Since 2003, when it was released, WordPress has grown from just a blogging platform to an infamous content management system. Daily reports from W3Techs reveal that it powers almost 38% of all websites.
Despite its market share, reputation, and a library of thousands of plugins and themes, WordPress is afflicted by certain shortcomings.
- It’s self-managed. From managing updates and backups to web security issues, the responsibility of managing everything is yours. This can be difficult for anyone who doesn’t have the time or tech-skill, or both.
- There’s no drag-and-drop editor. It can take beginners some time to get used to website designing. You need an additional plugin for this functionality.
- WordPress websites are at the receiving end of countless hacking attempts. This can be attributed to the old programming techniques used for WordPress’ code. It also doesn’t block multiple failed login attempts, which is a security threat in itself.
- Unless you reach for plugins, necessary functionalities such as lead generation, as well as sitemaps and Meta Descriptions for SEO are absent.
- Many plugins and themes can often provide similar functionality. This makes it difficult to figure out whether the code you want to modify resides in the theme or the plugin.
Read on to find out about some of the best WordPress alternatives we have.
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WIX
For those seeking fully responsive and customizable templates, Wix is one of the best alternatives to WordPress. While WordPress offers a range of themes, it’s tedious for beginners to customize them. Wix offers easy customization right from the free plan. All you need to do is drag the elements around and drop them with a click of your mouse. You also get animations and video backgrounds. Some other features of the platform include:
- Smart assistance with Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) for certain types of projects such as yoga sites, portfolios, etc.
- A host of business-focused apps, such as those for restaurants and hotels, and
- eCommerce support with the paid plans.
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Weebly
If you want an exceptionally intuitive website builder, Weebly is the easiest choice. To date, it has created almost 50 million websites. While the free plan comes with a small Weebly banner in the footer and also lacks a proper domain name, you can connect to a domain name for a monthly charge of $6 onwards. Let’s look at the features:
- A flexible blog feature. It allows a host of different layouts with the available elements such as galleries, video integration, contact forms, etc.
- An integrated audio and video player in the pro plan.
- Hundreds of apps on the App Center.
- A team management feature, to help you assign and give access to editors.
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Squarespace
This website builder is a popular choice for creative users. It comes with a range of stylish designs, along with some other features such as:
- Responsive designs.
- Functionality to import a WordPress blog. One downside to using Squarespace for blogging, though, is you can’t adjust meta descriptions and page titles for each post.
- Scheduling of posts, multi-author functionality, useful commenting features, AMP support, etc.
- Functionality to host your own podcast.
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Jimdo
Jimdo has had over 20 million websites built on it to date. It is a good free website builder. You can start with its free basic plan, and explore the following features:
- Ease of use. It is a platform geared towards beginner bloggers.
- Straightforward editing with the Style menu. It is a fantastic visual tool to make site-wide changes such as font colors and size. It also saves a lot of time.
- Competitive SEO. Jimdo’s backend provides full control over elements such as the URL, the page title, and description. It offers SSL encryption, another ranking factor for SEO.
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Site123
Staying true to its name, Site123 helps you build a website in as little as three easy steps – you choose a design, put in content, and, finally, go live with it. Its designs come in general categories such as an online store, portfolio, or business. Some of its likable features are:
- It is multilingual. You can thus translate your website if you want.
- The free plan lets you test the features for as long as you want.
- The interface is easy and almost as simple as filling up a form. With everything predefined, rest assured that your content will display correctly.
- The advanced plan offers an e-commerce feature as well as mass emailing.
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Shopify
Shopify is one of the best online store builders in the market, especially for big projects. With over 800,000 stores online, $63 billion in sales, offices worldwide, and more than 3000 employees, it is the leading e-commerce solution. Check out its features:
- Not tech-savvy? Don’t worry, Shopify allows you to do almost everything in just a few clicks. It has a great interface for beginners.
- There is an excellent quantity as well as quality of designs, all of which are mobile responsive.
- You get complete access to the code and thus have flexibility in customizing the templates.
- It provides easy scalability for online stores of any size.
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Joomla!
Although a little complicated, this is a strong, flexible, and multi-purpose CMS platform. With millions of worldwide users, it has a big community of developers. Here are some of its features:
- It comes with plenty of templates and extensions to allow customization of your site.
- It runs on most web hosting platforms.
- Joomla! comes with extensive documentation and a community support system.
- It is a secure platform, with built-in 2-factor authentication.
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Webnode
Webnode is among the largest players in website creation, with over 40 million registered users. Its most interesting feature is the multilingual support – over 20 languages. It even offers support in all the languages. Here are some more features:
- Backup and restore feature in the paid plans.
- Ease of use. You get a convenient drag and drop editor to add sections to pages.
- Responsive designs with a lot of variety.
- An integrated e-commerce solution.
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Ghost
This is a NodeJS based platform perfect for users who want to solely focus on blogging. Its best features are:
- It keeps the clutter away and allows you a clean writing experience. Your readers too, get a cleaner browsing experience.
- It has built-in SEO features, from canonical tags and XML sitemaps to AMP pages and metadata.
- It comes with a free SSL certificate.
- You have built-in social sharing options.
- You can integrate over a thousand third-party services with your Ghost site. Zapier allows this functionality.
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Duda
Founded in 2008, Duda specializes in mobile websites. Duda’s Responsive Website Builder, though, optimizes your site for not just smartphones but also a tablet or a computer. It comes with the following features:
- A unique website personalization tool to send customized offers to your visitors, based on their location or browsing history.
- The ability to create a multilingual website.
- An easy-to-use drag and drop editor. This is a fairly intuitive way to build a website.
- Backup and restore feature to help you with major site changes.
What is the best WordPress alternative?
Switching your provider can be challenging once you have your website up and running. It is best to research well and choose your priority – whether it is customizability or a multilingual website, or even competent SEO. For the most part, Wix is a great WordPress alternative in terms of ease of use, excellent templates, flexibility, and SEO.