Duda vs. WordPress

So, you are ready to start a new site, and you want to give it all the bells and whistles … but you don’t know what to use? There are so many options out there: from hosting your personal item in WordPress to services like Duda, WordPress.com. They all have advantages and disadvantages, and the decision can be complicated, what should you do? Well, here at Site turner we want to help you. So we’ve spent hundreds of hours testing each platform, and now we’re putting them face to face.

In today’s comparison, we take a look at hosted services, WordPress and Duda. In a future comparison, we’ll compare them with SquareSpace and a few other website builders. And then, when you’re an expert, we compare these services to WordPress or Drupal hosting.

In this article our comparison Duda vs. WordPress

Introducing Duda

Duda is a service originally designed for building mobile websites from desktop sites. It has two different modes: responsive mode and mobile website mode.

Mobile website mode allows you to build a mobile website from a standard desktop site. In this mode, you enter a website URL and Duda tries to take that website and turn it into a version compatible with phones. The success of this varies and we will learn more about this later.

The other mode allows you to build a responsive website by choosing a template and then adding widgets. This mode competes more directly with WordPress, and can be very useful, as we’ll find out.

Introducing WordPress

WordPress is the most well-known of all content management services, and it’s used by about 25% of all websites on the Internet.

Like Duda, WordPress also has two different modalities. You can install the open source platform on your web server or go to WordPress.com and create a live site. The latter is a direct competitor of Duda, while the former is an indirect competitor.

In this post, we’ll be looking primarily at the online version, WordPress.com (which we’ll just call WordPress from now on), although much of the comparison is transferable. We’ll look at the difference between self-hosting WordPress and using the online version in a future post.

Comparison of the general performance of WordPress and Duda

Functionality	WordPress	Duda
Available themes	280	150
Free plan	Several free custom URL options (note that you need to purchase an enterprise level plan to remove their branding)	Available only during the trial period
SEO Functionality	SEO tools for business plans only	Built in basic SEO
Import options	Self-hosted WordPress, Medium, Wix, Square space, Blogger, more	Import (part of) website content
Export options	Export basic data	Available on some plans
Social media integration	Post to Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, more	Automatically pull feeds and comments from FB, Twitter, Yelp, etc.
Storage	6-13 GB for personal plans, unlimited for businesses	Unlimited
Google Analytics	Only for business plans	Fully supported
Reporting, analytics functionality	Basic analyzes integrated via JetPack	Basic analytics built in
No branding on website	Business plans for Only	For all plans
Google AMP	Automatic support, changeable	Not supported
Plugins	Several hundred plugins available; can download others *	20 “rules”, 17 third-party plugins for e-commerce
Comments	Integrated full comments	Must use a third party (Facebook, Disqus)

Easy use of WordPress

Getting started with WordPress is really easy. You go to the WordPress.com site and sign up, then you enter a few questions.

From there you are prompted to choose a site URL and at this point, you are asked to sign up for a paid version, which allows you to get a free domain name.

Once your site is created, you will see some sort of wizard that will help you publish your site. The wizard will guide you in choosing an icon on the site and adding a slogan.

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So far the process is as easy as writing your name, but this is where things get tricky.

The last step in the wizard is to create your contact page, where you are immediately presented with a confusing code and no real instructions on how to do it. At this point, the less technical of our testers gave up:

The other testers skipped the code (it’s a contact form) and continued to build their page.

However, once you have completed the contact form section, you are on your own on the main page … and it is very difficult to know how to continue from there. And unfortunately, the interface is not the same as the open source version of WordPress, so even people with WordPress experience may experience some confusion.

Also, read about top plugins for WordPress

Building a store with WordPress

WordPress doesn’t really have an integrated ecommerce solution. Instead, it lets you use WooCommerce with a one-click installation.

For those of you who don’t know, WooCommerce is the most used WordPress ecommerce plugin. It is used by hundreds of thousands of sites online, from small to huge sites, so you will always be able to find help and support.

Using Duda is easy

Getting a beautiful website up and running is pretty easy with Duda, but there can be a few little quirks that make it a bit difficult to build your perfect site.

Duda has two rules: you can build a flexible website using a step-by-step processing process, or there is a secondary method where you create a mobile website based on your desktop content. In this article, we will look at the process step by step.

Unlike WordPress, when you start your website with Doda, the first thing you do is choose a template. There are more than 150 different templates to choose from, including dozens of business templates.

Once you select the template, you just enter your site name, and the system creates a site for you, which you customize using the drag and drop GUI editor.

The most graphical of all the products in this article is Duda’s site editor. For those who are familiar with tools like PowerPoint, how to add and format design elements is very easy. To add an element you have to select it from the sidebar’s widgets menu and drag it to the page.

The Duda editor also has some really cool features. If you have a restaurant, for example, you can just enter the name of your restaurant and the system will find and fill your menu (obviously, it has to be somewhere – in some form – online) to work properly. We tested it and it worked perfectly.

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Building a store with Duda

Building a store on Duda is pretty straightforward. You can enter your import into them, and then the system works mostly. We found everything to be pretty self-explanatory. There are several payment options, including Square, Paypal, and Stripe, as well as automated shipping calculation.

Duda stores integrate with Facebook, Instagram, Google, and even Amazon, so you can sell there, too – if you have the right level plan. There are some really good scans included for free, although you’ll need to install a paid app to get full ones.