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

Spider web hosting vs WordPress vs website builder: Which is best?

laptop on a desk displaying website templates

(Image credit: Photo by Domenico Loia on Unsplash)

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

If you cull to build a site using ane of the best website builders, you have to decide how much of the piece of work will exist undertaken by you, and how much you'll outsource to developers or experts. The all-time approach to a site will depend entirely on how much time you can spare, the level of control you want over the build, and the amount of technical cognition yous've got.

Thankfully, website builders provide a strong selection for creating sites when yous've non got the necessary feel. With their unproblematic elevate-and-drop interfaces, anyone can make a website, even if you lot don't know HTML, CSS, or JavaScript code. These builders create the underlying lawmaking for you lot, and save yous the difficult work.

If you're edifice a site yourself or with a web blueprint visitor, yous'll need to buy web hosting from one of the best web hosting services. Here, you're renting disk space on a remote figurer server, onto which you upload your site's files, allowing visitors to and then admission the site from all effectually the world.

Nonetheless, if all of that sounds besides complex or likewise much work for you, in that location'south a 3rd option in content management organization (CMS) software, which makes creating web pages simpler. WordPress is the most well-known CMS, and has a item focus on blogging sites. You tin can create and publish a WordPress site in a few minutes or hours, fifty-fifty without web development experience.

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

Web hosting vs WordPress vs website builders: Web hosting

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

When you buy web hosting, you get online storage infinite, and the rest is upwardly to you. Buying a web hosting service gives y'all the greatest control over how your website will turn out, but it invariably increases the amount of work yous must exercise to go your website off the ground.

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 any i piece of software.

Hosting providers often accept one-click installers for popular CMSs that can save you lots of time. Nearly companies demand non reinvent the cycle, then information technology makes sense to utilize 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 development bike
Increased maintenance and direction

WordPress

You lot can install the gratis WordPress CMS via one of the best WordPress hosting providers, or yous can host your site and utilize a website builder for WordPress, installable as plugins.

The best thing is how easy it is to build a website with WordPress through its browser-based editor. Thousands of themes be for WordPress, so y'all can rapidly accept a professional-looking site, and there are over 55,000 WordPress plugins yous can install that add together functionality to your website.

WordPress is an excellent choice to go a fully performance website upwardly and running quickly. However, security is a business on WordPress sites. The software itself is considered relatively secure, but themes and plugins are all developed by distinct people, so bugs and security holes are often introduced. WordPress is the about hacked CMS in the world.

While WordPress itself is free, premium themes and plugins are not. You must also update the software regularly as 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 you're selling goods online, consider a more ecommerce focused CMS similar Shopify.

Pros:

Thousands of themes
Powerful plugins
Like shooting fish in a barrel multi-creator blogging

Cons:

Toll of plug-ins tin can mount up
Ameliorate options exist for ecommerce sites
Security is a concern

Website builders

Wix's homepage — A website builder like Wix is fast and simple to employ but has limited scalability (Image credit: Wix)

Website builders such as Wix, Weebly, and Squarespace create website code for you. Y'all need not know anything virtually website development to use a website builder, as all y'all do is drag and drop the elements you desire onto the page.

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

Unfortunately, website builders are rather simplistic, then you're restricted to specific, generic templates. Calculation functionality to your site that isn't inherently function of the website edifice tool is challenging, making scaling your site up subsequently a problem.

Finally, the created website code is machine-generated and then 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 architect forever.

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

Pros:

Fast website cosmos
Low cost
No technical knowledge required

Cons:

Difficult to transfer code
Cookie-cutter designs
Poor scalability