WordPress vs. Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy

When your small or medium sized business needs a website, you have two basic choices. First, there are DIY solutions like Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy, which promote their proprietary website packages based on their simplicity and quick setup. However, their simplicity comes at a cost, including the inability to fully customize the website’s look and functionality.

Then, there are more professional solutions, like WordPress. These options can be DIY for some people, but companies most often use skilled WordPress website developers to build a website. WordPress is the best website solution for creating and managing a professional website because it gives you complete control over the look and functionality of your website. Let’s take a look at WordPress vs. Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy.

The Appeal of Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy

There’s no denying that proprietary platforms like Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy have appeal. They allow users to get a basic website up and running quickly, freeing them from the hassle of coding their site or dealing with intricate settings. Adding to the appeal for novice website owners is these platforms’ “complete package” approach, including the site builder, hosting, and sometimes email.

But very often, those who were initially happy with their choice of Wix, Squarespace, or GoDaddy become unhappy very quickly as soon as they run up against their many limitations.

Limitations of Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy

Limited Design Options

By design, these proprietary platforms (and others) have limited functionality and don’t support complete customization, or they make customizations very difficult. Each tool — whether it’s designed to place an image, create columns on a page, build an FAQ, or any other design element — prescribes what you can do and how things look. These restrictions aren’t too much of a problem if you are running a simple blog site. However, limited functionality and limited customization can quickly become a problem for business owners.

Far Fewer Options

The limitations aren’t just about design but also functionality. One of the most significant problems with proprietary website companies like Wix, Squarespace, and Godaddy Website Builder is that you can’t add your own complex code, develop your own software modules, or even choose from prewritten software that other companies might have created.

Why is this so? With these platforms, a staff of dozens of developers decides how each element might work, whether it’s a menu, a calendar, a form, or something else. There might be two or three such tools to choose from, but you are stuck if you don’t like any of them.

Basically, if you want to do ANYTHING that their few dozen developers haven’t thought of, there’s nothing you can do about it.

Poor Support

Keep in mind that the ONLY place to get professional support for these platforms is from the company itself, and they are all known to have notoriously bad customer support. Don’t take it from us, but instead do a little Googling for terms like “Wix Support Sucks,” “Squarespace Support Reviews” or check Youtube for some “Godaddy Website Builder Review videos.”

These reviews are, across the board, very, very, very poor.

Contrast that with support for WordPress.

WordPress is supported by hundreds of thousands of individual web developers and programmers. There are also tens of thousands of people in user forums on Reddit and other sites that will happily give you free advice. And don’t forget that your closest support alternatives are usually your own web developer and web host.

Provider Lock-In

Then, there is the issue of proprietary platforms locking you into their services. In reality, you are renting your website rather than owning it because their website builder only runs on their servers. If you become dissatisfied with the provider’s service, you can’t move your website somewhere else without totally rebuilding it.

And if a disaster happens and you somehow lose your account, you can’t take a backup file generated there to restore your file on another system.

These realities complicate migrating to a superior platform like WordPress without skilled technical support.

They Just Might Get You In Legal Trouble

Finally, proprietary platforms aren’t typically very compliant with regulatory requirements. The reason stems from using outdated, proprietary, or extremely complex code that is just too difficult for them to change when regulations change.

For example, business websites are now required to be ADA-compliant, which means certain kinds of “tags” must be present in some elements, and certain other elements must be built in specific ways. Altogether, there are nearly 100 different success criteria to make a website ADA-compliant. However, these proprietary platforms just do not allow you to customize elements as much as you might need to, and their own programmers can’t even make global changes to their systems without potential adverse effects on thousands of websites.

This makes websites hosted on the platforms especially vulnerable to lawsuits based on failure to comply with ADA accessibility requirements.

Similarly, Privacy Compliance regulations require that websites notify users that browser cookies are set and that data is collected about their visit. No data is allowed to be collected until the visitor agrees. However, when these privacy laws came into effect, beginning in 2018, almost none of these proprietary sites could give website owners the ability to follow the regulations.

WordPress vs. Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy

WordPress dominates the website development market with a 63% share versus 4% and 3% for Wix and Squarespace, respectively (see chart). WordPress’s market dominance and open-source technology offer advantages that proprietary platform solutions cannot match, starting with flexibility and customization.

Tens of thousands of WordPress developers support countless websites globally and have thousands of free and paid plugins and themes at their disposal to provide any functionality an organization needs or desires.

Note: Chart compiled by ChatGPT using readily available 2024 data.

When your website is built using WordPress, you have full ownership and control of everything, including your content, custom coding for specialized functionality, and more. Because WordPress is universally supported, you can easily migrate support to any qualified WordPress developer.

WordPress is an open-source platform supported by a global community of developers and contributors. As a result, the code is continually updated to meet the latest standards and can be freely used by any qualified WordPress developer. Clean, standardized code means upgrading WordPress websites to meet new industry and government regulations is easy. GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, and ADA compliance can all be handled with available software, which is another reason why WordPress is the best website solution.

West Hills Web Is Your WordPress Resources

Sure, it’s easy to say WordPress is the best website solution. Fortunately, we can provide ample evidence supporting this claim through our portfolio of successful websites and happy clients, many of whom we’ve moved away from proprietary platforms like Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy. So, we understand firsthand the limitations these proprietary solutions impose.

We build every website to our client’s exact specifications, using the latest WordPress code and the plug-ins your website needs for full functionality. When your website goes live, you own everything and can rest assured that any qualified WordPress developer can provide support. Of course, we hope we are that developer for years to come and will work tirelessly to ensure your satisfaction.

Find out for yourself why in the battle of WordPress vs. Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy, WordPress is the best website solution and West Hills Web is the right web developer for you. Call us at 818-592-6370 or use our online contact form.

We look forward to making your website future-proof and unforgettable.