With over 600+ platforms and products that you could use for building a website, there’s got to be a better way to make a good choice while avoiding decision paralysis and cognitive fatigue.
One way to do that is to choose a platform that’s highly-rated and popular—the top 3 website builders, according to this short list compiled by Capterra:
Generally speaking, any one of these will work well for most basic websites, especially the top 3 that are well-known. What’s great about the well-known ones is they have a lot of users, and that means it’s statistically easier to find someone to help manage the website, if you don’t have time to do it yourself.
What about pricing? A basic website costs around $9 to $25 per month. For an ecommerce website (where you can sell products or services), that’ll run around $50 per month, or more. Check current pricing for: Wix | Squarespace | WordPress.
Wix vs. Squarespace vs. WordPress
Wix and Squarespace have become quite popular because of their drag-and-drop visual editor for web pages, plus lots of advertising, word of mouth, and word of mouse. For non-techies, either one of these will work. (one caveat: neither of these provide website backups, so be careful with keeping a copy of your content in some shape or form on your own.)
However, WordPress runs over 43% of the websites on the internet—with some of those running on wordpress.com so all the technical parts are managed in one place. This is the easiest and reliable choice, go with wordpress.com; plus, they include automated backup with their Business (or higher) plan.
Alternatively, websites could be powered by the WordPress CMS (content management software, free at wordpress.org) and this requires technical expertise to manage software installing, web hosting, plugins, themes, and all the goodies for advanced users. This opens up the potential to grow your web presence and add on more features as needed (or wanted.) And, you do have to setup your own backup processes; at least with WordPress, you can get a real backup.
How to Choose a WordPress Hosting Provider
There’s hundreds (or more?) review sites about WordPress web hosting, and it’s quite challenging to sort through which ones have objective evaluations; many of them are supported by affiliate referral fees or editorial selection or something else untransparent. Some popular comparison and review sites: hostingadvice.com | whatsthehost.com | wphostingreviews.com | hostadvice.com | cheapandbesthosting.com | webhostingtalk.com
For WordPress hosting services that’s recommended by the r/webhosting subreddit community, see reddit.com/r/webhosting/wiki/pickingahost/
GeneratePress theme recommends these: generatepress.com/wordpress-hosting
For the list of providers that WordPress mentions, wordpress.org/hosting
Check current pricing for these popular WordPress hosting providers: SiteGround | Bluehost | Hostinger | Flywheel | DreamHost | A2 Hosting | Liquid Web | WP Engine | Kinsta
What Do I Use for Websites?
I’ve worked on a variety of projects using all kinds of website builders, including Wix, Squarespace, Blogger, Google Sites, ExpressionEngine, Github HTML, and others. I’ve been using WordPress (the .org version) here at djchuang.com for many years along with a handful of other personal sites. Because I have multiple websites, products like Wix and Squarespace that charge on a per-website basis makes that too expensive.
Currently, my websites run on InMotion Hosting, but because of a recent disasterous data loss, I’ll be switching web hosting next year or so.