Best website builder: Comparing SquareSpace, Weebly, Wix, GoDaddy website builder, WordPress and others
DIY, Drag and Drop website builders compared.
Popular Drag and Drop Website Builders
List of the popular drag and drop website builders that will be discussed in this article:
Better marketing doesn’t equal better product
Does better marketing really mean you are getting a better product? This industry’s best kept secret may surprise you. Learn how better marketing could hurt you.
Odds are even if you aren’t in the website design industry, you’ve probably heard of Weebly, Wix, SquareSpace, and maybe even GoDaddy’s website builder. The reason for this is that they all have great marketing teams! As stated above, WordPress is an organization and its advertising budget is practically nonexistent. The bad news is, once a customer buys into one of the non-WordPress services it is hard to get out with his site’s content. That site becomes a cash cow for the company with little to no traffic to the client’s site.
If you are in the website design industry odds are you are already using WordPress.
Industry standard
WordPress has truly become the industry standard for professionals. Yet it is flexible enough for non-professionals. With WordPress you can:
- Choose your own domain name
- Install WordPress on your choice of hosts/self-hosted
- Open source
- Better integration
- Expansion via pre-made plug-ins
- Different looks with pre-made themes
- User-friendly drag and drop editors
- Mobile friendly
- Online Support via forms & documentation
- And much more
By the Numbers
But here is the shocker…. This lesser known website builder (to the non-tech crowd) dominates the industry! Not by a small percentage, but by big numbers! Costs upfront costs vs. Long term. WordPress is daunting… Domain name, Hosting, setup, small learning curve vs extreme simplicity of.. Long term effects- website performance… Load, content ownership, and SEO all others fall flat!
This is header: Industry’s best kept secret. How better marketing could hurt you. SIDE WordPress is structured as a nonprofit
CMS usage in the United States by BuiltWith
Adding up the multiple versions of WordPress installation percentages and you get a grand total 52% of all content management systems on the market, in the United States. That is a total of 74,652,825 WordPress Websites installed and increasing!
Drag and drop editor
Is WordPress really classified as a drag and drop editor? I’d say no, it’s not standard drag and drop, out of the box. But with the multiple plugin options available, for free, it can be. Some of the WordPress plugins are more user-friendly than most of the other options listed above.
Organization (FREE) vs. Business
According to WP Tavern, 63% of WordPress core committers are not employed by Automattic. This doesn’t include plugins, themes or other code for WordPress. It’s the contributors who have made this CMS (content management system) what it is today and what it’s going to be tomorrow. Compare that with any of the other walled-off CMSs listed on this page and they don’t come even close to the number of people trying to make their product better.
Speed Tests
With all of the options other than a self-hosted WordPress installation, you will be locked into a specific host (theirs), at the whim of their servers’ speeds. Page load speed is a ranking factor for SEO. In fact, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) Project is fastly becoming even more important for websites to have due to SEO. Those pages will be shown automatically on Mobile Phones. This is yet an option for most of the other CMSs listed above while WordPress already has a plug-in for it. Speed test your site using Pingdom’s free tools. With a self-hosted WordPress installation, you have lots of options to help speed up your site. From something as simple as a fast host (ie. Digital Ocean) to security like Sucuri that blocks DDoS attacks to a content delivery network (CDN). You can even use those in combination to have a fast loading page like the one you see here.
SSL (Secure Socket Layer)
As a web programmer, I have a problem with Wix’s lack of SSL certificate. What professional site with clients wouldn’t have one!?
An SSL protects sensitive information like credit card numbers and personal information inputted from web forms. The green lock is also a great way to assure your customers that your site is trustworthy.
Caught stealing GPL code from WordPress
Wix gets caught “stealing” GPL code from WordPress. WordPress’ code is considered open source and is published under GNU Public License (GPL). But the way that Wix used the code, according to Matt Mullenweg it is in violation of the GPL.
List of WordPress “drag and drop” Page Builder (plugins):
PLEASE NOTE, as of 2022 we no longer recommend the use of any “Page Builder” below as they are slow and probably will lead to security issues in the near future. Please see our list of recommended block editors.
Some links below may not work, as they slowly go out of business due to Gutenberg Blocks taking over.
- Brizy made by ThemeFuse (Brizy on WordPress.org)
- Beaver Builder (video shown above)
- Page Builder by SiteOrigin
- Visual Composer
- MotoPress Content Editor
- Live Composer
- Drag and Drop Builder Plugin by Elegant Themes’
- Themify Builder
- Elementor (FREE with low cost paid expansion options)
- bbe or Dope WP (Free & Fast Bootstrap page builder)
- Page Builder Sandwich
- BoldGrid (not a fan, due to $60/year and false comparison chart)
Divi page builder by elegant themes (above)
Comparing Features Side-by-Side
| WordPress | SqureSpace | Weebly | Wix | GoDaddy (old version) | Others | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drag & Drop editor out of the box | ||||||
| Multiple free drag and drop editors | ||||||
| Flexibility to use other drag and drop editors | ||||||
| Multiple Theme Options (look of the site) | OVER 10,000 | |||||
| Highly customizable theme | ||||||
| Self hosted so you own your own content | (NEW is WordPress) | Some | ||||
| Free SSL | Free with letsencrypt.org depending on hosting. | |||||
| Ability to use REST Api? | ||||||
| Site speed optimization options and CDN | ||||||
| Security Monitoring | Several plugins available also see sucuri.net | |||||
| Plugins available to expand your website’s functionality | 46,000+ of them and counting. | Minimal | Minimal | Minimal | Minimal | Minimal |
| SEO Friendly | With Free Yoast SEO Plugin | Minimal | Minimal | Minimal | Minimal | |
| Google Analytics integration | ||||||
| Google Webmaster Tools integration |
