Building a new website from scratch takes a lot of previous sketching and analysis. There are certain questions to be considered before deciding what is the best platform to use. In today’s blog post, we go through the core questions to be posed before embarking yourself into building a new website. Plus, we analyze three major frameworks: React, WordPress, and Webflow. 

Choosing a platform: 5 questions before getting started 

1. Who is responsible for developing and maintaining the webpage? Do they have programming knowledge?

If the objective is to build a complex website with varied and customized features, it is important that someone from the team has programming experience. Nowadays, there are dozens of no-code platforms that allow anybody to build a good-looking website. But these platforms are limited, and knowing programming languages like HTML, CSS and Javascript can help overcome these limitations.

2. Is SEO the key of the project?

Some platforms are more SEO oriented than others. In these terms, it is crucial to analyze the speed of the platform, how much unnecessary code will be included in the web page, if the code is easily read and interpreted by Google (or other crawlers), and many others. 

3. Does the platform offer support or is there a big community that can help?

When developing a website problems and doubts will arise and, at that point, it will be important to find the right solution thanks to the community or support the platform offers. The more users, the more likely it is that someone already faced similar problems.

4. How much does it cost? What is the budget?

Some platforms have a monthly cost and it is important to take it into account when choosing one. Migrating to a different platform in the future may be pricey, so choosing wisely before starting it will be helpful. 

5. What is the purpose of the website? Is it meant to be an ecommerce store?

Websites may be meant to work as an ecommerce, as acquisition channels, or as informative pages. So, when deciding which platform to use, I recommend analyzing the purpose of the website. Ecommerce stores are particularly challenging, so it is advised to consider if the website will pivot to this model in the near future. 

ReactJS vs WordPress vs Webflow: How to pick the best platform for your project

Once you have gone through these key points to decide which platform to develop your website on, it is time to analyze the different platforms available and how well they adapt to the challenges described above. In this post we will analyze ReactJS, Wordpress and Webflow. 

ReactJS

ReactJS is an open-source JavaScript library that is used for building user interfaces specifically for single-page applications. It is perfect for the development of admin pages or control panels. These are some its highlights:

💻 Programming: As the name suggests, it is built using Javascript, but it is also necessary to know HTML and CSS. It can connect to any backend, through different languages or frameworks, so it provides a lot of freedom. If your objective is to build a control panel for an application, to control the stock of an ecommerce, social media website, and so on, this is the platform to go for. For example, Facebook is built using ReactJS.

🕷️ SEO-friendly: Even though there are several tools available to make React web pages SEO friendlier, they usually have a high cost and it is not easy to set them up. If the project income will depend on SEO, ReactJS might not be the best option.

🙋‍♀️ Community: There is a big community around React, and there are many libraries published that will make integrations with third-party libraries easy and simple.

💰 Cost: Free. But it will be necessary to pay for the domain name and for the hosting, the cost of the first being around 10 €/year, while the second one can start at 7 €/month. Some tools to make it more SEO friendly will also have a monthly cost.

🛒 Ecommerce: It is possible to build an ecommerce website with React. There are tons of libraries available. But be careful, ecommerce sites usually depend on SEO.

Wordpress

Wordpress is a content management system (CMS) launched in 2003. At the beginning, it was mainly used for blogs, but nowadays, almost any website can be built using Wordpress.

💻 Programming: Wordpress is built using PHP, Javascript, HTML and CSS. A new web page can be created using these languages, but they also offer several plugins (Elemmentor, Divi, etc.) that allow creating a website by dragging and dropping elements. This is great, because it gives the option to build some parts of a website through code while others are built through a visual interface.

🕷️ SEO-friendly: Wordpress web pages have always been able to position themselves on top positions on Google, but it is important to have clean code and a good structure in order to achieve this. Luckily, there are many plugins that will help improve the on-page SEO of these projects.

🙋‍♀️ Community: Wordpress has probably the biggest community regarding web development. There are many plugins that ease third-party integrations and many forums where most of the problems that exist have been previously solved.

💰 Cost: Free. But as in the case of ReactJS, it is necessary to pay for the domain name and the hosting. This last one can be slightly cheaper than the one ReactJS needs.

🛒 Ecommerce: Wordpress by itself can not be an ecommerce, but with the plugin WooCommerce you can turn any Wordpress page into an ecommerce. It can integrate almost any kind of payment, and it is widely used.

Webflow

Webflow provides software as a service for website building and hosting. Their online visual editor platform allows users to design, build, and launch websites.

💻 Programming: It provides a visual interface where users can drag and drop different features into the website. It does not require coding, even though it can be added in case it is needed. It reaches a level of personalization through no code that Elemmentor or Divi (from Wordpress) do not reach.

🕷️ SEO-friendly: Webflow pages are hosted in Webflow servers, and they are fast. Also, the code is supposedly optimized for SEO. So it can be concluded that Webflow pages are SEO friendly.

🙋‍♀️Community: Webflow is quite a new tool, but it has a nice and contributing community behind it, which makes it easy and simple to fix issues that might arise.

💰Cost: Their plans go from 12 $/month to 36 $/month, depending on the features. It is slightly more expensive than the other options, but it includes the domain name and hosting.

🛒Ecommerce: Yet, Webflow does not support ecommerce sites.

Conclusion

There are many platforms available for building websites, but each of them is oriented to different kinds of projects. It is important to analyze and compare them before making a decision, since migrating from one platform to another can be costly and time consuming.

Webflow is perfect for people without coding knowledge, since it allows creating a really professional-looking website without coding. For creating landing pages or portfolio websites, either Wordpress, React or Webflow will be a valid solution, but in this case the decision may rely on the programming language you are more familiar with. 

If none of these platforms suit you and in case your intention is to create a no-code ecommerce website, Shopify can be an interesting option. If you wish to know more about this and other frameworks, stay tuned and keep an eye on our blog!

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