I love WordPress, I think it is one of the best content management systems you can use. But that doesn’t mean that it is the right solution for every type of website. It is important to pick the right solution for your website. By knowing about other alternatives to WordPress you can make a more informed decision to what you use for your website.
*none of the links in this post are affiliates. I’m a WordPress guy, it wouldn’t make sense to try and make ad money from these, no matter how great they are.
Landing pages
This is one type of website that I would actively recommend not using WordPress for. There are simpler solutions out there if all you need is a one page landing page.
Of these is Carrd. It is a great choice for landing pages. They have a lot of fully responsive templates to choose from and you can quickly get something up and running.
E-commerce
WordPress can do e-commerce really well. There are a lot of high quality plugins you can use to create a really good online store for both physical (WooCommerce) and digital goods (Easy Digital Downloads). But there is another player in the market that is worth looking at.
And that’s Shopify.
Shopify has carved a really great spot for itself for e-commerce. It is a specialty all in one e-commerce service. You get management of orders, different ways to sell products, marketing and website hosting out of the box. They have a good variety of themes you can apply on your website to quickly get started.
The biggest advantage about being all in one is that there is little website maintenance needed since Shopify handles all that stuff for you.
Marketing site
A marketing website, to me, is a website with less than 10 or so pages, doesn’t change too often, and maybe has a blog component or a form or two. This is where it gets a little difficult to not recommend WordPress. WordPress is great for marketing websites, I’d argue it was built for it.
But if you want a solution where you get a most of what you need out of the box like a selection of nice themes, layout, forms, hosting etc. then Squarespace is a good choice.
Another option is Webflow but it takes a little more time to learn but in return you get a lot of flexibility to build much more complex layouts.
WordPress is great but not the only choice
WordPress is a great product but it’s not the only option out there. There are a lot of other products that you can use to create a high quality website for your business. A lot of my recommendations are out of the box services, which sacrifice flexibility and customisation for ease of use.
If you believe that you need something with a bit more freedom and room to grow then WordPress is a still a great choice. The key thing is to be aware of what is out there and if a particular product works for your current situation.