How to Choose the Right Platform to Build Your Website

Intro

Actually, creating a brand-new website independently is a pretty powerful and big step toward setting up a presence of your own online. You might be an entrepreneur interested in launching a **business **venture, a creative professional looking to showcase your portfolio, or simply a writer looking to start a personal blog-this will be your first and certainly primary point of contact with the world. It will reflect your brand, communicate your message, and be the hub for all your digital efforts. Hence, getting the right foundation for your website is one of the most crucial decisions you will ever make.

It will guide you step by step on how to create a website from scratch, taking into account considerations for 2024 and beyond. Whether you are building an online store, portfolio, or simple information site, this article will guide you in the process of selection to set the stage for a successful online presence.

Why You Need the Right Platform

The platform through which you are creating your website from scratch can easily make a difference in how flexible and adaptable the design will be, how the site might generally perform and as a result, how the user experience will be. The right platform will mean that your site runs according to plan, grows along with your needs, and features the functionality that you need without making your workflow overly complicated. In addition to this, an appropriate platform should also bring about security, responsiveness, and easy customization to ensure a seamless user experience.

Factors to Consider When Choosing a Platform

Reason for Your Website

Your selection of the right platform begins with the definition of what your website is to be used for. Differing platforms serve different purposes. Take, for instance,

• Blogs and Portfolios: If a blogger or a creative person is looking at publishing his or her thoughts in a blog or a portfolio, then WordPress or Wix may be more suited to his or her needs because of the content management and design flexibility.
• E-commerce: If you want to sell something, then some of the popular e-commerce platforms are Shopify and WooCommerce for WordPress and BigCommerce because most of them can integrate a payment system.
• Corporate or Informational Sites: All types of corporate websites or information pages will require Squarespace and WordPress, which provide some templates and tools to build pretty easy and professional-looking websites.

Knowing what you're going to do with your website can help narrow down the kind of platforms that aren't for your kind.

Ease of Use

If you're creating your first website, ease of use is an extremely important factor when you are not a developer. You can easily get a drag-and-drop** website builder **like Wix or Squarespace with such a user-friendly interface. Website builders have templates designed in advance, and you can even modify elements without having to code.

But if you have coding skills or plan to hire a developer, open-source platforms like WordPress or Joomla give you more control and flexibility. On these sites, the customization possibilities are endless, but you will often need some technical know-how-what one of the authors terms "geeking out."

Customization and Design Freedom

• Design is the main thing that makes your website unique. Some platforms will limit the amount you can change to suit your site, while others let you style it extensively.
• WordPress is pretty famous for almost infinite customization potential thanks to thousands of free and premium themes and plugins.
• Wix and Squarespace have great templates and drag-and-drop builders, but this may limit the design when going into the code.
• Webflow offers advanced design control with pixel-perfect possibilities, combining flexibility in code with a visual interface, ideal for those designers who are looking for more significant creative control over their work.
• Whether you are looking for total customization or can get away with pre-designed templates where not too much modification is required.

Pricing and Budget

The Budget feature is another factor that must be put into consideration when determining which platform to use when constructing websites. Most website-building platforms are free, such as WordPress.org, but this charges for hosting, domain name, and premium third-party plugins. Others, like Wix, Shopify, and Squarespace charge through monthly or yearly subscription fees, mostly covering hosting, templates, and support.

Determine long-term cost concerns; for instance, add-ons, hosting, and domain fees on complimentary hosting options, such as WordPress.org. Users may find free hosting options like WordPress.org appealing, but the plug-ins, security, and development can shortly escalate to a cost. Conversely, Wix and other sites allow for a more practical measure of costs through the idea of bundling with a provision of customer support.

Scalability and Future Growth

When building a website from scratch, it's also important to consider how the platform would grow well with your needs. If you're thinking about growing traffic or extending your services (for example, adding an e-commerce store), you need a platform that supports scaling.

• WordPress does very well in this area, as there is a vast ecosystem of plugins and hosting options.
• Shopify is meant to grow up with your e-commerce stores, hence you'll be able to add products and plenty of inventory easily into it.
• Webflow also scales up so that it can handle the most complexly designed webs as your business grows.
• Choose a platform that will not limit your growth or force you to migrate to another system when your needs change.

SEO Capabilities

SEO is crucial to having an organic visitor count on your website. Features on your website must include some type of SEO tool either within the manufacturer's default settings or to be compatible with a third-party SEO plugin.

• Some top performers, like WordPress, come with very powerful SEO options, such as Yoast SEO and Rank Math.
• Shopify and Squarespace have their basic settings for SEO, so it may not be as complicated for non-techie users to optimize their sites.
• In the recent past, Wix has improved its SEO features. However, for full personalization of SEO, it is always upon WordPress.

Under this, also ensure that the chosen platform allows you to perform simple yet basic SEO tasks like customization of meta title and description, integration of Google Analytics, and generation of a sitemap.

Performance and Speed

Fast site speed is an essential part of the user experience as well as your website's SEO. Slow sites can send visitors elsewhere and will end up harming your search engine rankings. There are plenty of WordPress plugins designed to optimize site speed, which include caching plugins, but above all, they depend on the quality of the hosting.

• Wix and Squarespace already work with managed hosting, which means you can rely on their optimized performance of your site without worrying about server settings.
• Shopify and BigCommerce also offer hosting, so the store is guaranteed to load fast.
• Choose a site that offers reliable performance with fast loads and minimal downtime.

Security

This is the most important aspect of website security, especially if you are collecting information from users or running an e-commerce store. This aspect has to do with who handles the security; it could be the service provider, who ensures it for you, or you take charge and ensure everything by yourself.

• You have control over WordPress, but to tackle security issues, you have to install security plugins or update your website frequently to avoid being vulnerable.
• All these platforms, Shopify, Squarespace, and Wix include SSL certificates, backup, etc in packages; thus the security requirements are not the concern of the non-technical end-user.

Before choosing the platform, ensure that one should have SSL encryption to protect your website, update regularly, back up data so you won't lose any information in case something happens, and protect from malware and attacks.

Support and Resources

When you're setting up your website from ground zero, good customer support can temper most of the drama for sure, more so if things take a bad turn technically.

• Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace provide 24/7 support which is fantastic for beginners who might get lost at any moment.
• WordPress, however, has an enormous following of developers around the world, so it has amassed thorough support forums, but this also means proper care for the customers is only available via third-party services.

If you are going to require a lot of support later on, then a platform which quickly responds to a customer service need will be very important.

Mobile Responsiveness

Given the fast growth of mobile users, your site has to be responsive to them. Most of the new platforms come with responsive templates, while others do it much better.

• WordPress themes are more or less responsive in nature; however you still need to choose a theme which is optimized for all screens.
• Wix, Squarespace and Webflow also offer mobile-friendly designs and allow the user to dictate what his site looks like on different devices.

Make sure that the website builder you select enables preview and customization of your website for smartphone users.

Conclusion

Irrespective of your goals for your website or the budget, the technical skills, and the long-term plans, choosing the right platform on which to build the website from scratch requires thoughtful consideration. Different platforms, such as WordPress, Shopify, Wix, and Squarespace, serve different purposes, which means that selecting the best one must depend on whether the features of that platform better match the purpose of building your website. Once you understand aspects such as customization, ease of use, scalability, and security, you can make a well-informed decision on how to help your website on its path to success in 2024.

The best option for how to create a website from scratch will be one that offers the balance of functionality, flexibility of design and support to enable you to build a professional and engaging online presence tailored to your needs.