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Why use WordPress for your website? Honestly, ask ten people and you’ll get ten different answers, three arguments, and at least one person telling you the platform you’re currently on is terrible.
I’ve been helping business owners build and grow their websites for 15 years, and this is one of the conversations I have most often. Squarespace, Wix, Showit, Kajabi. They all have their fans, and they all have their place. But for most established business owners, WordPress is the answer. Not because it’s the trendiest option, or the prettiest, or the easiest to get started with. Because it’s the one that actually grows with your business without locking you in or letting you down.
I’ve migrated people off most of these platforms when they outgrew them, and onto ones that actually fit their business. So here are my thoughts, based on 15 years of actually doing this.
WordPress vs Squarespace, Wix, Showit, and Kajabi: what's the difference?
Before we get into it, a quick note. There are two kinds of tools being compared here, and people often mix them up.
Website builders like Squarespace, Wix, and Showit are website platforms. You pay a monthly fee, they host your site on their servers, and you build everything inside their system. Simple to start, but you’re always working within their rules. Kajabi is a bit of a special one in this category: it’s not just a website platform but an all-in-one business platform, however you are still paying them and building on their servers.
WordPress (self-hosted) is different. The software itself is free and open source, which means you install it on your own hosting, you own everything, and you can do almost anything with it. More moving parts to set up, yes, but it’s yours in a way no other platform can match.
One thing to sort out before we go any further: WordPress.com vs WordPress.org
Above I said “WordPress (self-hosted)”. That is because there are actually two versions of WordPress. And since this trips people up constantly, I want to save you the headache and explain it here:
WordPress.org is the self-hosted version, the one I’m talking about throughout this post. You download the free software, install it on your own hosting, and you own everything. Full flexibility, full control.
WordPress.com is a separate hosted platform that uses the WordPress name but works much more like Squarespace or Wix. You pay a monthly fee, you’re on their servers, and the free and lower-tier plans are heavily restricted. You can’t install your own plugins, your customisation options are limited, and you’ll hit walls quickly if you’re running a real business. To get anything close to the full WordPress experience on WordPress.com, you’re paying business-tier prices that wipe out the cost advantage entirely.
If you ever signed up for WordPress and found yourself frustrated that you couldn’t do what you wanted, there’s a good chance you accidentally ended up on WordPress.com. It happens all the time.
When people in the web world say “use WordPress,” they mean WordPress.org. That’s what this post is about.
Why use WordPress for your website?
1. You own it completely
This is the big one that people don’t think about until something goes wrong.
With Squarespace, Wix, or Showit, your website lives on their platform. If they put their prices up (which they do), you pay more or you leave. If they change a feature you rely on, you have to adapt. If they ever close down or get acquired, your site goes with them.
WordPress runs on your own hosting. You choose your hosting provider, you pay them directly, and your website is yours. If you don’t like your host, you move it. Nothing is locked in.
After investing months into building your website and years into the content you’ve created there, ownership matters.
2. The SEO capabilities are genuinely in a different league
This is the thing I want you to hear clearly: if you ever want people to find your website through Google, WordPress gives you the best tools to make that happen.
With a SEO plugin like RankMath, you get full control over everything that affects how Google reads your pages. Meta titles, descriptions, schema markup, sitemaps, internal linking suggestions, readability checks, and more. These aren’t buried in a settings menu somewhere. They’re right there when you’re writing your posts and pages.
This is exactly why I get frustrated when I see business owners switch to Showit because it looks beautiful. And don’t get me wrong, it does look beautiful.
But here’s the thing most people don’t realise: Showit doesn’t actually have its own blogging platform. If you want to blog on Showit, you still need WordPress underneath it.
Showit themselves chose not to build their own blogging system because they recognised WordPress was simply the best at it. So Showit handles the design of your main pages, but your blog runs on WordPress in the background. You’re managing two systems, paying Showit prices, and still relying on WordPress for the part of your site that drives your search traffic. At that point, why not just use WordPress for everything?
To be fair, Squarespace handles the SEO basics well. Clean URLs, automatic sitemaps, mobile responsiveness, meta titles and descriptions. It covers what most simple business sites need. But if you’re planning to blog regularly and use content to drive organic traffic, WordPress gives you a level of depth and control that Squarespace simply can’t match.
If SEO matters to your business, and for most service-based business owners it should, WordPress is the answer, not a workaround.
3. It grows with your business
When you start your business, your website needs are relatively simple. A homepage, an about page, some service pages, maybe a blog. Fine. Almost any platform can handle that.
But businesses grow. You add a freebie with its own landing page. You launch a course. You set up an email sequence that needs a specific thank-you page. You want a member area, a shop, a booking system. You start running ads that need dedicated landing pages with no menu or footer.
WordPress handles all of this. Not with workarounds or expensive upgrades, but with plugins, many of which are free, that extend what your site can do. The plugin library has over 59,000 options. Whatever you need your site to do, there’s almost certainly a way to do it.
Please note that the amount of plugins is also the dangerous part of WordPress websites, because a lot of them aren’t great. I have clear opinions on which plugins to use for what, but if you need a function, it almost certainly exists.
Other platforms run into ceilings. Not immediately, but they do. And migrating a full website is genuinely painful work, which we’ll get to.
4. You can make it look exactly how you want
One of the most common reasons I hear for choosing Showit or Squarespace is the design. And I understand it. They have beautiful templates and you can see the result immediately.
The reputation WordPress has for being hard to customise comes from the old days of theme-based design, where you were stuck inside a template’s layout and changing anything structural meant touching code. That’s not how modern WordPress works. With Elementor, you’re working in a visual drag-and-drop builder where you can move anything, change anything, and see the result immediately, without touching a single line of code. My own WordPress templates are built in Elementor for exactly this reason. If you love a template but want to move the logo, change the layout, or rearrange the footer, you just do it.
The difference is that WordPress gives you more creative control, not less. You’re not limited by the grid system or the design rules built into a platform.
If you can imagine it, you can generally build it.
5. The cost is lower than you think
People often assume WordPress is expensive because it has more moving parts.
But let’s look at the actual numbers.
A good quality host like Lyrical Host costs about 200 euros a year. The WordPress software is free. Many excellent plugins, including the SEO plugin I use, are free. You might invest in one paid plugin or a template to get started, but that’s a smaller (yearly) cost, not a monthly subscription that increases every year.
Compare that to Squarespace, which starts at around €23 a month and goes up. Or Showit, which starts at €29 a month just to get the blog functionality. Or Kajabi, which starts at around €125 a month for its entry plan. Over three years, the difference adds up significantly.
And you don’t have the hidden cost that nobody warns you about: the migration bill.
The website migration problem nobody talks about
Every year I help a handful of clients who built their site on a simpler platform and have outgrown it. And then occasionally there’s a sudden rush, usually when one of the platforms puts their prices up and people start looking for the exit. They want to move to WordPress because they need the SEO capabilities, the flexibility, or they’ve simply hit a wall with what their platform can do.
Moving from Squarespace or Wix to WordPress is not a copy-paste job. Your content, images, URLs, redirects, and design all need to be rebuilt. Blog posts sometimes can be imported but usually need cleaning up and sometimes need rebuilding completely. Pages rarely migrate cleanly. And sometimes even the URL structure changes, which means you have to set up redirects or lose any search ranking you’ve built up.
It’s doable. I do it for clients. But it takes time and it costs money, and it could have been avoided by choosing WordPress at the start.
If you know your business is going to grow, your website needs to grow with it. WordPress is the platform that’s built for that from day one.
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So when are the other website platforms a good fit?
I want to be honest here, because not every situation calls for the same answer.
Squarespace is a reasonable choice if you genuinely need something simple and fast, your business model is unlikely to change significantly, and SEO is not a priority for you. The templates are polished, the interface is clean, and you can get something professional-looking online quickly. Just know you’re accepting the limitations that come with a closed system.
Wix has improved a lot in recent years and is genuinely beginner-friendly. I’d still point you towards WordPress for most business owners, but if you need to get something up today with zero budget for setup help, Wix gets you there. The SEO tools have come on, though they’re still not as powerful as WordPress. Just know that if you ever want to move away, you’re essentially starting from scratch.
Showit is popular among photographers and designers because the visual design freedom is real. If your business is very design-led and you want full creative control over the look of your pages, Showit can do that. But please understand: Showit’s main website pages have weaker SEO than WordPress, and the beautiful pages you’re building there are essentially not the ones Google crawls for blog content. You’re relying on the WordPress blog integration for your search visibility. At that point, you’re managing two interfaces and paying more for the privilege.
Kajabi is a different conversation entirely, and I want to give it a fair one because a lot of my clients use it.
What about Kajabi?
Kajabi is not really a website builder. It’s a complete business platform: website, courses, community, email marketing, sales funnels, checkout, and more, all in one place. If you’re selling digital products or programmes, that all-in-one appeal is genuinely understandable, and for a simple setup it can work fine.
But here’s my honest take after migrating dozens of clients away from it: Kajabi tries to do everything, and that means it doesn’t do most of it well. Only the courses and digital products side of things are really nice in Kajabi.
The website side is functional but limited. It works fine if your needs are straightforward, but you’ll hit walls quickly if you want anything beyond a basic setup.
The email side is where I see the most frustration. The automations are basic compared to a dedicated email platform. You can’t create conditional splits or paths without building entirely separate sequences. If someone unsubscribes, they’re off your list entirely with no option to stay subscribed to specific types of emails. Sending a regular newsletter is clunkier than it should be. And the deliverability issues, the emails not arriving, the campaigns not firing correctly, are something I hear about consistently from clients who come to me after struggling with it.
My honest recommendation: if you want to host your courses and digital products on Kajabi, go for it. Though there are cheaper options if you are just using it for that. And while you can use Kajabi for your website I would recommend WordPress as soon as you want a little more. What is almost a non-negotiable for me is not using Kajabi for your email marketing, but using Kit instead. You’ll have an email setup that actually does what you need it to do and yes, it does integrate with Kajabi, natively even. Yes, it’s more tools to manage, but they’ll each do their job properly.
But I'm not technical enough for WordPress
This is the thing I hear most often, “I’m not a techy and therefore WordPress is too difficult” and I want to address it directly.
WordPress has a reputation for being complicated that it mostly doesn’t deserve anymore. The editor is visual and intuitive. Elementor makes building pages a drag-and-drop process. Good hosting like Lyrical Host installs WordPress for you with one click and offers real human support when you get stuck.
What WordPress does require is a good setup to begin with. A lot of the horror stories people tell about WordPress being slow, clunky, or hard to manage come from a bad setup, not from WordPress itself. Once your site is built well, with a clean theme, sensible plugins, and proper hosting, maintaining it is genuinely straightforward. You write your posts, update your pages, and the technical side mostly takes care of itself.
The basics that make the biggest difference: use a builder like Elementor for your design (I’d steer clear of Divi, which adds code that makes it much harder to change things later), be selective with plugins and only install what you actually need, and start with good hosting. Beyond that, less is genuinely more in the beginning. And if the setup feels like too much to tackle alone, that’s exactly what my Tech Hours are for.
So now you know why you want to use WordPress for your website. If you’re starting fresh, start on WordPress. If you’re on another platform and starting to feel the limitations, now is a good time to think about making the move before your site gets any bigger and the migration gets any harder.
