Is WordPress slow and want a better or a free alternative? If so, you’re not alone. A slow website, especially on mobile, will impact negatively all other metrics, including engagement, conversion, and others.
WordPress currently has lower Core Web Vitals metrics compared with its alternatives. Core Web Vitals is now a standard for Google in terms of page experience and speed(perceived load) with the LCP(largest contentful paint) metric.
As WordPress is an open-source CMS, it may be hard to compete with private apps that have robust technology on all of their pages. Nonetheless, there are faster WordPress alternatives.
If you’re looking for a website builder solution including hosting, or a content management system (CMS), take a look at the following list of faster WordPress alternatives in Core Web Vitals terms.
Fastest WordPress Alternatives Rank
For this rank, we used data from Google Core Web vitals filtered by mobile. The rank is as follows:
Core Web Vitals is now a standard for Google regarding page experience. It applies to visual stability, loading, and interactivity experience. Alongside other metrics, they form what Google calls Search Signals for Page Experience, which is used as a search ranking algorithm.
Choosing technologies with great Core Web Vitals metrics will give your website better SEO results.
Core Web Vitals doesn’t only apply directly to the SEO but rather a lot of metrics. Speed – represented by the LCP metric – can have a direct impact on the cost of running a website, due to how slow-loading websites may consume more server resources/require more bandwidth, leading to higher hosting costs.
Slow websites can also lead to increased costs for customer support, as customers may be more likely to contact support if they are experiencing issues with a slow-loading website.
Ghost
Open source alternative to WordPress that can be installed on a Ubuntu server to self-host.
Ghost Pro offers creator plans including memberships, subscriptions, and newsletters. Takes 0% fees on these services, as it uses Stripe. Ghost Pro also has native SEO, CDN, domain, and free SSL.
One of the powerful ways to leverage Ghost and keep the WordPress experience is deploying your site with Netlify. You can use Ghost custom integration to achieve it. This integration triggers rebuilds of your site any time content is updated using webhooks.
Current plans are based on audience, with the following pricing(1 year-plans):
- Ghost self-hosted: Free
- 500/members audience, 1/staff, 1/newsletter, 1/membership: $108/year
- 1000/members audience, 2/staff, 3/newsletter, 5/membership: $300/year
- 1000/members audience, 5/staff, 10/newsletter, unlimited/membership: $600/year
- 10k/members audience, unlimited/staff, unlim./newsletter, unlim./membership: $2388/year
Framer
Framer is a platform to build websites where you have full control of all elements.
The platform offers hosting as part of the plans. Framer offers a library of templates with +1000 free templates.
The following tiers are available:
- 2 pages 10GB/bandwidth: $60/year
- 1000 pages 50GB/bandwidth: $180/year
- 10000 pages 100GB/bandwidth + 10 CMS collections: $360/year
Webflow
Webflow is a CMS and website builder alternative to WordPress that allows you to build websites without coding. It offers a free plan for starting up your project on the platform until you launch it as a custom domain. Webflow also has Workspace plans featuring team options.
Yearly pricing:
- 1 site, 1GB/mo bandwidth, webflow.io domain: Free
- 1 site, 50GB/mo bandwidth, domain, no database: $144/year
- 1 site, 200GB/mo bandwidth, domain, 2k items/database, 3 editors: $192/year
- 1 site, 400GB/mo bandwidth, domain, 1k items/database, 10 editors: $432/year
Duda
Duda excels in the list as the fastest WordPress alternative. Duda is a website builder featuring team collaboration and client management. It can be used as a Woocommerce alternative. Duda websites come with HTTPS, hosting, multi-language, and membership.
Pricing (1-year plans)
- 1 site + limited library: $168/year
- 1 site + unlimited library + 4 team collab + client manag./feedback: $264/year
- 4 sites + unlimited library + 10 team collab + client manag./feedback + email domain + full site export: $396/year
Relume
Relume is an AI tool that enhances and speeds up the development process. Use Relume to either enhance your WordPress development or enhance the switching to another tool, as Relume offers built-in export designs to Webflow.
Their AI tool creates pages with wireframes based on your sitemap, all automated.
Their pricing starts at $38/mo for 3 projects and access to Pro Figma kits.
WordPress blocks
WordPress block offers a fast and straightforward way to build websites elegantly. It’s a new option to build and keeps the website way faster than website builders but has the user experience to let regular users create their entire website using blocks.
You can either build using a block theme or a block plugin:
Netlify CMS
Netlify is an open-source headless CMS that allows non-technical users a simple way to edit and add content to any site built with a static site generator. It is built on client-side JavaScript, reusable APIs, and prebuilt Markup. Click here to see a demo of Netlify CMS.
Netlify CMS is platform agnostic and works and even integrates with many other static site generators, including Hugo and Gatsby.
Gatsby
Gatsby is a headless frontend that can be used as a blog. The Gatsby Blog plugin allows you to build a blog with all major features, including RSS, automatic optimization of images, and SEO features. All done in the React framework, which Gatsby is based on.
Gatsby also offers a Gatsby WordPress plugin solution that allows keeping using WordPress as the CMS, but with increased security and performance due to the static rendering of Gatsby.
Webstudio
Webstudio is a new website builder in the format of Webflow, which means its main appeal is for Webflow enthusiasts. Their sites are deployed on Cloudflare workers, which means speed across the globe.
Their builder is open-source and AGPL-licensed, which means no platform lock-in.
