16 advantages that WordPress has over traditional DIY website building tools

When creating a website for your business, sometimes to save money it is easier to go the DIY route. But be careful, because by using an online site builder to build your website, you are building an instantly outdated website! The second you launch your website it will be outdated and lack many of the functionality that users take for granted. Many of the web hosting companies like go-daddy, and yahoo offer an option to use their “site-builder” to build an overnight website. Also most CPanel web hosting services give you the option to use tools like RV Site Builder to build your own business website. While these tools may sound easy and convenient, a lot of the times the end result is a website that lacks structure, proper design, and functionality.

Instead of using the provided site builder, I would recommend to use WordPress. Any web hosting company should have easy and clear instructions on how to start your own WordPress website. Before choosing a host make sure that you ask if they support WordPress and get instructions on how to properly install it. Tools like softaculous, or fantastico are very common for DIY options and have “one-click-install”  WordPress options.  Nearly 70 Million people use WordPress to create a reliable website or blog. The following are 16 reasons why this is a better choice and a smarter solution for your business over using a general site builder.

Simplicity – WordPress is SIMPLE. That is one of the main reasons why it has grown to be the most dominating CMS over Joomla and Drupal. It is easy to add more content, pages, posts, pictures. As well as customize your design. If you can use e-mail or Microsoft Word, you will be able to update your own website. That is often a huge plus, since most people think they will have to learn HTML, CSS, PHP, and other complicated technologies to get a website started.

Stability – Unlike any website builder that is out there, WordPress is always being maintained and updated to keep its . New versions of WordPress usually provide more options and greater security or functionality. WordPress is always evolving, so this means that if you keep up with the updates, your website will not be outdated in a year. This makes it a very stable environment that is capable of growing with you and your business. WordPress is like a do-it-yourself kind of site builder, with a rock solid foundation that will not let you down.

Design – A huge plus about WordPress is that there are literally thousands of themes that are available for you to use. Even the free ones provide you with more functionality than any HTML site builder would ever be able to give you. Also many themes allow you to update simple things like a custom header, background, and color options without doing any kind of coding languages. The same is true for a lot of website builders, but a major disadvantage would be that you would be using a design that may be over used, since many other people have chosen the same theme or layout.

Flexibility – Generally when you use a website builder you are constrained to the boundaries set by the provided template. The beauty of WordPress is that you have approximately 22,000+ plug-ins available to add functionality to your website. There are also thousand of themes available so that you can change the look of your website literally at the click of a button. This means that it is easy to adapt to changes in technology and the constant transformation of online media.

SEO – Google loves WordPress websites because it is built completely around SEO. It is simple to use H1, H2, and H3 tags, and you can include keywords in the url of your website using the proper permalink structure. There are many plug-ins available like the All-In-One-SEO-Pack, SEO ultimate, Platinum SEO pack, WordPress SEO by Yoast, and many more. Getting this kind of specialized support from a DIY site-builder is nearly impossible.

Structure – One of the main reasons that WordPress is SEO ready out of the box is its structure. The cleaner your structure is the faster your website will load, and the happier your user will be. WordPress allows you to create XML site maps to tell Google’s robots where all the pages are in your website, as well as which ones it should crawl, and which ones it should ignore. Proper structure is a cornerstone of SEO, and this is a major weakness of any site builder out there.

Content Management – Managing your content is made simple using WordPress because it allows you to have different roles. The biggest benefit is that you can assign administrators, editors, authors, contributors and set limits on what they can and can’t do. This is a great feature if you plan on expanding your website in the future or plan on having an elaborate blog with many content producers. Most HTML site builders will only allow you to make modifications, and involving other people may involve giving up your password or log-in information.

Community – WordPress makes it easy to create a membership website. If you are looking to start a forum or your own social media platform, WordPress is stable enough and flexible enough to allow you to do so with very little technical knowledge. buddypress.org is a great resource if you are interested in building a community around your website. HTML websites and DIY type of services typically charge you an extra monthly fee to add this extra feature to your website.

Ability to Share – WordPress.com has a huge community and sharing could not be easier. There are many social media widgets, plug-ins, and API’s to integrate your social media accounts to your WordPress website. WordPress also makes it simple to share your content through various networks after you post it to your website. Social media is becoming very important in website ranking, and the more people share your content, the more authority you have. So sharing is a crucial functionality that you absolutely need on your website.

Open Source – The beauty of WordPress is that it is open source, and there are literally thousands of people across the globe making improvements, modifications, and adding more capabilities daily. The community is very strong and many designers and developers work daily to contribute and answer questions you may have on the main support forum.

Responsive – With tablets and mobile phones being so popular and being adapted so quickly it is important not to forget to enhance the mobile experience. Most HTML website builders do not offer an option to provide a responsive design that adapts to the way the user is viewing your website. Finding a responsive and beautiful WordPress theme is usually a good idea. Again, some of these themes are available completely free, but I always recommend buying a responsive theme or adapting to a responsive framework so that your mobile users don’t feel ignored.

Functionality – Most HTML websites and HTML site builders will include basic functionality. WordPress takes this further by providing plug-ins and themes to customize your website and enhance the user experience.

Integrations & API’s – This is a technical term that means that a technology will talk to another technology. For example if you would like to include Google maps function inside of your WordPress website, there is an API for that. All social media networks provide API’s, and this allows you to further integrate 3rd party online services with your websites. There are literally thousands of API’s that are already available to be used with WordPress, and this gives you the power to leverage outside resources inside of your website. The support for API’s on site builders is generally limited to whatever the company decides to use. In addition it would take the knowledge of programming knowledge and extra time to implement them on your website.

Scalability – While your company may be starting out and you only need a single website now, having the ability to easily create a network of websites is important for future growth. For example if you want to have 20 store locations, for SEO it is good to have a website for each location. Using the WordPress multi-site functionality you can save time by installing WordPress only once and having the ability to create as many websites as you need. This will save you time, money, and resources and allow you to scale your business quickly and easily.

Support- WordPress has thousands of volunteers who offer their advice completely free of charge on the main forum. At anytime you can post a question at http://wordpress.org/support/ and it is very likely you will get a quick response. Most traditional web hosting companies provide you site builder tools, but it usually does not include any support.

Speed – Believe it or not, you can literally build a website in a single day using WordPress if you have your content and pictures ready. It is generally not recommended, but if you need a website up fast, WordPress is a major shortcut. You are basically leveraging other people’s work to your benefit. The heavy work has been done, all you have to do is populate your content, and choose a theme. Well there is actually more to it, but I challenge you to use Dreamweaver to design, code, and launch your website the same day. These are just a few reasons why you need to consider using WordPress over a traditional site-builder. There are many more advantages than this, but it would take an entire book to explain the benefits. These are the ones that I find are more important and that are easy to understand. WordPress is the leading tool for building modern websites, and many people consider it a monopoly, due to the high adoption rates and global growth. Even if you are doing it yourself, by using WordPress, you can assure yourself that it will be easy to adapt to changes in the future.