There are many popular platforms to use when building a site, but in my industry of branding for wedding businesses there are really three: WordPress, Squarespace, and Showit. Squarespace is a beast I just haven’t tackled and probably never will. WordPress is a beast I HAVE tackled and never will again. Showit is the future! I love it!

So why is WordPress so terrible?

WordPress is a great platform, but it is not the most user friendly. If you are a developer it’s a piece of cake. I am not a developer. I am a designer and while I can style WordPress sites using themes like Divi, I cannot create a WordPress site from scratch.

Here are my reasons why I no longer use WordPress:

1. It requires TONS of maintenance. – To make sure WordPress sites stay up and running you have to constantly be updating your theme, WordPress itself, and plugins manually. This is a pain. And sometimes when you do updates they are incompatible with each other which can break parts of your site.
2. There isn’t a good contact form. – Unless you use an embed code on your contact page from Honeybook or elsewhere creating a good contact form is difficult and/or expensive. There are paid plugins like Gravity Forms that are good for contact forms, BUT you have to pay for the form every year and make updates to the plugin often.
3. There is no support. – You’re on your own with a WordPress site. There is no support email to use other than your designer and in my case I am not a developer. I can’t fix a lot of things that break.
4. Mobile versions are a PAIN – You don’t have too much control over a mobile version of your site.
5. Difficult to update – Making updates to your site isn’t that easy unless you are familiar with the theme like Divi. Most of my clients are not. It’s not very easy to update fonts, change colors, and the size of things.
6. Limited in design and creativity – Unless you are a developer who can build sites from scratch there are limitations in how creative you can be with your layout. I would always have to think “how would I code this?”

Here are my reasons why I LOVE Showit:

1. No maintenance – There is NO maintenance required on your end as the user. Showit does all of that to their app for you. No plugin updates or anything else.
2. Amazing support and community – Showit has a support team you can email 24/7 to help you should an emergency arise. They also have a Facebook group with a strong community that helps each other learn. Showit also has an awesome wiki with tutorials for everything.
3. No limit to creativity – Showit has a drag and drop interface and there is NO coding involved at all. It’s truly one of a kind.
4. The design of your WordPress blog is in Showit – This is truly one of a kind. I have never seen another platform that allows you to design your blog page in the platform, but have WordPress generate the blog. You can make your blog super unique as well as all your static pages in Showit.
5. Easy to use! Showit is SO easy to use. It’s a drag and drop system with layers like Photoshop. You can easily update galleries and text.
6. Shopify connection – Showit makes it easy to have a shop on your site with Shopify lite. Simply get a Shopify lite plan and add “add to cart” buttons on your product pages. You can design how everything on your shop looks in Showit.

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