WordPress vs HTML: which is better for your website?

WordPress and HTML are the two most common camps of website creators.

If you never coded before, the concept of creating a website from scratch using HTML can seem really difficult. Fortunately, today, WordPress exists and allows you to manage content easily without any HTML knowledge.

Both WordPress and HTML have their own pros and cons, depending on your needs. This article will help you make an informed decision between the two.

Without further ado, let’s review WordPress vs HTML in detail.

Moreover, a website created with HTML alone will be rather simple, and making it more dynamic will require additional CSS and JS code.

If your site requires no updates, regular changes, or any additional content, HTML is a better choice as it will make your website perform faster.

If you want to grow your business website and constantly update it, then WordPress is the best choice. Why so?

With WordPress, you can maintain your website yourself, even without any technical skills. You can also create content and pages that you need whenever you want. Moreover, there are plenty of plugins to power your site’s functions and grow your business, for example:

• WordPress is SEO friendly, but you can easily optimize it further using SEO plugins, such as Yoast SEO.
• If you run an online store, you can easily manage it using eCommerce plugins, such as WooCommerce.
• You can also integrate your content marketing strategy with an email marketing strategy simply by using plugins. Start building an email list using a plugin like MailChimp to maintain your relationship with customers.
• You can save time by automating marketing strategies using a marketing automation plugin, such as Inboundnow.

See? You can make the most of your online marketing strategy to generate leads, regularly engage with your customers, and make sales simply by using WordPress plugins.

Get to know WordPress

WordPress is a content management system (CMS) that allows users to easily create, manage, and modify website content using admin area specifically designed to be user-friendly. It doesn’t require users to understand coding to start using it.

More than 30% of all websites on the internet use WordPress. Thus, it makes WordPress one of the best CMS platforms on the market. It is used by massive media companies, such as The New York Times, MTV News, and many others.

Keep in mind that there are two different WordPress platforms, namely WordPress.org and WordPress.com. It is important not to confuse both of them.

WordPress.org is an open-source CMS. It is here where you can download the software and find plenty of free plugins and themes. It is also the one that you should choose if you want to create a website and have the ability to freely use a custom domain and sign up for a hosting service.

So, if you want to start making a website, register a domain and make a choice between using WordPress or HTML.

If you want to make a WordPress-powered website, all you have to do is choose the best web hosting plan for WordPress.

Meanwhile, WordPress.com is a self-hosted version of WordPress. While it is easier to use, there are some limitations of how freely you can manage your content.

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of using WordPress and its drawbacks:

Pros

• WordPress is easy to work with. This allows you to almost completely eliminate the need to know how to code. When performing your website’s daily management tasks, the platform is specifically designed to be very beginner-friendly. It is famous for its 5-minute installation.
  Instead of coding, most of the actions can be performed through its user interface. It allows you to:
  • Create or update content and pages.
  • Customize your site’s functionality and appearance.
  • Improve and manage SEO.
• WordPress is highly customizable. You can easily upgrade your site with plugins and use various pre-made themes. Plugins act as code extensions to further increase your site’s functionality and power. Meanwhile, themes are used to customize how you want your website to look.
• WordPress is always developing, as it is open-source. Anyone can contribute to WordPress – helping in fixing issues and bugs, etc.; they can also create and develop their own WordPress themes and plugins. This helps the rapid development of WordPress as the platform always gets better whenever there is a new release or an update.

Cons

• WordPress is built on PHP and MySQL. You can use WordPress without any knowledge of PHP and MySQL. However, to make more advanced customizations that are not offered by plugins or themes, you need to know some scripting languages, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which might take time to learn.
• You must maintain your website periodically to make sure there aren’t any compatibility issues.  So, you will be required to keep your WordPress site and its aspects – such as plugins and themes – always up to date. If your time to maintain your WordPress site is scarce, use a WordPress hosting service that provides daily backups and updates for your site, helping keep your WordPress site secure.

Get to know HTML

HTML or Hyper-Text Markup Language is a markup language containing tags that are used to classify elements on a website page.

HTML is used together with CSS and JavaScript to build websites. It provides the sites’ basic structure, which is later enhanced by CSS and JavaScript.

CSS helps visually style the basic structure classified by HTML, and it controls how the content’s layout is formatted and presented to the users. JavaScript is used to make the website interactive, and it controls the behavior of different content elements in response to user action.

Technically, HTML and CSS are not programming languages – it is page content structure and style information. While JavaScript is a logic-based programming language.

Apart from this, WordPress can actually be generated with HTML as a static website. It will allow you to manage your content as easy as in WordPress but will publish everything as a static website with HTML accompanied with a fast page load speed.

Let’s take a look at HTML’s pros and cons to differentiate it better.

Pros

• Less need for updates and backups. Since static HTML sites are not constantly updated, you only need to create a backup every time you make a change, which realistically is not very frequent. As scripting language updates are few and far between, you’ll need to worry about it far less than with WordPress.
• Control nearly everything on your website. Because you build your website from the core using a markup language, accessing and modifying the code is easier than with WordPress. This makes it much more flexible when integrating certain additional features. For example, while WordPress uses schema plugins, you can easily employ schema markup on a static HTML website via code.
• HTML websites use fewer resources. It can run on a cheaper server with fewer resources because, unlike WordPress, it doesn’t need PHP or MySQL servers.

Cons

• HTML is definitely not beginner-friendly. Static HTML is good for building a basic website. However, you need to do a little coding if you want to update your content, and you need to rewrite your CSS if you want to change your site’s appearance.
• A high maintenance cost is inevitable. If you don’t have any coding ability, you will have to pay a developer to make those changes or perform updates. Of course, you can learn coding yourself as well. In WordPress, you can simply do that without any help. Considering this, an HTML website could cost much more than a WordPress website.

Conclusion

Deciding between WordPress or HTML as the foundation for your website will depend on your needs. Here’s a quick recap of what we covered in this article.

The main difference between WordPress and HTML is that creating a website with WordPress does not require any development knowledge while coding it from scratch using HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) has a steeper learning curve but will give you more control.

All in all, WordPress is the better pick if you want to expand your site by adding content on a regular basis.

If you’re still unsure which option is the best for you, check out other WordPress alternatives or consider using a site builder. You can also go through our WordPress tutorial if you want to learn more.

So, have you made your decision? Let us know in the comments!