WordPress has long been hailed king when it comes to website platforms, especially for bloggers. WordPress’ vast amount of themes and plugins, knowledgeable support, and consistently updated platform make it an appealing content management system (CMS) for many businesses and personal users. However, WordPress isn’t necessarily the most user-friendly website builder on the market. It’s not an all-in-one solution. This means you must rely on plugins in order to achieve your desired customization and functionality. On the other hand, there are effective WordPress alternatives that you can use to build your website. Here are the 10 best SEO-friendly alternatives to WordPress that you should know.
Wix
While WordPress offers an unbelievably wide range of designs, customizing these designs to match your needs means loads of tedious work and custom code. Building a Wix site is different. You move the elements around with a click of the mouse, dropping them right where you want them. All plans, even the free ones, come with the same design options.
The video backgrounds and animations are no problems whatsoever. This website builder gets SEO right, too. Portfolio pages, in particular, turn out really good, and most importantly, without being difficult to create. They have many business-focused apps (e.g. for hotels or restaurants) that can make your life easier if you are in one of these industries.
Square Space
Squarespace’s robust software gives you a place to host your website, a website builder, and a blogging platform, so you have all the basics you need to get yourself started. Its wide variety of website templates, all with a modern visual appeal, give you the ability to easily select something that’s pre-built with some basic functionality to customize it. For those who find they need to use eCommerce, Squarespace also gives you the ability to integrate an online store to make for a seamless experience.
Joomla
Joomla is the original WordPress alternative. In other words, it’s the main piece of software that comes to mind when considering alternatives to WordPress that run in a similar way. Joomla is a content management system (CMS) much like WordPress. This means it gives you tools for effective creation and then managing whatever content you want to host on your website.
It provides a ton of functionality right out of the gate and can be used to run any type of website. From simple brochures to blogs, eCommerce, informational or official sites (e.g. gov sites), and even social networks.
Weebly.com
Weebly is another incredible drag and drop website builder which is used by over 40,000,000 people worldwide. You can create anything from an online store to portfolio sites or SEO-friendly websites to increase your website’s traffic and sales with ease.
There’s a reason why over 40 million people use Weebly. The primary reason is Weebly comes out of the box with curated website templates, powerful eCommerce apps, and integrated marketing tools (which include SEO and lead generation tools) to launch your websites.
Shopify
Shopify is one of the world’s leading eCommerce platforms. Not only can you integrate Shopify into an existing website, but you can also use its website builder to build a storefront for your products. While its design abilities are not so advanced, Shopify has the best eCommerce features when compared to other platforms. It integrates with leading sales platforms, like Amazon, Etsy, Facebook, Instagram, and more, making it the best WordPress alternative for serious eCommerce sellers.
Drupal.Org
Just like WordPress, Drupal is also a powerful content management system (CMS), which is an open-source project that helps you build powerful websites for any kind of audience. From healthcare to eCommerce to media and publishing, you can use Drupal CMS to create great websites.
A top reason to consider using Drupal over other WordPress competitor sites is that it provides exceptional security. In fact, Drupal CMS is considered one of the most scrutinized and secure platforms on the World Wide Web. Hacking a website that is hosted on the Drupal platform is almost an impossible task. It considers each element of a website as an object and has security algorithms working for every element. So if you’re concerned about your website’s security, go for Drupal.
HubSpot
HubSpot’s full-funnel inbound marketing website platform not only makes it easy to create a beautiful, high-performing website, but its integrated marketing platform gives you the tools necessary to track all your key metrics for it as well.
If you want to get into blogging, HubSpot has a place for you too. Their blogging software enables you to write, format, and edit the content with ease. For those who are concerned about driving traffic to it, the software gives you as-you-type keyword suggestions and on-page SEO advice so you can outrank your competitors for the keywords that matter.
Webnode
This website builder is particularly interesting if you are looking for a multilingual website builder. A feature that not many providers offer. Generally, WordPress was designed as a tool to publish in one language only, though you can add plugins that will enable you to add translations to your website.
So if you already know that you’ll be publishing in more than one language, Webnode could be a great WordPress alternative for you. Webnode’s blog is not comparable to WordPress, unfortunately. It’s very basic and doesn’t have features such as categories or tags. Comments can only be displayed via the Facebook comments feature.
Ghost
For anything and everything to do with blogs, magazines, publishing, or any kind of writing, Ghost is a wonderful platform. You can self-host your own Ghost-powered website or opt for the Ghost servers.
BigCommerce
If you’re looking for scalability in an SEO-friendly WordPress alternative, BigCommerce might be the right option for you. It features strong SEO support and smooth multi-channel integration, and there are no platform fees or commissions. However, customer reviews aren’t overly favorable when it comes to setting up, and this e-Commerce-targeted platform isn’t the best for small businesses or stores with tight margins.
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