes not mentioned is that while WordPress is extremely open-ended as a platform, many of its best plugins are paid experiences, meaning that it is not always the best option for those looking to get sites put up in a manner that is cost-effective. It is entirely likely that the cost of getting your WordPress site off the ground will be anywhere from 300-500 dollars. While that number is a pittance to many businesses, if you are an individual or just starting out, it very well can be a large enough expense to make you consider the value proposition of what is being offered—as well as what you are using it for.
The Cost of Doing Business
Ultimately, however, for what criticisms can be leveled against WordPress, I no longer believe that they are valid enough to completely rule it out as a viable platform for businesses of all scales. And here’s why: because no matter what service you use, each one is going to have something about it that is confusing or cumbersome—particularly features related to content management.
The reality is that for what all-in-one page builder, content management systems that there are out there, very few actually compare to the dedicated, and regimented experience that WordPress can provide. Regardless of whether we point to consumer-grade tools such as Wix and SquareSpace, or professional-grade tools such as Webflow, all of these systems treat content management as an afterthought. For businesses that aspire to have content as a regular part of their marketing operation, that should be a factor of most significance.
But I am no longer of the opinion that businesses shouldn’t learn certain things, or incorporate certain technologies because they are “confusing,” or “hard.” There are people who think that running a digital cash register is hard upon the first time opening it. There are people who think that iPhones are hard, and yes, there are people who think email is hard. The difference is that people of all ages learn these systems because they feel that they are essential to certain parts of their lives—be that making them money, keeping tabs on loved ones, or making sure that the clocks stay running in their life.
Like cash registers, web pages are an essential part of owning a business. If you do not want to have a webpage, then don’t have a business, but no longer am I of the opinion that business owners shouldn’t learn industry-standard tools because, for all intents and purposes, they don’t get them on first brush.
Ultimately, if you want to do certain things, you have to learn certain things. If you want an operation that functions in a certain way, be that brick and mortar, digital, or hybrid, you have to invest in making that kind of capability and functionality possible. Sometimes that can cost money, but other times that investment is in time. Picking a consumer-level page builder and CMS doesn’t functionally save more time that the business manager will have to commit to learning that CMS, and building a content strategy around using it. So if a time investment is required of you, then don’t waste what time you have, and invest it in learning professional things.
Regardless of what ease of use Wix and Squarespace may claim to offer, it will be hard for these platforms to serve your needs after the process of building your website is complete. That is why picking a professional-grade platform for your business—and learning that platform—is an essential component to starting an online presence. It is no different than if you wanted enterprise-grade storefront software. I wouldn’t tell you to start a Wix page, I’d tell you to get on WooCommerce, because it is a professional grade tool. The reality is that if you are running a professional operation, you should be running professional software—so that you are not only saving yourself time and headache, but also so that you can readily bring other professionals into your operation who know what they are doing, and what they are interacting with. This is why industry standards exist: why job advertisements ask for knowledge of platform-agnostic experiences that everybody has some experience with, such as Adobe Creative Suite, and Microsoft word. Ultimately, professional tools accommodate the work of other professionals. So if you are a business owner trying to build a website, and you want to work with professionals, if you are wondering if your business needs a WordPress website, the answer is yes.
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