Introduction
So, you've decided to launch your own website with a website builder platform. Great start! The next step is to decide on the platform.
With a variety of website building platforms available in the market today, Wordpress and Webflow are among the most popular ones. Which one to choose? A good idea is to evaluate a site builder according to several key characteristics:
- The key features
- Hosting
- Customization opportunities
- Ecommerce features
- The learning curve
- Pricing
Let’s take a look at both Webflow and Wordpress from these perspectives.
The key features
As to the essential features that a modern website should have, both platforms a good enough in providing the following:
- Responsive design;
- SEO friendly websites;
- High level of security and performance;
- A variety of integrations with third-party services.
Hosting
As to hosting, Webflow stores all the sites on its servers and provides reliable hosting service with minimal downtime.
Contrary to that, Wordpress doesn’t offer integrated hosting services, so your project will be stored on third-party hosts.
Customization opportunities
With Webflow, you can customize your website in whatever way you want with no coding required. Even the complete beginners in the field of web design can create their own website from separate blocks in the visual editor thanks to the Drag & Drop mechanism.
Another great feature is the possibility to work directly with the CMS data and to customize the content types as needed.
With Wordpress, you still have a lot of opportunities for customization - there are tons of plugins and extensions available. However, if you want the complete customization, you will have to code it yourself (or hire coding experts).
Ecommerce features
If you're running an e-commerce business, Webflow can make it easy for you to sell your products and scale the business to suit your individual needs. It supports the basic ecommerce workflows, such as order processing, shipping and taxes management. It supports Zapier integration as well.
Every page you create is completely customizable, from product page to checkout. Also, unlike other site builders, checkout pages can be completely consistent with the rest of the site. You can even customize the transactional emails that you send to your customers to confirm purchases. This makes it much easier to ensure that every aspect of your messages and visuals is in line with your overall marketing strategy.
On top of that, customers can choose a payment method from a variety of available ones, which is always a huge bonus. The Webflow dashboard integrates with lots of payment processing services - Apple Pay, Google Pay, Stripe, PayPal and many more. The Order Dashboard is also very easy to use.
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Wordpress ecommerce opportunities are even more powerful. With a variety of integrations available, the opportunities for the web stores are almost endless.
All you have to do to get started here is to install a free solution like the WooCommerce plugin.
In addition to a minimal learning curve for beginners, WooCommerce is highly customizable, which means that the sky is truly the limit to what you create for your online store. What's more, WooCommerce has hundreds of free and paid extensions added.
You can implement whatever you need to deliver and fulfill your project ideas, and even build your own dropshipping business with WooCommerce!
The learning curve
Webflow's comprehensive functionality also means that it comes with a great learning curve. Unlike other tools, it will take you some time to understand how this whole system works. The upside is that once you get used to Webflow, you can do a lot with it, including creating parallax effects, animations, and more.
WordPress may seem easier to use than Webflow. That is, even the complete beginners can set up a good looking website in just several hours.
Pricing
The last, but not the least important factor in choosing the best website building platform is pricing. That is, you need to make sure that the platform you choose will actually fit your budget.
In terms of pricing, Webflow may seem to be more expensive. A basic plan without CMS will cost you $12/month. See Webflow Pricing
As to Wordpress, it’s free to use - all you need to pay for is hosting. However, certain plugins and addons are paid, so if you need something specific for your website, this might require additional money investment.
