Web hosting vs WordPress vs website builder: Which is best?

Web hosting vs WordPress vs website builder: Which is all-time?

laptop on a desk displaying website templates

(Paradigm credit: Photo by Domenico Loia on Unsplash)

When it comes to creating a new website, there are a serial of options open to you or your business: web hosting, WordPress, and website builders. All three of these methods can be used together, so they're not mutually exclusive options for building a site: but it's useful to have each service divers, and so that you know where to begin.

If yous choose to build a site using one of the all-time website builders, you take to decide how much of the piece of work volition be undertaken by you, and how much you'll outsource to developers or experts. The all-time arroyo to a site will depend entirely on how much time yous tin can spare, the level of control you want over the build, and the amount of technical cognition you've got.

Thankfully, website builders provide a stiff choice for creating sites when you've not got the necessary experience. With their elementary drag-and-drop interfaces, anyone can make a website, even if you don't know HTML, CSS, or JavaScript code. These builders create the underlying code for you, and save you the hard work.

If you're building a site yourself or with a web design company, you'll demand to purchase web hosting from ane of the best web hosting services. Here, you lot're renting disk space on a remote computer server, onto which yous upload your site's files, allowing visitors to then admission the site from all effectually the globe.

However, if all of that sounds too complex or likewise much piece of work for yous, there's a 3rd option in content direction arrangement (CMS) software, which makes creating spider web pages simpler. WordPress is the almost well-known CMS, and has a detail focus on blogging sites. You lot tin create and publish a WordPress site in a few minutes or hours, even without spider web development feel.

In this comparison feature, we discuss and evaluate these iii options, pitting web hosting vs WordPress vs website builders and exploring their relative pros and cons for site building.

Web hosting vs WordPress vs website builders: Spider web hosting

HostGator's homepage — A web hosting service offers maximum flexibility merely expertise is required (Image credit: HostGator)

When you buy web hosting, you get online storage space, and the rest is up to you. Buying a web hosting service gives you the greatest command over how your website volition turn out, but it invariably increases the amount of work you must do to become your website off the footing.

Having your own web hosting from the beginning makes it easier to add additional features to your website when your business grows. You're also not locked into using whatsoever i piece of software.

Hosting providers often take one-click installers for popular CMSs that can salve y'all lots of time. Most companies need not reinvent the wheel, so information technology makes sense to use tools that make building and managing your site easier instead of creating everything from scratch.

Pros:

Maximum flexibility
A huge number of providers
Scales well

Cons:

Requires technical expertise
Longer evolution cycle
Increased maintenance and management

WordPress

You tin can install the free WordPress CMS via ane of the all-time WordPress hosting providers, or yous tin can host your site and use a website builder for WordPress, installable as plugins.

The best affair is how easy it is to build a website with WordPress through its browser-based editor. Thousands of themes exist for WordPress, so you tin rapidly have a professional person-looking site, and at that place are over 55,000 WordPress plugins you tin can install that add functionality to your website.

WordPress is an excellent option to go a fully functioning website upward and running quickly. However, security is a business concern on WordPress sites. The software itself is considered relatively secure, but themes and plugins are all adult past singled-out people, so bugs and security holes are often introduced. WordPress is the nearly hacked CMS in the globe.

While WordPress itself is gratis, premium themes and plugins are not. Yous must likewise update the software regularly equally security holes are patched, which can inadvertently render a theme or plugin on your site unusable until it has been updated.

Finally, although selling goods on a WordPress site is possible, WordPress wasn't built with ecommerce in mind. If y'all're selling appurtenances online, consider a more ecommerce focused CMS like Shopify.

Pros:

Thousands of themes
Powerful plugins
Easy multi-creator blogging

Cons:

Cost of plug-ins can mountain up
Better options exist for ecommerce sites
Security is a concern

Website builders

Wix's homepage — A website builder like Wix is fast and uncomplicated to use merely has limited scalability (Paradigm credit: Wix)

Website builders such as Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace create website code for you lot. Y'all need not know anything about website development to use a website architect, every bit all you exercise is drag and driblet the elements you want onto the page.

The other major advantage of using a website builder is speed. You can brand a website much more quickly using a website builder than if you were coding each page yourself.

Unfortunately, website builders are rather simplistic, so you're restricted to specific, generic templates. Adding functionality to your site that isn't inherently part of the website building tool is challenging, making scaling your site up later a problem.

Finally, the created website code is machine-generated so information technology can be hard for a web designer to work with. This makes transferring your website to other platforms difficult, essentially locking you into using the website builder forever.

Website builders are a fine choice for modest, basic websites that won't need to grow into something bigger in the time to come, but their limitations brand them a poor choice for everything else.

Pros:

Fast website creation
Low price
No technical cognition required

Cons:

Difficult to transfer lawmaking
Cookie-cutter designs
Poor scalability