Site builders and themes

A theme is a ready-made front end for a platform: page layouts, components and styles that someone else designed and keeps updating. You adapt it with your colours, fonts, texts and photos. A website builder goes one step further: you assemble the pages in your browser, and the hosting comes with it.

The diagram puts these tools on a line. At one end, Wix and Squarespace include everything in one subscription. Then come a Shopify theme, a shop ready to sell; a WordPress theme, on hosting you choose, with plugins to add features; and Webflow, a design tool that writes the page for the designer. At the other end, a framework, where developers design and build everything from scratch.

The further left, the more is ready-made: the site is online in days rather than months, it costs less, and the owner edits it without a developer. The price is freedom. You can change what the tool lets you change, and nothing more.

WordPress is open source and free, and it runs about 40% of all websites, according to W3Techs in October 2026. The chart compares it with the other tools of this lesson. You pay for the hosting and for the work, not for WordPress itself.

The look comes from a theme. Thousands are free in WordPress's own directory, and many more are sold on marketplaces. Recent themes, called block themes, let you change the layouts in WordPress's site editor. Page builders such as Elementor add a drag-and-drop editor on top, at the cost of extra code on every page. Features come from plugins: a contact form, a shop with WooCommerce, several languages.

Two habits keep a WordPress site healthy. Changes to a theme go in a child theme, a small separate layer that the theme's updates don't touch. And someone installs the updates of WordPress, the theme and each plugin, because security companies that follow WordPress find most of its security holes in plugins and themes, not in WordPress itself.

Webflow, Wix and Squarespace are hosted builders: one monthly subscription includes the design tool, the hosting and the editor. There's nothing to install, and updates and security are the provider's job.

Webflow is made for designers. It thinks in boxes, margins and grids, like a designer's tool, and writes clean HTML and CSS from what the designer draws. It also has a content system for articles or projects. Webflow says that 300,000 organisations use it. Wix and Squarespace are made for owners who build their site alone. Wix says it has more than 300 million users. Squarespace offers polished templates with fewer decisions to make. All three tend to make fast pages by default, as the figures in the lesson Judging a front end show.

The design stays inside the tool. If you leave, the design has to be rebuilt somewhere else, and you need to check which content can be exported. That's acceptable when you know it before you start.

Shopify rents a complete shop for a monthly fee: products, stock, payments, taxes, delivery and the checkout. Its investor page speaks of "millions of merchants" in more than 175 countries, and more than 14% of online sales in the United States.

How the shop looks comes from a theme, free or paid, chosen in Shopify's Theme Store and adapted with colours, photos and sections. Apps add features, such as customer reviews, subscriptions or a size guide. Each app has its own monthly fee, and often adds code to every page.

The checkout stays Shopify's own. That limits what you can change there, but it keeps payments safe and simple, which is exactly what a small shop wants. Large brands sometimes want more control: they build their own front end with a framework, and keep Shopify behind it for the products, the stock and the payments. Developers call this "headless", and Shopify offers its own React-based framework, Hydrogen, for it.

Start from what the site must do, not from the tool. A builder or a theme wins when the site is mostly content, or a standard shop. A small theatre company that presents its shows, sells tickets through a ticketing service and changes its pages every week is a good example. It's online in days, on a small budget, and the team edits it alone.

A framework wins when the site must do something that no builder offers, such as a booking engine with its own rules, or when the design and the experience are the product itself. Then the freedom is worth the developers.

Often a project needs both. A car-sharing service has an app, where members find and book cars, which only developers can build. Its public pages (prices, how it works, the blog) change every week, and the marketing team can edit them alone on a builder. Two tools, each doing what it does best. Whatever the choice, count it over several years: the builder's monthly fees against the custom build's upkeep and the developers it needs.

Take a physiotherapy practice choosing a WordPress theme. A few checks, made before buying, avoid most of the problems.

First, updates. The theme's page shows when it was last updated and how many sites use it. One updated last month and used by many sites is alive. One not updated for a year may be abandoned, and an abandoned theme gets no more security fixes. Second, weight. Open the theme's demo on a phone, and run Lighthouse on it. Themes that promise to do everything, with forty layouts, many slideshows and their own page builder, load all that code on every page, used or not.

Third, accessibility. Go through the demo with the Tab key: can you reach the menu, the links and the form? WordPress's directory marks themes that meet its accessibility rules as "accessibility ready". And read the reviews, to see how the seller answers problems.

These questions work whether an agency, a freelancer or you choose the tool.

Ask what you'll need that this builder or theme can't do: list the needs first (several languages, bookings, a members' area), including the ones expected in the next two years. Ask who installs the updates, how often and at what cost. On WordPress that means WordPress itself, the theme and each plugin; on a hosted builder, the provider does it. Ask whether your team can change texts and pictures alone. And ask what you could take with you if you left: the design, the content, the domain name.