Most platform debates centre on the wrong question.
Is WordPress easier than Squarespace? No, probably not — not at first. Is Webflow more design-flexible? For certain things, yes. Does Wix let you get a basic site up faster with no technical knowledge? Absolutely.
But here’s the question that actually matters for a business that plans to still be operating in five years: When you need to bring someone new into your digital workflow — an SEO specialist, a copywriter, a virtual assistant, a new marketing hire, a developer you found at short notice — how much will it cost you in time and money to get them functional?
That’s the real cost of platform choice. Not the monthly subscription fee. The people cost.
And when you measure it that way, the answer has been the same for fifteen years: WordPress is the common language of all your digital professionals, and that reduces friction in your digital marketing tremendously.
What Lingua Franca Actually Means
The term “lingua franca” originally referred to a contact language used between traders who didn’t share a native tongue. Merchants from different countries needed to communicate, and they converged on a shared language that let them do business together. Not because it was the most elegant language. Not because it had the deepest grammar. Because it was the one everyone already knew.
WordPress is that language for the web.
The statistic you’ll hear most often is that WordPress powers over 43% of all websites globally. That’s a remarkable number — more than four in ten websites on the internet — but it’s honestly not the interesting part. The interesting part is what that number has created: a labour market.
When WordPress is what 43% of websites run on, it becomes what web professionals learn. Not because they chose it for ideological reasons. Because that’s where the work is. And that creates a feedback loop that has compounded for fifteen years. More WordPress sites means more WordPress developers. More WordPress developers means more WordPress SEO specialists, because SEO tools are built around WordPress. More WordPress-fluent professionals across the industry means businesses choose WordPress because they know they can find help. Which creates more WordPress sites.
At this point, WordPress isn’t just a CMS. It’s the shared infrastructure assumption of the entire web services industry.
The Trades Argument
Think about it from the perspective of a typical small or medium-sized business managing their digital presence.
You have a website. It needs to exist, work reliably, and be updated periodically. You’re not a developer. You’re running a business. So you rely on a small ecosystem of professionals who help you: maybe a developer who built the site, an SEO specialist who handles search optimisation, a copywriter who updates the blog, a virtual assistant who uploads new product images or event listings.
If your website is on WordPress, here’s what your working week looks like: you email the copywriter, she logs in, writes and publishes the post. You message the SEO specialist, he runs his audit tools and implements changes directly. Your VA uploads the product photos. The developer jumps in when something breaks and fixes it in an hour.
No briefing sessions on how to use the platform. No “can you send me a login tutorial?” No “I’ve never used this system before, can you give me access to the staging docs?”
Now imagine you’re on a proprietary platform. One that’s well-designed, polished, genuinely easier to set up. But not what most web professionals use day to day. When your SEO specialist says “I’ve never worked in this CMS before,” you have two options: pay for her onboarding time, or find a different SEO specialist. When your developer moves to another country and you need a replacement at short notice, your hiring pool just got dramatically smaller.
I’ve watched this play out many times. A business in Auckland or Christchurch that chose a less common platform because it looked good in a demo, and then spent months dealing with the practical consequences when their team changed. Finding a Webflow developer in a regional New Zealand city at short notice is genuinely difficult. Finding a WordPress developer who can start this week is a fifteen-minute search on any freelancer platform.
The Evidence
A digital agency we work with manages more than a dozen client websites across different industries — a hotel, a professional services firm, an international recruiting network, several trade businesses. Their team includes a project coordinator, a developer, and a designer. Any given week, they’re also coordinating with external SEO contractors, client-side marketing staff, and the hosting provider.
What makes this work without constant friction is that everyone is speaking the same language. When an SEO contractor comes in to work on a client’s redirects, he doesn’t need a walk-through of the platform. When a client’s marketing manager wants to update her own events page, she can. When the developer is tied up and the coordinator needs to make a small text change, she makes it herself. The platform is never the bottleneck.
This is what lingua franca looks like in practice: multiple trades, working independently, on the same system, without the overhead of platform translation.
We see it from the other direction too. An Australian marketing consultant who hosts sites for several clients — a fine foods business, a catering company, a health clinic — describes the same thing. Her clients’ staff can update their own sites. Her contractors know the platform already. She doesn’t need to hire WordPress specialists; she just needs professionals who happen to already know it. Which is most of them.
The pattern that shows up repeatedly in our customer base is this: the businesses that run the smoothest digital operations are not the ones with the most technical staff. They’re the ones on a platform with the widest ecosystem of fluent practitioners. Because digital work is inherently collaborative, and collaboration has friction costs.
The Counter-Argument
I want to be honest about the counter-argument, because it’s a real one.
Squarespace is easier to use than WordPress. For a solo operator who builds their own site and manages it themselves, Squarespace’s interface is genuinely cleaner. Webflow gives designers more visual control without touching code. Shopify is better than WooCommerce out of the box for straightforward e-commerce. These aren’t myths — they’re accurate observations about first-use experience.
The reframe I’d offer is this: ease of first use and total cost of ownership over five years are not the same measurement.
A platform that’s easier to set up but locks you into a proprietary ecosystem has hidden costs that don’t show up until you’re three years in. Squarespace changes their pricing — which they have done, multiple times. Webflow’s pricing model for hosting scales quickly once you need multiple sites or CMS items. And when you need to bring in external help, you pay the platform-learning premium every time.
The businesses I’ve seen struggle are not the ones that chose WordPress and found it complex. They’re the ones that chose a “simpler” platform, got two years in, outgrew its limitations, and then faced a full migration — with all the cost and risk that comes with it. Migrating from Squarespace to WordPress isn’t a weekend project. It’s a significant rebuild, and you’re doing it because the simple platform stopped being simple once your needs got real.
That’s the shiny new object problem. New platforms always look better in a demo. The demo is designed to show you the happy path. It doesn’t show you what happens when you need to run a complex custom post type, or integrate with a legacy CRM, or find a developer who can fix a specific problem at short notice on a Friday afternoon.
Total Cost of Ownership
Here’s the maths on the platform decision, because this is a business decision, not a design preference.
Say you bring in three new contractors over three years — an SEO specialist, a copywriter, a new developer when the first one moves on. On a proprietary platform, each of them needs onboarding time. Budget two to four hours per person at $120-$150/hour. That’s $720 to $1,800 in platform-learning costs alone — before they’ve done a minute of productive work. On WordPress, that cost is zero. They already know it.
Now add the pricing risk. Squarespace has changed their pricing three times. Webflow’s per-site hosting costs scale quickly. When your proprietary platform reprices, you absorb it or face a migration. On open source WordPress, the software is free and always will be. You choose your hosting provider, your server, your cost structure.
Then add the feature ceiling. Every time you hit a limitation — a CRM integration, a custom workflow, a complex layout — you’re either stuck within the platform’s ecosystem or paying premium rates for a scarce specialist. On WordPress, the developer ecosystem is the deepest in the industry. The chance someone has already solved your problem is high. The chance you can find a developer to build a custom solution is higher.
Over three years, these costs compound. The platform that was “easier to set up” has quietly become more expensive than the one that required a bit more work upfront.
When a client asks me “why WordPress over Squarespace,” I don’t give them a feature comparison. I give them this: choosing a platform is choosing a labour market. WordPress is the deepest labour market in the web industry. That depth compounds in ways that ease-of-setup simply cannot match.
What This Looks Like for a New Zealand Business
Geography matters here in a way that the global statistics don’t always capture.
In markets like New Zealand and Australia, the labour pool for specialist platform skills is thin. There aren’t enough Webflow developers in Wellington or Christchurch to guarantee you can find one at short notice. There aren’t enough Squarespace specialists in regional Australia who can walk into your workflow and be productive in a week.
WordPress developers? They’re everywhere. Because WordPress is what the industry taught itself. Because WordPress is what the agency ecosystem runs on. Because WordPress is what virtual assistants, SEO contractors, and marketing freelancers learned when they got into digital work.
This doesn’t mean WordPress is perfect. It has genuine complexity — the admin interface has decades of accumulated decision-making behind it, and it shows. The plugin ecosystem has more crap in it than any other CMS. You can build a bloated, slow, insecure WordPress site with almost no effort if you don’t know what you’re doing. I’ve seen more broken WordPress sites than I can count.
But those are problems of implementation, not problems of platform. And they’re problems that managed hosting solves. The deep talent pool remains, regardless of what any individual has done to any particular WordPress site.
The Deeper Point
Here’s the argument I come back to when someone says they’re going to use a newer, shinier platform because it’s easier:
Your digital marketing involves more than one person. It always will, once you’re serious about it. An SEO specialist, a copywriter, a developer, an admin — each one of those relationships costs less when they walk in already fluent. Each one of those relationships costs more when you chose a platform they’ve never touched.
WordPress is the common language precisely because it became the common language. The feedback loop has been running for fifteen years and it doesn’t reverse. The platform that 43% of websites use is the platform that the industry learned. That’s not going to change because a well-funded startup built a prettier interface.
Choosing a platform that only a small percentage of web professionals specialise in is choosing to pay a premium on every future hire, every new contractor, every time your business grows and your digital team changes with it. That premium is invisible until you’re paying it. And by then, you’re deep enough in that switching carries its own cost.
Do it once. Do it right. Build on the lingua franca.
What’s Next
Next week, I’ll make the companion argument: why open source guarantees longevity in a way that no proprietary platform can match. If the lingua franca argument is about talent availability today, the longevity argument is about strategic risk tomorrow. They belong together.
This is part of The 11 Truths About Web Hosting, a twelve-week series on what the hosting industry gets wrong — and what actually matters for your business.
If anything in this article made you wonder about your own platform decision, we offer a free site audit at managedhosting.partners. No obligation. Just an honest assessment of where your site stands.
