If you are looking to build something you own outright, you will experience a lot more flexibility and have access to any feature you can dream of using WordPress.
The internet is saturated with website building options, and almost all of them work. Your website will be built, it can look good, and it can function. But every platform comes with its strengths and weaknesses, and I have worked on a large enough number of them to have landed on a favorite.
WordPress.org (which I’ll refer to as WordPress from now on) consistently comes out on top in terms of customizability and functionality. The biggest reason I recommend it is you have full control over it and it’s under your hosting. Another huge advantage is the limitless capabilities WordPress sites can offer.
WordPress is self-hosted — you are owning and not renting
Your hosting is the space online that your website files live (I recommend Bluehost!). You can “buy” hosting and upload files to build your website (self-hosting). Or, you can “rent” hosting by signing up for a platform and getting space on their hosting. This gives them control over the kind of site you build.
WordPress.com, Squarespace, Wix, and all the more beginner-friendly platforms are exactly that: platforms. You don’t own your website, you are renting space on someone else’s hosting, and they have control over your website’s functions.
WordPress is different, it’s a Content Management System (CMS): free software that you upload to your hosting to create a dashboard. From that dashboard, you can do anything and own everything.
WordPress can do almost anything, you aren’t limited to anyone’s idea of what a website should or shouldn’t have
You have the freedom to build any kind of site when you are using WordPress. Some themes will guide you into more industry-specific capabilities, but then every theme can be expanded to do more because of the countless plugins available to WordPress users. Plugins are programs that you can install into your site to give it any kind of function you can think of.
When you are on someone else’s hosting, the features and capabilities are already built-in, and you will have to wait for their team to decide if extra features you want are worth building, then you have to wait for them to build them.
With WordPress, you also have full control over customizing the theme and making it look exactly how your brand needs it to. Premium themes come with customization panels, and even free themes can be edited into anything you want because you have access to all the codes used to build them.
