There, I said it. I hate WordPress.
I just don’t get it.
And before you chime in, it’s not a builder issue, I have Elementor, Divi, and Beaver at my disposal.
It’s not intuitive to me in the slightest, it doesn’t make sense to me.
So why, in 2023, have I spent the last week looking at whether I should move to WordPress from Squarespace, which I’m utterly in love with?
Let’s Go Back A Bit: My Website History
I started on Ghost, which took 3 of us about a month to get it looking how I wanted it to. I still love this palette, but it’s not great for accessibility!
Then I found that the Ghost theme I had also had a WordPress version, and I was offered free hosting for my site on WP, so I moved,
and.
hated.
every.
minute.
I could never get it to do what I wanted, I followed all the instructions, and couldn’t get the bloody thing to do what I wanted. It looked terrible, don’t get me wrong, it was purple, but it looked like utter ass! Every time I added a new page or post, everything went wrong!
Eventually, your girl just said fuck it, and looked for another option. I looked at Wix but it has a load of stuff I didn’t need, and finally settled on Squarespace. And guess what? I built my entire website in a weekend.
To say it was a breath of fresh air, would be a massive understatement!
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So Then Why Am I Revisiting WordPress?
Simple answer. Money.
Recently, I became aware of a WordPress plugin called Tasty Pins, and then another called HotJar. Tasty Pins is only available for WordPress, but HotJar is available on Squarespace (where I currently am), but it would mean that I needed to upgrade my Squarespace account, from £144/annual to £204/annual, just to get the free version of HotJar.
Just for a bit of clarity, I earn nothing from my website, so this is a 100% sunk cost. I have no lead magnets, and no paid products (I might have within the next month or so, but nothing right now). So everything I pay for Squarespace and ConvertKit are out-of-pocket expenses.
If I’m looking to pay more for my website to enable the HotJar integration, I wondered whether it would be better to move to WordPress, where I already have hosting, a site, Divi, and Beaver Builder ready and waiting for me.
Point to note here, TastyPins isn’t free, and neither is HotJar. So, while I would save money on Squarespace, how quickly would I get to spending exactly the same money (or more) on WordPress and plugins?
Another issue for me is the time cost. The time it will take me to learn WordPress and Divi or Beaver or Elementor.
What am I not doing in my business because I’m learning that?
Is it worth it?
I need to learn how to use and not hate WordPress.
So I did what I usually do, and took to Twitter/X, and asked for help!
Because WP is so commonly used, it was a pretty safe bet that someone on my follower list would use it and would be able to point me in the direction of some helpful resources.
My followers are fabulous, and soon I had a massive list of YouTube channels and websites to get help on starting WP from scratch.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!
Seriously, I have a website that I love on Squarespace.
OK, they’ve increased their pricing for 2024, but who hasn’t in our current economic climate?
I understand how to use it, hell, I was writing my weekly newsletter and decided to write a blog post with the behind-the-scenes details on why I was looking at WordPress, rather than putting it all in my newsletter, and I opened Squarespace and just did it.
You’re reading it right now.
I didn’t think twice about opening my articles page and writing a new one.
This was the biggest difference that I saw when I originally switched from WordPress to Squarespace. When I was on WordPress last time, I didn’t post articles because it was too hard to get it to look how it should. On Squarespace, there aren’t a bajillion things that I can fuck up, I open it, type, and post.
Where does this leave me?
Staying with Squarespace, obviously! And being comfortable in my ‘I hate WordPress’ world!
I’ve been quoted $1,200 for someone to help me set up WordPress, to set up templates and style sheets for me, which is a very reasonable number. But I still wouldn’t know how they were built, and I’d still need to get someone to help me later on if I needed something new. Meaning even more money.
I’m not a web dev, it’s just not my zone of genius.
Will I upgrade my Squarespace account to get advanced features?
Probably, if I need them for the plugins that I’m looking at.
Code injections are on the Business Plan, the one up from what I have currently.
But, I’ve learned a lot about Squarespace this weekend, and there are a lot of features I didn’t even know were there, and a lot of things that can be achieved without using code injections or fiddling with custom CSS.
I’m not saying for a second that Squarespace is as extensible as WordPress, but there’s a lot that you can do without having to have a paid plugin and code injection, if you watch the right videos on YouTube.
Then WordPress Happened
I thought it would be a good plan to update this post!
Originally, “I hate WordPress” was published on my Squarespace website on August 21, 2023.
Today is October 7, 2023, and I’m typing this into the Gutenberg editor in WordPress.
Don’t be scared to be wrong. Then admit it. Again.
