Considering building your next website on Showit or WordPress, but need a comparison to decide which website builder is better? I’m not surprised – every smart business owner and blogger knows that a gorgeous, functional website is essential to standing out and getting found online. But how do you choose a website platform when there are so many options?
In this post, I’ll be comparing Showit and WordPress (the self-hosted version), and focusing on their design capabilities, maintenance requirements, SEO friendliness, and more.
Quick Answer: Who Should Use Showit or WordPress
You should choose Showit if your priority is easy design.
Showit customers love its extensive, completely freeform drag-and-drop design capabilities to launch the web design of their dreams, without having to touch a single line of code.
You should choose WordPress if you are tech-savvy, or okay with a learning curve.
WordPress users love its complete and deep feature customization, extensive CMS use, or they prefer web feature customization and to manage your own code and hosting over the ease of having a drag-and-drop design.
Showit vs WordPress: Basics & Costs
WordPress is an open-source, fully-fledged, widely-used, self-hosted CMS and website platform that has been around since 2003. Its capabilities go far beyond blogging – you can launch any type of website you can dream up with WordPress, from company websites to portfolios, forums, directories, and ecommerce stores, with enough development skill. This ability to customize the platform, however, results in a steeper learning curve. WordPress has a reputation for being difficult to use and more complex to learn than Showit, and based on my experience building websites, I’d say this is true.
The WordPress software itself is free, but you install it onto a host of your choice, so you must pay for hosting, and you must purchase a domain name to connect it to. You can also elect to purchase additional items for your WordPress site, like premium plugins and themes.
Showit is hosted website builder with drag-and-drop web design functionality and that was launched in 2008 and geared towards creative entreprenuers, business owners, coaches, photographers, and bloggers. It offers an intuitive drag-and-drop editor similar to Adobe Suite or Canva, making it the ideal platform for DIY-ers unfamiliar with web developlment or design software. Every Showit website is hosted on Showit servers, so you don’t have to worry about setting up or maintaining hosting. While acclimation may take some time, the learning curve is not too steep.
Showit requires a monthly subscription, and you can select the Showit subscription plan that works best for you. They currently offer 3 different price points. You can also elect to purchase additional premium themes and templates from the Showit shop or from third-party designers.
Showit vs WordPress: Design Capabilities
Showit and WordPress differ in that Showit does not feature an underlying grid to aid with layout or placement of elements. Instead, its drag-and-drop editor acts as a blank canvas where users can place any type of text, image, or other element on the page. Think of the Showit web designer like the Canva of website platforms.
One of the key advantages of Showit is its ease of creating a fully custom mobile site and designing it side by side with your desktop website. This is especially important, considering up to 70% of all web traffic now originates from mobile devices.
Showit’s visual drag-and-drop interface may make it simpler for beginners to get started, but mastering its use requires some patience. There are a plethora of editing controls in the editor and it can be challenging to know exactly what you’re doing at times.
Therefore, it’s possible to make mistakes when designing pages with Showit and publishing them. Always preview your page prior to making any major edits so as to prevent costly mistakes.
WordPress, on the other hand, is capable of advanced website creation with many content types, and offers a wider selection of plugins and functionalities that support it.
With WordPress, the overall website design and layout is controlled by the WordPress theme you install. There are a number of free themes in the WordPress directory, or you can pay for a premium theme. The theme you install will control all of your design options on your website, so each WordPress website’s design is managed slightly differently.
The one thing that every up-to-date WordPress website has in common is that you can use the built-in Gutenberg editor (now known as the block editor) to drag and drop your page layouts to your heart’s content. So your WordPress theme will control the colors, fonts, header and footer layouts, while the Gutenberg block editor will be used to build individual pages on a grid basis.
Showit vs WP: Blogging Abilities
Technically, WordPress and Showit both have the same exact blogging capabilities.
WordPress is a well known blogging platform and comes with a built in “post” post type to start blogging as soon as you install it.
Showit’s blogging functionality is created by integrating WordPress itself. So you’ll have all of the functionality of a WordPress blog on your Showit website, backed by your beautiful Showit design.
In other words, Showit, unlike WordPress, does not come with its own blogging platform but instead relies on using WordPress plugins to add blog functionality. You must be on a plan that adds blogging to your website in order to use this integration.
Designing blogs using Showit’s editing interface ties together the design elements (featured image, author, post content, categories etc.) with dynamic blog post content from within WordPress’ database. This means that when you publish your WordPress blog post using Showit, all of its components will be pulled directly into it automatically.
Showit vs WP: SEO Friendliness
Being able to manage your website’s SEO settings is essential for getting discovered when people search for you.
Showit is SEO-friendly allows you to natively set your SEO meta data for each page, including your page URLs, titles, and meta descriptions. On Showit, you must optimize your SEO meta data individually on a page-by-page basis, since it’s not a CMS. All of the content on Showit pages is readable and indexable by search engines as well. This is essential, since it’s not the case with every website platform.
Read the full Showit SEO guide coming soon.
WordPress is also SEO-friendly, and allows the installation of third-party SEO plugins like Yoast and Rankmath which also allow you to optimize each page’s SEO data, including URLs, titles, and meta descriptions. You can optimize pages individually, or in bulk using one of the aforementioned SEO plugins.
Showit vs WordPress: Maintenance & Security
When self-hosting your WordPress website, you are 100% responsible for maintaining everything about it – including your hosting, the latest WordPress software and updates, your security setup, your theme, and your plugins. You’re responsible for creating and maintaining backups, as well as restoring them in the case that something goes awry, and you’re on your own (or must hire a WordPress wizard) if you break something in its functionality or layout. WordPress requires more attention when it comes to security as well, because being such a popular website platform, it’s highly targeted for vulnerabilities. This means that if you’re not comfortable maintaining your own site and hosting, you should probably be paying someone to do so.
Showit (and other hosted website builder platforms) are quite the opposite. Showit hosting maintenance is taken care of automatically, so you never have to mess with your server. The same goes for the platform updates, security management, and vulnerability patching. For those looking to save money on maintenance and security, this is a huge benefit, since you no longer have to hire a website developer in order to keep your site operational. The cost of maintaining and security can add up quickly when using an outside provider. You even get a free SSL certificate with Showit. All you have to maintain is your visual design.
Showit vs WordPress: Support
Showit offers incredible live chat support that will assist with any queries along the way, plus they have a Facebook community where users in your area can receive assistance! Furthermore, Showit Experts Group members answer queries and share tips and tricks as needed.
WordPress has a huge community behind it since so many web designers, business owners, and bloggers use it. However, solving problems will ultimately come down to Googling and figuring it out yourself, or hiring an expert.
Comparison Summary
To summarize, Showit is a complete, hosted website builder (similar to Wix and Squarespace) where the website platform and technology is completely handled for you, for a small monthly fee. WordPress is a website software that you install and manage on your own server, and you add themes and plugins to it to style it however you want. You don’t pay any fee to WordPress, but you do have to pay for your server and any website experts you might need to help maintain and update your website and server.
Comparing Showit and WordPress is like comparing the Apple vs Windows of computers.
If you want full drag-and-drop control over your design without the headaches of code, hosting, maintenance, or security, then Showit (or another website builder like Wix or SquareSpace) might be the best choice for you.
If you want complete control over your website’s features, need to extensively use a CMS, or feel more comfortable hosting and maintaining your own server or paying an expert to, then WordPress might be the best choice for you.
