Everyone has an opinion on this one.
Ask a web developer. Ask a small business owner. Ask a blogger who built their first site last month. You’ll get three completely different answers — and all three will be said with total confidence.
So what’s actually true?
The honest answer is: it depends on what you need. But that doesn’t mean all website builders are equal. Some dominate certain categories. Some are better for beginners. Some are better for businesses that want to grow. And one platform stands so far above the rest in raw market share, flexibility, and long-term value that calling it anything other than number one would be inaccurate.
This post gives you the full picture. No sponsored rankings. No vague “it depends” non-answers. Just a clear breakdown of the top website builders, what each one actually does well, who each one is really for, and why one platform consistently earns the top spot across every serious category.
By the end, you’ll know exactly which builder fits your situation. Let’s get into it.
1. How Do You Even Define “Number One”?
Before we crown anything, let’s agree on what “number one” actually means.
There are a few ways to measure it. Market share is the most objective. Which platform powers the most websites on the internet right now? That’s a data question with a clear answer.
Then there’s ease of use. Which builder is the fastest to learn and the least frustrating for a complete beginner? That’s a different question with a different answer.
Then there’s flexibility. Which builder lets you build anything — from a simple blog to a complex e-commerce store to a membership platform to a multi-language corporate site? Again, different answer.
And then there’s long-term value. Which platform grows with you? Which one doesn’t lock you in, charge you more as you succeed, or limit what you can do as your needs evolve?
The platform that wins across all four of those categories is WordPress.org.
Not Wix. Not Squarespace. Not Shopify. Not Webflow. WordPress powers over 43% of all websites on the entire internet. That’s not a niche lead. That’s a category-defining dominance that no other builder comes close to.
But the full story is more nuanced than just pointing at a market share number. So let’s actually break down the main contenders — because understanding why WordPress wins also means understanding what the others are genuinely good at.
2. WordPress — Why It’s Still the Undisputed Number One
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. Or rather, the giant that built the room.
WordPress.org — the self-hosted, open-source version — is the most widely used website building platform in history. Over 500 million websites run on it. It powers blogs, news sites, corporate websites, online stores, membership platforms, portfolio sites, and government portals.
That reach didn’t happen by accident.
WordPress is open-source. That means nobody owns it in the traditional sense. Thousands of developers worldwide contribute to it, build plugins for it, create themes for it, and improve it constantly. The result is a platform with over 60,000 free plugins and thousands of premium themes — more customisation options than any other builder on earth.
Flexibility is where WordPress is truly unmatched. You can start with a simple blog. Add WooCommerce and turn it into an online store. Add a membership plugin and create a paid community. Build a booking system. Run a learning management system. Host a podcast. All on the same platform, without switching tools.
WordPress also gives you full ownership of your site and data. You choose your hosting. You control your files. You’re not renting space from a company that can change its pricing, shut down, or limit your features next year.
Think of WordPress like owning a plot of land. You build what you want on it. You can extend it, renovate it, or completely redesign it at any time. Other builders are more like renting an apartment — nice and convenient, but someone else makes the rules.
For anyone serious about building a web presence that lasts, scales, and stays under their control, WordPress is the clear number one.
3. Wix — The Best Builder for Total Beginners
Wix is genuinely good. And it deserves a fair assessment.
For someone who has never touched a website before, wants something live within a day, and doesn’t need complex functionality — Wix is one of the fastest paths from zero to published.
The interface is drag-and-drop. You click on something. You drag it somewhere. It moves. No code. No settings to configure. No hosting to set up. Wix handles all the technical infrastructure for you.
Wix also has a strong template library. Hundreds of professionally designed starting points across dozens of categories. Pick one, swap in your content, and you’ve got a real-looking website fast.
Where does Wix fall short?
Flexibility has a ceiling. Wix sites are hosted on Wix servers. You can’t export your site and move it elsewhere. If Wix raises its prices or changes its terms, you’re stuck. The plugin and extension ecosystem is much smaller than WordPress.
Wix also struggles at scale. A simple business website works fine. A complex e-commerce operation with thousands of products, custom integrations, and specific workflow requirements runs into limits quickly.
The pricing model also means ongoing monthly costs. Those add up. A Wix site that costs $23 a month adds up to $276 a year — every year, forever, just to keep the lights on.
Wix is an excellent beginner tool. It’s not a long-term platform for businesses that expect to grow significantly.
4. Squarespace — The Designer’s Choice for Beautiful, Simple Sites
If Wix is built for ease, Squarespace is built for aesthetics.
Squarespace templates are genuinely some of the most polished in the industry. They’re clean, modern, and designed with visual detail that most drag-and-drop builders can’t match. For photographers, artists, designers, and creative professionals who want a portfolio that looks high-end without custom development, Squarespace is a legitimate choice.
The platform is also fully hosted and managed. Like Wix, you don’t deal with servers, updates, or security patches. It handles that. You focus on the content.
Squarespace has improved its e-commerce capabilities considerably. Small online stores selling physical or digital products can run well on the platform. The blogging tools are decent. And the all-in-one pricing model is predictable.
But the same constraints apply here as with Wix.
You don’t own the platform. If you want to move your site, you can export some content but not the full site. The customisation ceiling is lower than WordPress. The plugin ecosystem is much smaller. And for anything complex — custom functionality, large product catalogues, membership areas, complex integrations — Squarespace runs out of runway.
Squarespace is the right choice for creatives who want beautiful and simple and don’t need much beyond that. For anyone planning to build a growing business online, it’s a starting point, not an endpoint.
5. Shopify — The Number One for Pure E-Commerce
Here’s where we have to give credit where it’s clearly due.
For online stores specifically, Shopify is the strongest dedicated platform on the market.
Shopify is built exclusively for selling. Product management, inventory, shipping, payment processing, abandoned cart recovery, discount codes, customer accounts — all of it is built in and works well out of the box. The checkout experience is optimised. The payment integrations are deep. The app store is massive.
If your entire website is an online store and selling product is the primary function, Shopify deserves serious consideration alongside WordPress with WooCommerce.
Where does Shopify lose ground?
Cost, primarily. Shopify charges a monthly fee plus transaction fees on sales unless you use Shopify Payments. As your store grows, those fees compound. At scale, the difference between Shopify’s ongoing costs and a WordPress/WooCommerce setup on your own hosting can be significant.
Shopify also isn’t great for content. Blogging is possible but limited compared to WordPress. Building a content-heavy site alongside an e-commerce store is awkward on Shopify. WordPress handles both content and commerce natively, which makes it more versatile for businesses that want to sell and publish.
For a pure-play online store with straightforward products and a team that wants a managed solution, Shopify is excellent. For everything else, WordPress with WooCommerce is more powerful and more cost-effective at scale.
6. Webflow — The Professional Designer’s Power Tool
Webflow sits in a different category from the others.
It’s not really built for beginners. It’s built for designers and agencies who want pixel-perfect control without writing code — or at least, without writing much of it.
Webflow’s visual editor is genuinely impressive. You build with real CSS and HTML concepts — flexbox, grid, padding, margins — but through a visual interface. What you design is what the browser renders. No gap between design intention and live output.
Webflow also handles hosting, CMS, and e-commerce in one platform. It’s cleaner and more developer-aligned than Squarespace, with more customisation than Wix.
The catch is the learning curve.
Webflow is not quick to learn. It rewards people who understand design systems and CSS fundamentals. A complete beginner will feel lost. Even intermediate users need dedicated learning time before they’re productive.
Pricing is also tiered and can get expensive for client sites or larger operations. Exporting code is possible but hosting stays on Webflow’s infrastructure unless you export and self-host.
Webflow is a genuine contender for design-focused professionals building bespoke websites for clients. For the average business owner or content creator? The learning investment doesn’t match the return compared to WordPress with Elementor.
7. Wix vs WordPress vs Squarespace — A Direct Head-to-Head
Let’s cut through the noise with a direct comparison on the five things that matter most.
Ease of use: Wix wins here. Squarespace is close behind. WordPress has a steeper learning curve but Elementor and similar page builders have made it much more accessible.
Design quality: Squarespace leads on out-of-the-box visual polish. WordPress with a premium theme and Elementor Pro matches or beats it. Wix templates are solid but less refined.
Flexibility and customisation: WordPress wins by a massive margin. No other builder comes close to its plugin ecosystem, theme variety, or ability to build custom functionality.
Ownership and portability: WordPress wins outright. You own everything. The others lock you into their platforms to varying degrees.
Long-term cost: WordPress on self-managed hosting is the most cost-effective at scale. Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify all charge ongoing monthly fees that grow as your needs grow.
As the old saying goes, “don’t judge a book by its cover.” Wix might look simpler and friendlier at first glance. But look at the full picture and WordPress’s combination of power, ownership, and cost-efficiency is hard to argue against for any serious web project.
8. Why WordPress Powers 43% of the Internet
That number comes up a lot. But do you know why it’s actually that high?
It’s not marketing. It’s not because WordPress was the first. Several other CMS platforms launched around the same time. WordPress won because it kept doing the right things over twenty-plus years.
Open source meant constant improvement. No single company controlled WordPress’s roadmap. The community of developers, designers, and users shaped what it became. That collective input created a platform that solved real problems at every level.
The plugin ecosystem is the real moat. Need a contact form? There are dozens of free plugins. Need a booking system? Yep. Need to run a full learning management system with paid courses? There’s WooCommerce, LearnDash, LifterLMS. Need a complex membership structure? MemberPress, Restrict Content Pro. Whatever you want to build, there’s almost certainly a plugin that handles it.
Themes changed web design for everyone. Before premium WordPress themes, having a professionally designed website meant hiring an expensive custom developer. Themes like Astra, GeneratePress, and OceanWP gave small businesses and solo creators access to professional design at low cost.
The developer community is massive. If you ever get stuck on a WordPress problem, someone has already solved it. Stack Overflow threads, YouTube tutorials, official documentation, support forums — the resources are enormous. That makes WordPress approachable even for people who aren’t technical.
The 43% market share isn’t a fluke. It’s the compounded result of two decades of good decisions, strong community, and genuine usefulness.
9. WordPress With Elementor — The Combination That Changes Everything
WordPress on its own used to require at least some technical knowledge to make things look good.
That changed significantly when page builders like Elementor arrived. And for non-developers who want the power of WordPress with the visual ease of Wix or Squarespace, Elementor is genuinely transformative.
Elementor is a drag-and-drop visual page builder that runs inside WordPress. You design pages visually. You see exactly what the page will look like as you build it. Columns, sections, widgets, animations, hover effects — all controllable without touching a line of code.
Elementor Pro takes it further. Dynamic content, custom post type templates, theme builder (so you can design your header, footer, and archive pages visually), popup builder, WooCommerce builder, and a form builder. It’s essentially a full design system built on top of WordPress.
The combination of WordPress plus Elementor Pro gives you something no other platform offers: the complete design freedom of a professional tool, the backend power of the world’s most flexible CMS, and full ownership of everything you build.
Compared to Wix or Squarespace, the learning curve is slightly higher. But the ceiling is infinitely higher too. What can you build? Basically anything. What does it cost long-term? Far less than most SaaS builders at scale.
For anyone building sites professionally — or anyone who wants a website that can genuinely grow with their business — WordPress plus Elementor is the answer that keeps coming up.
10. When Another Builder Makes More Sense Than WordPress
Let’s be honest. WordPress isn’t always the right choice for everyone.
There are specific situations where another builder makes more practical sense.
You need something live in 48 hours and have zero technical background. If there’s a genuine deadline and zero time to learn even the basics of WordPress, Wix or Squarespace will get you there faster. A simple business site or portfolio that needs to exist by Friday? Wix works.
You’re running a pure online store with a small product catalogue and want a managed solution. Shopify’s out-of-the-box selling tools, integrated payment processing, and clean checkout flow make it genuinely strong for small e-commerce operations that don’t need a content strategy alongside the store.
You’re a designer building bespoke client sites and you’re already fluent in CSS and design systems. Webflow’s visual precision might actually suit your workflow better than WordPress plus a page builder.
Your site is purely a visual portfolio with no plans to grow. If you’re a photographer who wants twelve pages of images and a contact form, and that’s it forever, Squarespace will serve you well and you’ll spend less time managing it.
The key phrase in all of those scenarios is “simple and limited.” As soon as the needs become more complex — more content, more products, more integrations, more customisation, more traffic — WordPress becomes the stronger answer.
The question isn’t which platform is objectively best. The question is which platform is best for where you are right now and where you expect to be in three years.
11. How to Choose the Right Website Builder for Your Specific Situation
Stop reading comparison articles that give you a vague matrix. Here’s a cleaner framework.
Ask yourself these four questions:
1. How technical are you — honestly? Complete beginner with no interest in learning anything technical? Wix or Squarespace. Willing to spend two to four weeks learning a platform that will serve you for years? WordPress.
2. What is your primary goal? Selling products online as the main function? Look at Shopify or WordPress with WooCommerce. Publishing content, building an audience, growing a service business? WordPress is the clear answer. Portfolio or creative showcase? Squarespace or WordPress.
3. How much do you expect your site to grow? If you expect significant growth — more content, more traffic, more features — build on a platform that can handle it from day one. WordPress scales. Wix and Squarespace have ceilings.
4. Do you care about owning your platform? If the idea of being locked into a monthly subscription with a company that controls your site bothers you, WordPress is your answer. If you’re fine with that arrangement, the hosted builders work fine.
Most people who think they need a simple, beginner-friendly builder actually need WordPress — they just haven’t been given a clear enough on-ramp. The platform is far more accessible in 2026 than it was five years ago. With tools like Elementor, the Astra theme, and better documentation, even non-technical users can run a strong WordPress site.
12. The Long-Term Case for WordPress as the #1 Platform
Here’s the thing about website builders. The wrong choice costs you more than the monthly fee.
It costs you migration pain. Moving a Wix or Squarespace site to WordPress when you outgrow it is a real project. It takes time. It usually means rebuilding, not just transferring. The longer you stay on a limited platform, the bigger that migration becomes.
It costs you missed opportunities. A WordPress site can be SEO-optimised with Rank Math or Yoast at a level that most hosted builders can’t match. It can be speed-optimised with caching and performance plugins. It can be monetised in a dozen different ways. Those capabilities compound over time.
It costs you dependency. Every platform built on someone else’s infrastructure is a platform you don’t fully control. Prices go up. Features get removed. Companies get acquired. What happens to your Wix site if Wix changes its pricing model next year?
WordPress avoids all three of those problems.
Your content lives on hosting you control. Your design choices are yours. Your data is portable. Your plugins can be replaced if a better option emerges. Nobody can raise your platform fee or take away features you depend on.
This is why professional web developers, serious content creators, digital businesses, and organisations of all sizes keep choosing WordPress. Not because it’s the easiest option on day one. Because it’s the best option across the full life of the site.
The number one website builder in 2026 is the same one it was in 2015 and 2010. WordPress. By every meaningful measure.
Conclusion
So — what is the number one website builder?
WordPress.org is the clear answer for anyone building a serious web presence. It powers over 43% of the internet. It offers unmatched flexibility, full ownership, a massive plugin ecosystem, and the lowest long-term cost of any major platform.
For pure beginners who need something live this week with zero learning curve, Wix or Squarespace works. For dedicated online stores with a managed setup, Shopify competes seriously. For design-focused professionals, Webflow has genuine strengths.
But none of them beat WordPress when you zoom out and measure what actually matters: how far can you grow on this platform, how much does it cost over five years, and who actually owns the site at the end of the day.
The right builder is the one that fits your real needs. But if you have any intention of building something that grows, earns, and lasts — start on WordPress. Learn it properly. Use tools like Elementor to make it visual. You’ll thank yourself in year two.
Want help building or growing your WordPress site the right way? WordPress Baba builds and consults on WordPress sites for businesses, creators, and agencies. Browse our guides or get in touch directly.
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