Looking for an alternative to WordPress

Which problem are you actually solving

If the problem is that WordPress is too much work, the answer is not usually a different platform, because the work is in the assembly rather than in the software. If the problem is that you want to stop owning anything and just pay a monthly fee, a rented builder is genuinely the right answer and we will say so.

Below is what each route actually costs you, in money and in what you end up holding.

The four honest options

A rented builder (Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy)

Easy to start, $200 to $600 a year forever, and you cannot take the site with you. Stop paying and the pages cease to exist. For some businesses that is a perfectly rational trade.

WordPress you assemble yourself

Cheapest in cash, most expensive in weekends. A host, a theme, a builder, a plugin stack, and ongoing responsibility for all of it. Good if you enjoy it.

A freelancer or agency

$2,000 to $8,000 and three to eight weeks, most of it waiting for content. The right choice when you need bespoke functionality, a shop, or a booking system.

This: a theme written for you

$199 once, $15 a month hosted, a real WordPress theme you own and can take elsewhere. Suited to a one page site done properly, not to a shop.

Why we think the fourth one is underrated

The rented builders solved the wrong half of the problem. They made it easy to start and impossible to leave. The assembly route solved the ownership half and left the difficulty. A freelancer solves both and costs ten times as much, because a person has to spend real days on it.

What we do is narrow on purpose: one page, done to a standard, on a real theme, on your own address. Inside that shape it is a better deal than any of the three. Outside it, one of the three is genuinely the better answer, and the page above says which.

What you can take with you, by route

• Rented builder: the text and images you uploaded, and nothing structural. Usually not the design, usually not the domain if you registered it through them.
• Self-assembled WordPress: everything, if you know how to export it. This is the route's real advantage.
• Freelancer: everything, normally, but check the contract for who owns the design files and who holds the domain.
• Here: the theme zip, the content inside it, and the web address, which was registered in your name from the beginning.

What you actually end up owning

Most ways of getting a website end with you renting one. Cancel a builder subscription and the pages stop existing; there is nothing to take with you because there was never a file. That is the trade you make for the monthly price, and plenty of people make it knowingly.

This is not that. What gets built for you is a WordPress theme: a real folder of files, with its own style.css, index.php and functions.php, that installs through Appearance, Themes, Add New, Upload Theme on any WordPress host in the world. We host it for you at $15 a month so you never have to think about it, and the web address is registered in your name, not ours.

If you ever want to leave, ask for a copy and it is yours: the theme file, the address, the content. You can hand it to any developer and they will recognise exactly what they are looking at, because it is an ordinary WordPress theme and not a proprietary export nobody else can open.