Duda vs Wordpress: Best Website Builder For Small Biz

When it comes to SEO, where does Duda fall short as compared to WordPress? Blogs. Duda still has some limitations when it comes to building and ranking robust blogs, and generally speaking, Duda blogs cannot compete with WordPress. For example, Duda does not give you access to dev mode for blog posts which greatly limits customization. The blog layouts can be tailored for your business but still have some design limitations. You can't easily link to an existing blog post from the main nav menu or anywhere else on the site as you need to manually add the url for each specific blog you want to link to. Duda blogs also do not use categories similar to WordPress BUT Duda does leverage tags. You can use tags to organize and display blog content, and I think it works well overall, but there may be an added advantage of having formal categories, especially if the category names are SEO or keyword driven and appear as part of the url structure. Duda doesn't have a permalink setup option for blogs currently either. Because of that, it makes it difficult, but not impossible, to add a folder structure to the url. Like website.com/blog/category/blog-title or whatever permalink standard you want to use.

Does this mean that Duda blog posts can't rank well? Absolutely not. I have written blog posts that are getting many views per month but can Duda blogs compete head to head with WordPress blog content. Na, not at this time in my opinion.

Wait a second... Maybe we should ask, who cares? Well, if you are a small business owner who uses blogging on occasion to turn out new content, promote products or services, and educate people on your products, services, or local community, then Duda should meet your needs just fine. BUT what if you're not selling a service or products. What if your goal is to make money on Google Adsense and affiliate marketing primarily? If that's the case, WordPress is still king. Can you add affiliate links to your Duda blog and begin making money - yes you can. I've been doing it for a while now. Can you add Google Adsense to Duda blogs - yes and no. There is a current limitation where you cannot upload and leverage ads.txt.

The point I am trying to make is. Most small businesses do not need WordPress in order to rank their business on Google. If they work with the right Duda agency or freelance builder such as Ayni Media, they should have complete confidence in their website's ability to rank and perform well from a conversion perspective. And instead of worrying about the website platform, what the business should care about is their desired outcome. What are you trying to achieve and can the right freelancer or agency help you achieve it? They may even be able to save you money at the same time.

You Need WordPress Because of its SEO Strengths

This is completely false in my opinion. Duda was built as a native drag and drop builder. There is no plugin or 3rd party support required. No template or theme to buy, well you can optionally buy templates from other Duda designers, but my point is, Duda is architected as a CMS or content management system with drag and drop. WordPress, was not built to be a drag and drop blog or website creation tool but has been customized over the years in order to support that trend. With Duda, they make site building a priority. Why? Because Duda caters to supporting agencies who want to sell and provide websites... and agencies need to work at scale.

Likely one of the biggest advantages to Duda, as compared to WordPress, is that Duda includes collaboration and a site dashboard. This means that you can easily communicate and record notes directly within a website project but also access all of your customer sites from a single dashboard. It's very easy to add clients to specific sites and manage their permissions as well. Duda even offers a one-page site link that you can send to a client, allowing them to easily populate their business information, social media links, and other key site attributes. This saves time during the build process and if you have questions or require client feedback, you can record action items and status updates using the collaboration tool so you don't have to scan through email after email looking for the client's responses. Ok, I sidetracked a bit, let's get back to the needs...

You Need WordPress Because its Customization Ability

Duda does require you to start from a template, you can't avoid it. I've seen many agencies bash templates when it comes to using them for website design and it makes no sense to me UNLESS someone is rolling out a template without making it their own. Every single Duda template can be changed. I'm talking about every color, image, row, section, column, - everything. When I'm done with a client's design their site only resembles the original template if they want it to. Duda even offers very stripped down templates to use as a starting point if you do not want to go with one of their more robust designs. This gives you much more creative freedom.

Now what about WordPress? Trying to customize WordPress can be a nightmare for most DIY people. This is why there are so many 3rd party and premium WordPress plugins, builders, templates, and services. Because WordPress is heavily customizable, it can do a lot, and you may need the right expertise in order to build exactly what you are trying to achieve — and the odds are — it's going to cost you more money than it would to build that same site on Duda. Will you have to make some compromises if you use Duda as an alternative? Maybe. It depends on the required site features, wireframe, or widgets. There may be certain elements that are difficult or impossible to reproduce in Duda that can exist in WordPress.

My biggest issue with building and managing WordPress sites is that every time I login to support a customer who has a WordPress site, they often use different 3rd party builders like Elementor, Brizy, Divi, Beaver Builder, or pro.photo. As a website builder and support resource, I don't really want to learn the ins and outs of every different type of WordPress builder. It slows me down. As an example, I helped a photographer setup their pro-photo based WordPress site and the project went well overall. A few months later the client wanted to make updates and neither of us could remember where to navigate to in the builder menu system to make certain changes. Then, pro-photo would roll out updates that can alter where content is managed. And like many other builders, you need to pay for upgrades and premium features. Pro photo is just one example. Again, it's not a bad service for photographers who want a WordPress site but the time it takes to set up and manage such a site is too high. Updates should be intuitive and fast in my opinion.

You Need WordPress Hosting for Your Website

Sure, if it's built using WordPress code, you need to host it somewhere. But with Duda, the site fee includes hosting AND it's unlimited hosting meaning there is no penalty to how many site or page visits you receive, how much disk space you consume, etc. Duda's pricing model is simple. There's less to worry about and less to manage. For my customers, I have two key services they require. A domain provider and Duda. That's it. I use namecheap.com for all of my domains and Duda for most of my customer sites. Of course, most customers already bought their domain name anyway, and it's usually very simple to connect their domain to Duda with simple A record and CNAME record DNS updates.

I recently examined WPEngine which is a very well known WordPress provider and host. They list page visit and data limitations right up front and their starting fee for small business sites is $30 per month. What is my agency's minimum small business website fee? $25 per month. And I can pretty much guarantee that your design or build fee will be less expensive and that the site will require less maintenance and be more secure.

Another bonus for Duda is uptime and availability. Just visit status.duda.co any time, 24/7 for the most recent incident information and to see if Duda services are up and running as expected. When I was on Bluehost WordPress hosting a few years ago, there were multiple times when my site went down or I couldn't login to manage my site. Not only that, Bluehost was slow and their management interface was not intuitive. Duda excels here and they are very transparent when it comes to ongoing issues. Their support team is amazingly responsive and they proactively send out emails if major outages occur. Better yet, Duda updates are being released every week or close to it. I can't even keep up with all of the new features, fixes, and abilities they are adding.

I hope my words are painting some type of picture for you. Haters are gonna hate on Duda. And you know who most of the haters are? Wordpress-only web designers or strict WordPress agencies. They want to stick with WordPress and they want to tell you that web design is complicated and difficult. That you need a web developer to design a website for you and that you need WordPress in order to compete on google.

Well, I'm here to tell you that you don't need a web developer. Not anymore. Some of you listening can even build Duda websites yourselves. Others may want to find a Duda certified pro, like myself, or many others.

Oh, if by chance you want to sell Duda websites, when you pay for a Duda agency plan, 4 monthly websites are included in the membership fee. Duda has three tiers when it comes to pricing. Basic, Team, or Agency. Basic includes one website and is ideally suited for a single DIY designer who wants to build a site using Duda. The Team plan will allow you to add other team members, manage permissions, and includes two websites as part of the fee. Agency is the ultimate though because you get 4 websites included in the plan fee as well as access to the premium app store, data collections, dynamic pages, and more. Would you like to watch a detailed video as it pertains to Duda pricing? Check out the below video on YouTube!

You DO NOT Need WordPress For Your Small Business Website

I only touched on some high-level differences in this article between Duda and WordPress but there are MANY and my point with this whole thing is — give Duda a chance. In fact, try building your next website on Duda FIRST instead of using it as a backup or alternate solution. It's a no-brainer if you sell websites to clients.

If you would like to start a free 14-day Duda trial today, please click here - 'Free Duda Trial'. I am a proud Duda agency customer and am also a Duda affiliate and as such would receive a commission only if you ended up activating a Duda plan after using my signup link. The trial is completely free, requires NO CREDIT CARD, and will let you fully experience what it's like to work with Duda as a website builder. If you prefer to work with a Duda agency or get a quote for your business's website project, I welcome a discussion. Please visit aynimedia.com/contact to submit your information today. You can also reach out to me on Twitter @ThomasConnery. OH!! If you purchase an annual Duda plan, use my personal discount code, TOMCSAVE to save 10% off on your first year subscription.

If you found value in this article be sure to share it via social media. It will help spread the good word of Duda! Thank you so much for your time.