WordPress: Old School Way of Making a Website?

Øyvind (Ø…I know…Norwegian…just call me Owen):

You should not have to worry about servers, development environments, deployments, and outdated code anymore if you’re building a basic website. Seriously. There are way better services to build and host your website. Webflow is my platform of choice. Or you could go with Squarespace for low budget simple sites. Other no-code platforms to mention are Wix and Weebly. Some times, like in this article, Wix is rated above Squarespace. But for a simple website, I think it has a bit too much freedom and options.

Coming from a background in both development and design, I have been through everything from personally developing an elaborate PHP based CMS (including e-commerce) at the beginning of the century, to being blessed with the amazing tools we as designers and developers have today. Somewhere in the middle of this journey, WordPress was a solid candidate for the typical small business website. But not anymore in my opinion.

This article got me thinking. In my mind, WordPress is the default option. But does that make sense in 2023? For example, this website, which is hosted on Micro.blog, is built on Hugo. It’s really fast but doesn’t have all the features available on WordPress. But in my mind, it’s a good tradeoff. And in my opinion, most Squarespace sites look way better than most WordPress sites and require much less effort to build and maintain. I’ve never tried Webflow so I cannot comment on it. But I now wonder if WordPress is old technology living on custom and momentum.

I have a site on Squarespace. I like it because I was able to create a site I actually like. Its purpose is to write about and share images. I tried the same project on WordPress and it was way more effort and I did not like the result. And along the way, I was looking at theme after theme and plugin after plugin. It was no fun.¹ From what I’ve read, Webflow is more powerful than either WordPress or Squarespace and yields faster websites than either WordPress or Squarespace. But I have yet to try Webflow.