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Selecting the perfect website platform for you and your business is a personal quest. And with so many to choose from, how do you know which platform will work best for your unique needs?

Popular website platforms, including WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and others, each have their own strengths. From WordPress's famed SEO capabilities and customization options to the user-friendly nature of all-in-one solutions like Squarespace and Wix, you’ve got excellent options.

Whether building a website from scratch or contemplating a revamp, understanding your platform options is critical.

We're going over numerous site considerations, including:

Hosting
Design features
Customer support
Data ownership
Admin access
Content rights
And more

We know your website platform must deliver a stimulating experience for your visitors. Usability, scalability, and the impact of future SEO developments are all high priorities. This episode explores insights that will empower you to make the optimal choice for your clinic's online presence.

If you’d like to talk SEO shop, book your free discovery call with Propel Marketing & Design and get ready to transform your website into a powerful business tool.

Listen to the podcast episode:

What’s the Best Website Platform: WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, or Something Else?

Show Notes & Resources:

Podcast Episode Transcript - What’s the Best Website Platform: WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, or Something Else?

Hello and welcome to this episode. I'm your host, Darcy Sullivan, from Propel Marketing & Design. Today, we're unpacking a critical tool for any clinic owner's online presence–that's, your website.

More specifically, we're going to explore various website platforms, and compare some of their features, usability, scalability, and how they align with the needs of your business.

So we're using the term website platform, but you can also call these website builders, or they're referred to as CMSs, which stands for content management systems. For the ease of this episode, I'm just going to call them platforms, just to make it easy.

So there are so many of these website builders or website platforms out on the market today, so how do you know which one is the right solution for your organization?

Well, the true answer is the best platform will vary based on your specific needs. There are a number of common ones that we're going to talk about.

As a company that deals with a lot of clinic owners, whether they're chiropractors, physiotherapists, physical therapists, acupuncturists, massage therapists, etc.; the most common platforms that we see people using today are WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, Clinic Sites, and a couple of others, but it goes way beyond that.

We do typically see more of the people that are using those, but there are also ones that are owned and proprietary to a company that might have set up your website. We also have HubSpot, Weebly, GoDaddy Website Builder, DreamHost Website Builder, Joomla, Drupal, Shopify, BigCommerce, web.com, and again, the list goes on and on.

So here are some questions that you want to ask yourself, and if you're using somebody to set up your website, you want to ask them before you decide which website platform you should use.

First off, is hosting included with the website platform? For example, hosting, which is where your files actually sit, is usually included with some of the easy builders, for example, Squarespace, Wix, and Clinic Sites. Where it is not included when it comes to most of your WordPress websites.

While WordPress is the platform, most people seek out hosting separate from that, and that hosting could be from WP Engine, Flywheel, GoDaddy, Bluehost, the list goes on and on.

But when you start to think about your website, you want to make sure that you understand the costs that are associated with it, the ease of use when it comes to making changes, if you're going to be the person making changes or if you're solely going to rely on somebody that set up your website for you, then that might not be as big of a concern.

There can also be design features and limitations that are associated with each platform. Also, customer support, and this is going to be dependent on not only who sets up your website for you, but the platform that you use for your website, along with data ownership and portability.

A lot of times, people don't think about this. If they're going to set up a website but want to move it to a different platform later, what kind of portability is associated with that? Again, we have some of those all-in-one solutions, which would be your Wix, your Squarespace, and your Clinic Sites.

With the all-in-one solutions, you have the ease of having your hosting built into your website package. But do these sometimes have limitations? Yeah, they do. They're all really great platforms, especially for somebody who wants to get a website set up as soon as possible, whereas WordPress, for example, which we're big fans of WordPress over at Propel, in fact, when we set up websites for our clients, we usually set them up in WordPress.

Is WordPress a little bit more complicated? Yeah, it is. WordPress has a lot of moving parts with it. You've got the hosting, like we said, which is separate from the platform. In most cases. You have your WordPress files that need to be updated. You have theme files that need to be updated and plugins that need to be updated regularly.

Now, while it might sound difficult to update some of these items, it really is as simple as a click of a button when done the correct way.

So why would we sometimes suggest WordPress over one of the more simple solutions that are all-in-one? Well, there is a reason why the majority of websites out there today are run on WordPress, and currently WordPress is just a little bit easier to rank from an SEO standpoint. SEO being search engine optimization.

Now it also has additional features that can go above and beyond some of the all-in-one solutions. If you currently have a WordPress website, great, that doesn't mean that the next version of your website has to be WordPress.

If you decide that you hate WordPress because there are some people out there that just don't like working with that platform overall. When it comes to deciding what platform you want to work with, you have to ask yourself how easy is it for you to jump in push buttons, if you're the person that's going to be pushing buttons and keeping things up to date, or if that's a task that you're going to hand over to somebody else within your organization, how easy is it for them to make those modifications?

You can always do a test run with the all-in-one solutions of Wix, Squarespace, or Clinic Sites to see if you feel more comfortable using one of those platforms. Lately, what we've seen when it comes to the all-in-one solutions is that Wix is really trying to position itself as an SEO leader by partnering with more organizations and more training sessions when it comes to SEO, but it still doesn't exactly have the market share when it comes to SEO technology that WordPress does.

It doesn't mean it won't in the future. It doesn't mean that in the future, any of the other platforms won't outperform WordPress, but currently WordPress does give you a little bit of an edge.

Now, that said, you have to do SEO on your website. You can't just say, oh well, I heard, my platform is SEO-friendly, so I don't need to take any additional actions. All of the website platforms straight out of the box are SEO friendly, but you do have to take additional actions to make sure that your website does rank.

Now, I want to go back to some of the other platforms that I mentioned at the beginning, if you are currently using a website builder like GoDaddy Website Builder, Dreamhost Website Builder, or Weebly, those are extremely, extremely limited in what you have the functionality to do and how you're going to be able to rank your website, no matter how much great content you put on it.

So I would suggest, if you are using one of those platforms, that you move away from that platform. If you are using a platform that was designed by your website designer or is proprietary to them, you need to know what types of limitations come with that option, which is something to ask them.

It might be that you just don't care about SEO, search engine optimization, and you just want a website. If that's the case, then one of the simple solutions of either having somebody else just set up your website is fine, or by using one of those all-in-one solutions is fine and, honestly, a quick way to have a website set up.

But if you are in it for the long haul and you want organic website traffic coming to your website, you want to make sure that you are using a platform that's going to allow you to do that and again, it goes way beyond just setting up a website.

You have to take actions to optimize it for SEO. The all-in-one solutions that we mentioned before, your Wix, Squarespace, and Clinic Sites, all have opportunities for you–on-page–to make those SEO best practices, to put them in place on every single page of their website.

Whether it's adding alt text to images or adding your meta page description and your meta page title for SEO, they all offer you that opportunity, but you actually have to take the action to do that.

And when it comes to WordPress, you have the ability, through plugins like Yoast SEO and Rank Math, to put in that information. You also have the ability, as you add images, to add alt text to the images, but you have to actually take those actions.

When it comes to creating a website that you're going to want to use today and use years from now, you want to decide which platform is best for you, based on what you feel most comfortable adding content to.

If you're going to be the person adding content to the website, you want to explore the SEO options when it comes to your platform; if you care about SEO. If you have the ability to have somebody build out a website for you, you want to make sure that you ask them what website platform are they using? Why are they deciding to use that platform? And if it is a platform that they built, you want to make sure that you ask is it SEO friendly.

What does it mean to them that it's SEO friendly? Are there additional SEO actions that you'll be able to take on the website to improve the website?

Also, what features do you need on your website? Are you a company that is going to need to have sales through your website? Are you going to need to integrate your website with a booking platform? Are you going to need to do other things on your website outside of the norm, maybe showcase events or tickets or anything of that nature? You want to make sure that you have a full list of what's important to you when it comes to your website when you're trying to decide what website platform you should use.

Now, if you have a website and you're looking at it and you're thinking to yourself oh, our website seems dated, that doesn't necessarily mean that it's time to jump ship and pick a new website platform. It might just be time to adjust the theme that you have associated with your website. Changing a theme will give you an overall new looking website, so keep that in mind as well.

It's really easy to switch themes if you're using Wix or Squarespace or a platform like WordPress. It does take some planning ahead, but you're able to do it with ease.

There were a couple other platforms that I originally mentioned, but I'm assuming that most people that are listening to this are not using those, and those would be BigCommerce or Shopif. We do see a couple people still using Joomla and Drupal, but again, very few and far between when it comes to that and also even the HubSpot Website Builder.

If you're just getting started and you're setting up a website for the first time there was a really great episode that we did specifically geared towards that. We'll leave the link associated with the description and associated links for this episode, but if you are just getting started and if you want to narrow it down, I can give you some guidance into that.

And saying that, I would suggest to you that you either use WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or Clinic Sites.

And again, it is going to depend on how much flexibility you want, what capabilities you need from your website and how important SEO is to you.

Overall, I would say WordPress is the best platform currently for SEO, but again, it does require more complex things like running updates and additional maintenance, whereas when it comes to the all-in-one solutions right now, I would say, out of the three that we talked about, Squarespace does have a little bit of a nudge up above some of the other all-in-one platforms right now when it comes to SEO.

But again, we're seeing Wix really putting down some money when it comes to advertising, so you are seeing them associated with more trainings regarding SEO and more conferences, and they're really trying to make their way in that market, but they still have some space to go.

So, if you are going to use an all-in-one solution, keep in mind they do make it easier and quicker to set up your own website in record time.

And if you are going to have a company set up your website for you and they say that you would be using quote-unquote their platform, in some cases, we do see instances where people go with a company and they're going to be using their again quote-unquote platform and all it really is is that they have white labeled or made some adjustments to WordPress, and the actual platform is WordPress.

So dig a little deeper. If you are going with a company that is going to be setting up a website for you, ask them what platform or what CMS they would be using for the website builder.

Ask them is it a proprietary software? Is it WordPress? Is it Squarespace? What is the platform? What limitations does the platform have? Is the platform SEO-friendly? If they say yes, the platform is SEO-friendly, you have to ask them what does that mean?

You need to also ask them how flexible the platform is for customization. Would you be able to switch themes later on? If you want to change things around, are you, in fact, able to jump in and make edits to the website?

And, as we wrap up, I believe I've said this numerous times before, but I'm going to go ahead and say it again, if you have anybody set up a website for you, ask them to do a recorded session where they walk you through how you or one of your team members can make changes to the website.

A few other things before we wrap up: always make sure that you have admin access to your website. Always make sure that you, as a company, own the URL associated with the website. If somebody is setting up a website for you and they are adding the content for you and creating the words and texts that are going on your website, you need to ask them if you own the rights to that content.

If and when you might decide to switch platforms or switch companies you're working with, you should have Google Analytics set up on your website. You need to make sure that you and a backup person from your organization have admin access to Google Analytics and to your website. You need to make sure that you have admin access to wherever your website is registered. The registration for your website is the URL that you type in to go to your website. Registration is different from hosting, which is where your files sit, so you need to make sure that you own the URL and that you know how to access that URL.

Okay, I think that was a lot for today.

Anyways, if you're in the process of setting up a new website, if you need Propel to set up a new website for you, and you are a clinic owner, please visit our website propelyourcompany.com, and book a discovery call to see if worth a right solution for you.

If you have a website that's set up and you would like some SEO assistance or help making changes to your website, you can also contact us by visiting propelyourcompany.com and clicking the book a discovery button.

I know before that I did mention that WordPress is a little bit more complicated, but there are definite benefits to using that platform and I have seen non-techie people set up their own WordPress website as well. I know everybody has their own level of comfort when it comes to technology.

As I mentioned, we always set up websites for our clients in WordPress and then we train them on how to make edits for their websites. I think it's really important, no matter who sets up your website for you, that you ask them to do a recording teaching you how to make edits to your website and making sure that you have access to make some small changes when needed.

All right, that's it for today, folks. Thanks for listening in, and be sure to find us on Instagram @PropelYourCompany.

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Darcy’s SEO strategies are easy to implement and effective. She’s the #1 SEO expert I refer to whenever I need help with my rankings.

SEO queen! I can’t thank Propel and Darcy enough for holding my hand through the SEO process! I’m loving the podcast and all the insight! Also loving that my business is now getting the brand awareness and sales I’ve always wanted!

Wow! Clear, concise and impactful. Excellent details and tips - already seeing a return!! Worth the 20 min listen.

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