The best products are made with the best materials. Boutique restaurants pride themselves on serving locally-sourced ingredients. Luxury car manufacturers boast about their premium interior materials. Premium clothing brands obsess over the quality of their fabrics. Are you noticing a pattern?
Great outcomes are a combination of a thoughtful process and the best materials. Your agency is in charge of honing the process, but what about the materials? What “materials” are websites made from? Call us biased, but we’d have to say that’s the CMS.
A CMS, or Content Management System, is a software application that helps individuals create, organize, edit, or publish digital content. If you’re reading this on a desktop, hover your mouse over the tabs on the menu bar. Each of those pages are a piece of content, all of which are managed by the Duda platform.
While we (unsurprisingly) choose Duda to publish our website, it isn’t the only platform on the market. Far from it, in fact. There are countless website builders on the market today, but none more well known than Wordpress.
Wordpress powers 43.6% of the entire web. It’s a remarkable open source platform with a lot to like. For over two decades, contributors have transformed the platform from a blogging tool into a robust, adaptable CMS with more extensions than you could possibly imagine.
Unlike Wordpress, which is designed, with the help of their extensive theme and plugin capabilities, to be everything for everyone, Duda is built specifically for professionals. Our commitment to businesses serving SMBs, agencies, and SaaS companies alike, allows us to create a more focused product with a best-in-class suite of features tailored to our audience.
Another big difference between Duda and Wordpress; Duda is a closed-source platform. That means one vendor provides your hosting, security, editing capabilities, etc. Recent in-fighting between Wordpress and one of their hosting providers underscores the advantages of this approach.
Wordpress casts a wide net, but with complexity comes vulnerability. Many of the benefits that draw people to Wordpress are detriments in a different light. A classic example of a double-edged sword.
Duda is a closed-source, cloud-based platform with a centralized infrastructure. In short, we fully manage hosting, backend security, and server maintenance. This is fundamentally different from Wordpress, which is designed to be deployed by users on their own server.
Now, bear in mind that there are plenty of hosting companies on the market who would happily help you publish your website. However, this hosting fee is one of many costs you’ll accrue when building your Wordpress site. Additionally, the process of selecting a host itself is a chore.
Not all hosts are created equal. Some limit the number of visitors your site can receive per month, while others place a cap on the amount of media you can upload. Duda doesn’t limit any of that, on any tier. Every Duda plan includes unlimited bandwidth and storage, unlimited form submissions, and a staggering 1000 pages (not including dynamic pages or blog posts).
Pressable, one of Wordpress.org’s recommended hosting providers, charges $155/month for 400k monthly visits—astronomically more than Duda’s site price on any plan. Bluehost charges $110/month for 300k monthly visits.
For agencies serving large clients, this is huge. Take Strafford Media, for example. Their client, the Eddie Aikau Foundation, saw 500k simultaneous visitors during their main event, “The Super Bowl of Surfing.” Of course, Duda handled that traffic with ease.
“We had no downtime. No glitches at all,” said Linda Ipsen, president of the Eddie Aikau Foundation. “Everything worked perfectly!”
Building with a closed-source platform offers tangible security benefits, as well. We work tirelessly to maintain the integrity of our platform, an effort which extends to your client’s sites as well.
In contrast, Wordpress websites are in no-way connected to one another. They’re individual servers, managed by their owners. That means the person who built the Wordpress site is responsible for tedious technical maintenance like keeping the core Wordpress software up-to-date, as well as any extensions.
These extensions are where things get messy. Third-party Wordpress themes and plugins introduce weak points in the software. Each piece of software has a unique developer you have to trust with the integrity of your client’s site. Like we mentioned above, more complexity equals more vulnerability.
In 2022, 1,779 Wordpress vulnerabilities were disclosed, according to iThemes Security. Of those vulnerabilities, only about 1% were due to the Wordpress core itself, while 93% could be attributed to third-party plugins.
That’s the double-edged sword.
What about Duda’s app store? Fortunately, our approach to third-party extensions is fundamentally different from Wordpress. Apps do not directly install source code onto Duda's servers. Instead, they have access to structured, scoped, and secured APIs that limit the potential for malicious activity.
We like to say that Duda sites are “born SEO ready.” What we mean by that is, from the moment you create that first blank template, your site is ready to rank. We’ve meticulously optimized every facet of our platform to ensure great Core Web Vital scores. Frankly, “great” is underselling it.
Duda’s platform boasts the largest number of high-performing websites across all of the major website building platforms. Don’t take our word for it, see for yourself.
That’s in addition to automatically generated schema markup, an intuitive “SEO overview” dashboard, AI generated metadata, AI generated image alt-text, a built-in broken link checker, and so much more.
You’d need a variety of plugins to achieve the same effect on Wordpress. You may even have to pay for some of them! With Duda, that’s all available out-of-the-box.
As you can see, one of the main advantages Duda provides agencies is the ability to build faster and without worry. Sites begin with SEO best practices, unbreakable hosting, and strong security. That’s not to mention an intuitive, responsive editor—as opposed to having to install a theme builder—and super smart automation capabilities.
All of this comes from focus. A considered effort to create something useful for professionals, inspired by their workflows and informed by their stories. We’ve been working with agencies for over a decade and are proud to build a tool specifically for that audience.
Wordpress, on the other hand, is a little bit of everything. That can be useful, but also frustrating. Can you really scale your agency if you have to manage updates and maintenance for all of your clients? Does it take too long for your clients to rank in search?
Consider leaving all of that behind.
