If you're new to website building - you're probably wondering, what the fuck is Wordpress? Wordpress is a free and open-source blogging tool used by millions of users. It was first launched in 2003, and makes use of web software languages such as PHP. It was made by Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little when the two met in the summer of 2003, while working with Automattic. They would later go on to build many awesome things (such as Tumblr, WooCommerce and Vaultpress) - but it was the open-source project WordPress that made them famous and propelled them into becoming one of the most respected companies in web development.
According to a 2012 W3Techs estimate, WordPress now powers 28.5% of all the websites on the internet. In November 2016, WordPress was used by 27.4% of the top 10 million websites
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There are a ton of ways to build a site in Wordpress. Like, seriously, we mean waaaay too many different ways people 'claim' are the best ways to build a Wordpress site. Most popularly, people use what is known as a Wordpress page builder. This is where you have an interface that lets you drag and drop elements that make up your site. For example, you start by adding sections and then splitting them into columns and then add modules into these columns. So if you want a video, you would drop a video module into the column and then add in your link.
There's a ton of different Wordpress page builders out there, but some of the most popular include visual composer, DIVI (awful, stay away!) and Elementor.
Elementor is probably the most popular WordPress page builder plugin that enables you to create and design your websites pretty quickly and easily. It has a lot of cool templates, colours, designs, and features and due to it's popularity is generally the 'go-to' for most newbie website builders, entrepreneurs or small businesses.
Sounds great right? Just the solution you've been itching to get your hands on. Not so fast. At Dab Hand Marketing, we've been building websites for over 6 years and have seen a drastic change in the available technologies and methods. So, without further ado, here's why Wordpress is a terrible choice for your modern day web project.
If you opt to use Elementor, it relies on jQuery—a JavaScript library that helps developers create interactive effects and animations in their web projects. This means that Elementor is only able to do what it does because of the help from jQuery, and this can make it slow to load, or significantly slow down page load time.
So you guys can see this yourself, we have done a side by side comparison of a site which we had originally built for one of our clients in Wordpress. This has a load speed of
With the new site, you can clearly see a massive increase in load speeds.
Website load speed is an important metric for many companies. Loading time has a big impact on conversions on websites (conversions being a fancy word for 'your user fulfilling an action you, as the company, want...for example, clicking on the buy button).
When you have a slow loading website, it will reduce the amount of people who convert. People will get frustrated and may even abandon your site before the page loads. The CNN International Web Team investigated to find out more about what slows down loading times for mobile internet users around the world. They found that in 2013, 5% of smartphone users said they had abandoned a website because it was too slow to load, but in 2014 this number increased dramatically to 38%.
2 - Security
Even though Wordpress is one of the most popular and widely used website builders on the internet. This means it also has a lot of vulnerabilities. With some clever malware, attackers can inject some malicious code into your website for you to unknowingly display on all your visitors’ screens. This means hackers can push any kind of content onto your site, which could be a virus or something to steal confidential information from your visitors like credit card numbers and passwords.
WordPress has faced its fair share of attacks in recent years, with many famous sites being hacked because they were running outdated versions of WordPress. As a site manager it is crucial that you log into Wordpress and update plugins, themes and the Wordpress core whenever there is an update available. By skipping this out, you leave your website completely open to anyone with a bit of knowledge on how to get in.
For your personal blog about cats or travels, this doesn't matter so much if you got hacked (obviously it would be super annoying and take some time and effort to fix), but for large scale e-commerce stores this is a massive issue.
"Nah, Harry...I don't believe you. My site won't get hacked!"
Don't be so naive. Research shows that over 3 million websites since 2008 have been hacked. This is an average of 508,000 hacks per year. Even some of the highly guarded, best protected and built sites are vulnerable to competent hackers.
Wordpress is free and open-source, so it's available for download on the internet. As this means that anyone can create a plugin, there are a lot of plugins out there that are not up to date with the latest Wordpress code features. This is why you'll need to update your plugins and themes so they're compatible with all of Wordpress' recent updates.
Another factor where load speeds are affected is through uploading images, as these will be stored on your server in addition to the ones already saved on your computer when you created graphics or logos for your website. When WordPress needs to go out and fetch a web page for some other plugin, theme, or WordPress core update etc., it loads all of
Even though wordpress is open source, you still need a good host to make it work optimally. Yes, there are a lot of cheap hosting providers out there like blue host - but, like everything in life, you get what you pay for.
However, today - there is a much better solution that we think you should consider
The solution? Webflow!
What is webflow?
Webflow is a design tool for crafting and publishing responsive websites. You can use its visual editor to create your content, and publish it on any device without having to code anything.
Unlike Wordpress, Webflow is fast because it doesn't depend on jQuery, which also makes the page load more smoothly. Wordpress site load speeds are slow with websites that use a wordpress page builder (like elementor) as these plugins delay the loading of web pages by relying on jQuery, and thus make your site slow to load.
2 - Free hosting
If you are planning on building a site but don't intend on making any content changes you can actually host your website for Free. Yes! You read that right. Free!
What is a static site?
Static websites are websites that use HTML, CSS and JavaScript code to create a web page. Static sites don't need any type of server side programming or databases because all the content is generated from static files that are published to the web server.
Find out more about how to host your webflow website for free here:
https://www.udesly.com/webflow-to-netlify/
^ The guys at Udesly are awesome and have some well written and easy to follow guides. Honestly, it's a doddle!
Netlify is a service that lets you deploy static websites with zero downtime and in the cloud for free. It also provides Continuous Deployment, which makes it handy for teams to work on different parts of your site without needing to update each other's code.
Easy To Edit
Complex Data Management
If you wanted to setup a site like geelongaccesshire.com.au (with a ton of machines, all with their own site, description and custom fields) in Wordpress, you'd need to buy a re-occuring yearly subscription to a plugin (advanced custom fields or JetEngine), install, manage, update and educate your client on how to use it all.
With Webflow, all of this is built in. You (or your development team) just need to setup the fields so that you can add the info in. This is all done natively in Webflows back-end.
Cheaper In The Long Run
So as a monthly commitment, yes it doesn't appear on the surface that Webflow is a more expensive... but have you considered all of the extra costs associated with Wordpress? The hosting fee's (which can range anywhere from £5 - £75 a month) For a detailed hosting review check out this post: https://www.dabhandmarketing.com/post/honest-review-the-best-wordpress-hosting-for-2020 )
Although Elementor is 'free' - the free version is super limited in what it can do. You can't make layouts for WooCommerce, or template layouts for pages like blogs, search results or 404 pages. So you'll need to spend £100 or so per year for the premium subscription. Either that, or you will have to install a ton of extra plugins to get the same functions as the premium version without spending any dollah!
You'll also undoubtedly spend your money on extra plugins (like JetEngine for complex data managment... which is available in Webflow as default with no extra costs). So say, an extra £100 a year on a few essential plugins to improve your work.
Doesn't sound like Webflow's $20US a month is actually that expensive any more does it?
SEO Friendly
SEO stands for "search engine optimization". SEO are techniques used on websites to improve their rankings in the search results of a web search engine.
SEO is important for any company or business because it helps potential customers find them online when they are looking for companies in their niche. This is especially true if your competitors have a ranking higher than you do on Google, Bing, Yahoo etc.
With Wordpress, you'd need to download a plugin called yoast (further bloating your site and adding an extra thing to update) but with Webflow... it's all built in! Meaning you can easily add meta descriptions, titles, shareable images (for social media) and a ton of other important features.
Conclusion
Hopefully after reading this, you're going to throw Wordpress straight in the bin. Honestly, it is an awful platform full of issues, vulnerabilities and other junk that make your web project a total nightmare. If you, or your clients, have any real desire to be beyond mediocre you would toss Wordpress aside - and make way for the real web champion...Webflow!
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If you guys are interested in having your Wordpress site rebuilt in Webflow - we'd love to help! Shoot us a message on the contact form, or get in touch with us via whatsapp!
