If you’re looking to build a site for your business, then you’ll have to make many important decisions around the planning, design, and launch of the site. One of your first major choices will be deciding whether you want to build the site from scratch or use a website building platform. You will likely need to hire a developer to create a website from scratch. A developer will use HTML with a variety of markup and scripting languages, including CSS and Javascript, to create web pages. Although it may require more time and money to build from scratch, this option can result in a site that looks and functions exactly like you want.
If you’d rather not hire a developer, then you can get started with one of the hundreds of publishing platforms, website builders, and content management systems on the market. Of these solutions, a CMS is the most popular. It allows you to easily customize the design of your site, add multimedia in your posts, organize your content by tags and categories, manage multiple users, edit the underlying code, and much, much more.
To help you find a solution that’s right for your business, we’ll compare the different experiences you’ll get using the popular open-source CMS WordPress or building an HTML site.
WordPress is a flexible CMS that allows multiple users to create and run a website without coding. While much easier to customize than an HTML site, a WordPress site will be more difficult to maintain. With an HTML website, you won’t have to worry about plugin compatibility or site maintenance. However, because you’ll need a developer to make any changes, you’ll have little control over your site.
With WordPress, you can have ownership over your site without needing to code it from scratch or know how to code at all. You can easily extend its functionality via plugins, add content, change its appearance, and configure its setting. In exchange for this flexibility, you’ll have to spend more time, effort, and money managing your site. Ecommerce stores, small business sites, and other companies looking to grow their brand and customer base will prefer building with this open-source CMS.
If you don’t anticipate needing to update or change your site regularly, then you’re better off hiring a developer to build an HTML site. It will require less server resources and therefore be cheaper to build. Restaurants, gyms, boutiques, and other small businesses looking to establish a simple online presence will find this option appealing.
Now that we have a brief overview of the differences between building and managing a site on WordPress and building and managing an HTML site, let’s compare them in terms of price, blogging, and SEO.
The cost of building a website depends on a whole host of factors but the four major ones are your time, budget, technical knowledge, and design skills. If you have time but not technical knowledge, for example, then you could learn how to build an HTML site. If you lack both time and technical knowledge though, you can build a site on WordPress. Below we’ll look at the costs of creating and managing a website on WordPress and one built from scratch.
As open-source software, WordPress is free to download and use. However, you will have to pay for a domain name and hosting to launch your site. You may also have to factor in any premium plugins or themes you want to install. Although premium themes can cost up to $200 and plugins can range from one-time fees of $3.99 to annual fees of $250, these design options are most likely cheaper than hiring a web developer or designer to customize the appearance and functionality of your site.
Because domain registration, hosting, themes, and plugins vary in price, the costs of building and managing a WordPress site can range from a couple hundred to a couple thousands dollars. The average costs of are much more moderate than that range implies though. According to Website Builder Expert, building a WordPress site will cost you around $200 and managing it will cost $11 to $40 per month, on average.
Let’s first consider the cost of building an HTML site. Hiring an agency to build and design your site from scratch will be the priciest option, costing tens of thousands of dollars. Hiring a freelancer will be cheaper but range dramatically, depending on their hourly rate and the duration of the project. According to a custom quote by WebFX, hiring a developer to build out a responsive site with one to ten pages that’s moderately styled would cost between $7,000 and $10,000.
Estimating the cost of maintaining an HTML site is even more difficult than estimating the cost of building one because it completely depends on your coding abilities. If you don’t have any coding skills, you will have to pay a developer to make any changes to your site. Even simple tasks like adding new content or inserting images will require you to hire a developer for a few hours.
That’s why WebFX estimates that the cost of maintaining an HTML site can range from $400 to $60,000 per year. However, a smaller site like the one mentioned above will range much more moderately from $400 to $1,200 per year. Since you can add new content and perform most tasks without hiring a developer in WordPress, managing an HTML website will likely end up costing much more than a WordPress website.
If you’re investing this amount of time and money into building a site for your business, then you want people to see it. To boost your site’s visibility, aim to get ranking as close as possible to the first page. According to Search Engine Journal, sites listed on the first Google search results page get 91.5% of the traffic share for a keyword or phrase.
To drive that organic traffic to your site, you need to optimize your on-page and technical SEO. Let’s compare the SEO friendliness of building a site on WordPress and building one from scratch.
WordPress enables you to easily customize your image alt-text, meta descriptions, headings, and custom URLs right in your dashboard so you don’t need to edit a single line of code. You can also choose among thousands of responsive themes to design a mobile-friendly site. If you lack experience or knowledge of SEO, then you can download or purchase a range of WordPress plugins to help. Plugins like Yoast SEO, WP Rocket, and Redirection let you control many aspects of your site’s technical and on-page SEO.
The one disadvantage of a WordPress site is that it requires PHP and a database. Every time a visitor lands on your site, your server has to execute the PHP code and retrieve information from your database to display the correct information to the visitor. Because this requires more server resources than an HTML & CSS site, it can increase load time and delays. However, by selecting a fast hosting provider, optimizing and compressing your images, and taking other steps to speed up your site, you can get your load times under one second and meet your consumers’ expectation for speed.
There are several ways you can optimize your HTML site for search engines — you just need to know how to do it. Adding keywords in your posts and pages, linking to internal and external pages, and optimizing your URLs, heading tags, title tags, meta descriptions, and image alt text are all familiar best practices.
But, unlike on web building platforms, you can’t use any buttons on a dashboard or third-party plugins to help you with these steps. Instead, you have to spend the time creating the right tags and code for your site, or hiring someone who will. As mentioned above, HTML sites do not require PHP execution or database queries to load. That means that, if their code is optimized, HTML sites are faster out-of-the-box than WordPress sites.