There are a lot of reasons developers and designers new and old to the scene love WordPress. When the WordPress framework is uploaded onto your own hosting, it affords developers access to hundreds of thousands of themes and tools to make not just building, but updating and managing a website (even a large one) a breeze. WordPress also gives you the ability to neatly create full-site backups in seconds, and to transfer, upload, or download massive amounts of content with the click of a button.
But are the days of WordPress becoming numbered? It used to be that it dominated the list of top 10 website builders, but as Wix, Weebly, and now dozens of other website builders crack onto the scene, WordPress’ domination of the market share of 74 million websites is being steadily chipped away. Here’s a breakdown of major competitors, and why their unique strategies may contribute to the ultimate decline of WordPress.
Via pixabay.com
Wix
Wix is the elephant in the room. At only $4 a month, it compares easily in cost to a self-hosted wordpress website, and offers easy drag-and-drop website building for those who might not be so code-savvy… just like Squarespace. They’ll also give you a free domain name just for signing up.
It allows you to track membership to your site, to create and send newsletters, and even to create an app of your site. It offers stellar ecommerce services, and offers a truly exhaustive roster of support for users: support staff, forums, knowledgebases, and more. Like Squarespace, everything is internally updated, removing any concern about compatibility issues.
Wix offers a massive and fully comprehensive library of themes which, though they may only rarely push the envelope design-wise, can easily be made more visually interesting once selected. One key failing of Wix is that its templates aren’t responsive… but to account for this, it offers users access to a mobile version of their site which is fully editable. Another failing is that you cannot easily switch between templates, meaning you’ll lose all your content and data if you decide to switch.
Wix was founded in 2006, but had gained a major market share as early as 2010. Of all of the major website builders, it is the only one listed on NASDAQ, and has a polished history of being able to generate investment capital to launch new initiatives. Wix has a market share of 67 million users.
Squarespace
Squarespace is, simply put, easier to use and customize for your average layman. While self-hosted WordPress sites offer virtually infinite customization, more and more people are wanting to cut out the middle-man (the web developer) and make a website themselves. Squarespace’s tools are, simply, easier to use. There is virtually no learning curve, and you need to do less double-checking to ensure things appear how you want, because with Squarespace, what you see is what you get.
Squarespace also has a better system of support, and also offers dedicated support. Rather than offering over 100,000 themes and plugins all created by individual users, the Squarespace team has built their own tools all of a consistent quality, and has uploaded specific tutorials (video and text) to help users learn to work with them. Being a closed system, they also manage their own software updates. Anyone who’s worked with WordPress before knows that update compatibility issues can literally leave a website dead in the water.
Squarespace only offers a few templates, but they easily compare to (or outperform) many popular WordPress templates. If you want to shift your template, you can do so with the click of a button and not lose any content. Their templates are also automatically responsive, and beautifully so.
So, for some types of website builders, and absolutely for those who don’t like the uncertainty of potential update issues, Squarespace actually has a small leg up over WordPress in terms of usability.
Squarespace was founded in 2004, but really began blowing up in 2011. It has a current market share of almost 2 million users, which is growing rapidly.
The Bottom Line
Has the introduction of these competitors actually hurt WordPress’ share of the market? Probably not… yet. But Alexa will tell you that Wix ranks 250th globally for visits, which is no mean feat! And with their new ad campaigns likely to be reeling in more visitors, it’s likely that WordPress may become the choice purely for experienced developers, while the larger numbers of the html-incompetent choosing options like Wix or Squarespace.
from Darlene Milligan http://ift.tt/1OqeTmr via tips for small business growth
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