Over the last decade, technology has advanced by leaps and bounds. People are also getting advanced with changing times. People are creating websites for almost everything from online businesses to portfolios, blogs, eCommerce stores, and many more. Today there are various platforms to create your custom website.

WordPress is the most popular content management system (CMS) and is loved by the most. According to W3Techs, 43% of all websites use WordPress. Its drag-and-drop editor, thousands of themes, plugins, and widgets helps you to create custom websites with ease. You can use WordPress’s in-built extensibility and functionality to add live chat and forms on the website, use different themes on different pages, and many more.

WordPress may not be able to fulfil everyone’s needs. There are limitations to WordPress that makes users look for WordPress alternatives. In this blog, we will discuss WordPress, alternatives to WordPress, and its features.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is a free, open-source, versatile content management system (CMS) that helps create hobby or lifestyle blogs, business websites, eCommerce stores, professional portfolios, membership sites, and mobile applications. Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little developed WordPress in 2003. WordPress is written in PHP scripting language and uses the MySQL database.

You can use around 60,000 free plugins from the official directory to speed up a website, strengthen website security, add forms, increase SEO, and many more. There are around 10,000 free themes available in the official WordPress theme repository that you can use to upload a logo, set up a custom homepage, or customize the navigation menu.

Features:

  • You can use the WordPress media library to upload, customize, order, or filter media files such as audio, video, documents or images.
  • It is flexible, user-friendly, and makes user management quick and easy.
  • You can move, add, or delete dashboard widgets in the WordPress admin area.
  • It helps embed multimedia, links, and videos from popular websites such as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and many more.
  • It provides two Gutenberg blocks, i.e. Page Break Block and Read More Block for long posts.
  • It provides responsive page previews, keyboard shortcuts, slash commands, widget accessibility modes, and quick add links.

Top 14 WordPress Alternatives

Let’s explore some of the best WordPress alternatives.

Wix

Wix is one of the most popular and intuitive hosted website builders that offer free, reliable web hosting, SEO tools, top security features, and a dedicated support team that helps you create and manage your website. It is a drag-and-drop website builder that is ideal for bloggers, creative agencies, personal projects, portfolios, and resumes.

Wix offers splendour features such as title animations, cool video backgrounds, eCommerce tools, online storage for website assets, and mobile applications. It has an intuitive and powerful Editor X interface to help build websites.

Features:

  • It has an integrated Backup and Restore feature
  • It has 800+ design templates and built-in tools for layout and design
  • It has a powerful drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor
  • It has Artificial Design Intelligence that helps to build personalized websites
  • It provides powerful eCommerce functionality for small online stores

Squarespace

Squarespace is a website design, web-building tool, and platform that provides hosting, domain registration, themes and templates, eCommerce, and support. It has a collection of hundreds of mobile-friendly and responsive themes. These themes are modern, artistic, and sophisticated and are constantly improved and updated.

You can create custom domains and use ready-to-use design templates to build splendid websites. You can use Squarespace Video Studio to add exclusive elements to the video or upload scripts to incorporate voice-overs. It has a new drag-and-drop editor, Fluid Engine, that offers customization choices using the grid system.

Features:

  • It has a WYSIWYG editor with pre-built templates
  • It provides inventory management and abandoned cart recovery tools for eCommerce stores
  • It has in-built marketing and analytics tools
  • It has AMP-compatible pages for better mobile optimization
  • It provides unlimited free web hosting with limitless bandwidth and storage space
  • It has excellent customer support, documentation, and tutorials

Weebly

Weebly is an easy-to-use intuitive website builder that enables users to create custom websites using a drag-and-drop editor and pre-designed templates. It is a user-friendly platform that helps you design and build portfolios, eCommerce stores, blogs, and corporate websites.

You can build splendid-looking, responsive webpages using Weebly’s simple and clear interface. You can create complex layouts for your blog posts by adding elements such as forms and image galleries. Weebly’s integrated eCommerce tools and stunning template designs offer website creation flexibility for mobile sites.

Features:

  • It has mobile-optimized built-in templates
  • It has built-in business and eCommerce solutions
  • It seamlessly integrates with Square, a digital payment platform
  • It has in-built RSS and social sharing, advanced comment management, and custom contact forms
  • It helps create custom domain names and an advanced navigation bar with infinite sub-levels

Shopify

Shopify is a CMS platform and a hosted eCommerce website that helps small businesses build an online store to sell online through a streamlined dashboard. It helps create an entire store by selecting from over 70 eCommerce styles. You can add pages and posts using the drag-and-drop feature.

You can use Shopify tools to analyze your online store, maximize your Return on Investment (ROI) for marketing, and design customized online experiences for your customer. It helps automate inventory management, customer relationship management, transactions, etc. It has a built-in Point of Sale (POS) for pop-up shops, retail stores, market sales, and more for payment of goods in physical locations.

Features:

  • It provides tokengated commerce to connect crypto wallets
  • It has in-built B2B and Shopify point-of-sale
  • It has a vibrant third-party app store to help extend your store
  • It has advanced eCommerce and marketing features like customer reviews, reports, abandoned cart recovery, and fraud analysis
  • It has an easy-to-use editor and supports 100+ payment gateways

Joomla

Joomla is a versatile, open-source content management system (CMS) that helps create dynamic websites and online applications as well as publish information on the web. It is a robust, cost-efficient, and reliable CMS platform for creating online designs and websites for corporate and small businesses, complex social networking sites, or to create blogs.

Joomla is based on a model-view-controlled web application framework and developed using PHP, software design patterns, Object-oriented programming, and MySQL. It is free, has an intuitive interface, and is extendable. It is user-friendly, flexible, and has a good navigation system that manages various hierarchies and subpages. It supports polls, search, and web link management and analysis.

Good read – Joomla vs WordPress: The Best CMS For A New Site

Features:

  • It has in-built 2-factor authentication and multilingual website features
  • It stores information in various databases such as PostgreSQL, MySQL, MS SQL, and many more
  • It has an in-built banner management tool to create and track ad campaigns
  • It has an Access Control List feature to manage site users’ access
  • It has built-in SEO tools, user management controls, and a WYSIWYG editor
  • It has 6000+ extensions available

Drupal

Drupal is a free, open-source, fast-loading, and highly scalable content management system (CMS) that helps build personal and corporate websites, blogs, forums, eCommerce sites, portals, and social networking sites. It supports collaborative authoring, podcasts, newsletters, content management, file uploads/downloads, and many more.

Drupal is written in PHP and is best suited for developers with an understanding of PHP, HTML, and CSS. There are over 46,000 modules to extend the website’s functionality and 2900+ themes for website customization. It has out-of-box features such as custom content types, better user permission control, a taxonomy system, and multilingual functionality.

Features:

  • It provides API-driven, multi-channel content delivery in decoupled and hybrid decoupled modes
  • It has rich media support for audio, video files, and images
  • It has a mobile-first approach and customizable workflows
  • It seamlessly integrates with automation platforms to provide real-time sales alerts.
  • It has a rigorous security system with database encryption, user access control, and malicious data entry prevention

Ghost

Ghost is a lightweight, open-source, minimalist, NodeJS-based blogging platform for writers and other digital publishing content creators for writing and publishing blogs and magazines. It is beginner-friendly and has a clutter-free and clean interface. It provides integrated AMP support, complete SEO optimization, RSS feeds, subscription capture forms, detailed structured data, and a Slack integration hook to distribute your content on social media and other platforms/forums.

Features:

  • It provides robust tagging and dynamic routing functionality to create custom homepages, multi-language content, and URL structures
  • You can use JASON API to control the display data and customize the user experience
  • It supports plain text formatting syntax Markdown, which helps users write rich and structured content
  • It provides detailed member analytics to help understand the active audience
  • It has an in-built newsletter feature to send beautiful newsletters to subscribers or members every time a new post goes live

Webflow

Webflow is a no-code platform and a visual content management system (CMS) that empowers marketers, designers, and entrepreneurs to build custom websites. It is an in-browser design tool that helps design, build, and launch responsive and production-ready custom websites.

You can drag and drop HTML elements on the canvas and style CSS properties using Webflow Designer to create a custom website. It offers plenty of options such as customer service, a forum, an online community, and Webflow University for beginners. The Webflow University has video tutorials and written and visual information for beginners.

Features:

  • It has an uptime of 99.99%
  • You can use the Symbols feature to reuse images or clone a section of the website to use on other pages
  • It supports complex customizations with over 2000 fonts
  • You can deploy content directly on the page including images and text
  • It offers high-level security and provides a free SSL certificate

Blogger

Blogger is an easy-to-use, free blog hosting service and platform owned by Google that allows members to share text, photos, and videos. It offers splendid features such as in-built social capabilities, a domain name, commenting system, and templates for blogging. It provides link editing in Compose View, geo-tagging, and size and width approximation in Preview Mode. It is best suited for basic websites and personal blogs that do not require a high level of customization.

Features:

  • It has an in-built template designer to help customize templates
  • It seamlessly integrates with Google AdWords, Google Analytics, and Google Photos
  • It provides free web hosting and an SSL certificate
  • It has a spam filter system and zero downtime
  • It has an in-built mobile interface and supports Google Hosting

BigCommerce

BigCommerce is a SaaS eCommerce builder in which company owners can build a store and sell their products digitally. You can add unlimited products, use in-built sales tools to boost sales, and view your store performance. It is highly scalable, customizable, and offers pre-built themes and a page builder to develop your website.

BigCommerce is headless commerce and supports native WordPress integration. You can use BigCommerce for the store and WordPress for the main website. It does not charge for transactions and supports various payment gateways such as Apple Pay, Amazon Pay, Stripe, and PayPal.

Features:

  • It provides one-page checkout to boost sales of your eCommerce store
  • It provides powerful eCommerce functionalities such as custom segmentation, Channel Manager for multi-channel selling, and advanced analytics tools
  • It has features like rich snippets, custom URLs, and CDN to help improve site rankings
  • It seamlessly integrates POS to sync online and offline payments and inventory
  • It has an uptime rate of 99%

Site123

Site123 is a hosting solution, website builder, and blogging platform with ready-made layouts, styles, and templates to build responsive websites. It is a user-friendly, flexible, and easy-to-use website builder with pre-selected options you can choose to customize your website. Site123 stores websites on content distribution network (CDN) servers to reduce website loading time.

Features:

  • It has an easy-to-use intuitive website editor
  • It provides free SSL/HTTPS encryption protection for all websites
  • It provides mobile-responsive templates and 24/7 live chat support
  • It has in-built SEO tools and allows multilingual websites
  • It can integrate third-party plugins such as analytic tools, live chat, webmaster tools, and many more

Jimdo

Jimdo is a web hosting service and platform that helps small businesses and entrepreneurs to create simple websites and small online shops. It has Dolphin design mode, an Artificial Intelligence-based questionnaire that helps create a website within minutes by pulling out resources from your social media accounts. It is a beginner-friendly website-building tool offering hosting, an easy-to-use editing tool, an email account, and domain name registration.

Features:

  • It provides Artificial Intelligence design assistance in setting up a personalized website using images from Google My Business and Instagram accounts
  • It generates mobile-responsive websites
  • It has a “Creator” design mode to edit pre-built templates using the drag-and-drop editor
  • It provides access to high-quality copyright-free images
  • It provides easy-to-use eCommerce tools, professional templates, storage and bandwidth (500MB to unlimited), HTML 5 support, and mobile optimization

Magento

Magneto is a powerful, open-source eCommerce and CMS platform that provides online merchants with a flexible shopping cart system and control over the content, and functionality. It is developed on the Zend Framework and written in PHP. It offers SEO, marketing, and catalog management tools.

Magento provides robust features, customizable templates, and a powerful dashboard to build and manage multiple online stores, use worldwide shipping providers, and make transactions in numerous countries, currencies, and languages. It provides customized shopping experiences using Artificial Intelligence-based customer segmentation to analyze customers’ behavior.

Features:

  • It has in-built eCommerce features such as integrated payments, catalog management, and shipping
  • It uses Progressive Web Applications (PWAs) to provide a mobile app-like experience
  • It provides a WYSIWYG page builder to create websites with ease
  • It provides seamless third-party integrations such as Mail Chimp, Google Shopping, eBay, PayPal, and many more
  • It provides customizable multi-levels of security permissions

Webnode

Webnode is a great hosting solution and an intuitive website builder that helps small businesses and entrepreneurs build engaging websites with multilingual capabilities. It is a free, easy-to-use, cloud-based platform that offers SEO capabilities to optimize a website’s ranking, enhance the site’s online presence, and assist users to attract target customers.

Features:

  • It has an in-built backup and restore feature
  • It has customizable design templates, a drag-and-drop editor, and in-built analytics
  • It has robust support for multilingual websites and SEO
  • It provides Widgets and Google Analytics integration
  • It provides custom domain and Media and Content Manager

Conclusion

WordPress is an evergreen CMS platform and has a bright future ahead. But it is not the cup of tea for everyone. People who want hosting and website builder in one platform will look for WordPress alternatives that pack a punch and will be beneficial as per their requirements.

We have discussed the best WordPress alternatives that you can check out for your website development. Before finalizing the alternative to WordPress, you should consider parameters such as the type of website you requires, plugins, themes, budget, or functionality. In the end, it will be either your or your business’s call to choose a WordPress alternative as per the requirements.

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