Checkatrade Alternatives: Where Else Trades Get Work
- Website Strategy
Every so often, a client asks us about a platform we do not build on, usually Squarespace or Umbraco, and wants an honest opinion rather than a sales pitch.
Well, that’s a fair question.
We only build on WordPress. People ask us why often enough that we figured it was time to actually write it down, instead of explaining it fresh every single time.
This is not going to be a rigged comparison where two options lose on purpose. All three platforms are genuinely capable. The honest answer is that they suit different situations, and most small and medium UK businesses land in the same place for reasons that are worth understanding rather than just taking on trust.
WordPress currently powers 42.4% of all websites globally and holds close to 60% of the market among sites built on any identifiable CMS. That is not a small lead. It is the platform most developers, plugin makers, and hosting companies build around first, which has practical consequences for a business owner even if the percentage itself means nothing to you directly.
What that dominance actually buys you is choice and continuity. If your developer moves on, disappears, or you simply want a second opinion, there are more WordPress developers in the UK than for any other platform by a wide margin. If you need a specific feature, booking systems, membership areas, multilingual support, there is almost certainly a plugin for it already, built and maintained by someone else, rather than something your agency needs to code from scratch. That matters more than it sounds when you are trying to keep costs sensible.
Plenty of businesses build a website, launch it, and never check back in to see whether it is genuinely doing its job. That depends heavily on the platform having real flexibility underneath it, capturing leads properly, integrating with a CRM, running SEO in the background rather than as an afterthought. WordPress does all of that natively or through well-established plugins. It is not the newest or flashiest option. It is simply the one with the fewest walls around it.
Squarespace genuinely earns its reputation for design. Templates look polished out of the box, and for a photographer, a small creative studio, or someone who wants a simple portfolio site with minimal fuss, it can be a perfectly sensible choice.
Where it becomes a problem is growth. Squarespace is a closed platform; you are renting space inside their system, and if you ever want functionality outside what they have decided to offer, you are stuck. No custom plugin ecosystem. Limited SEO control compared to WordPress. Migrating away later, if the business outgrows it, means rebuilding from scratch rather than exporting and adapting.
We often see this play out with businesses that started on Squarespace when they were small, then came to us once they needed a proper booking system, e-commerce with specific logic, or SEO structure that the platform simply could not support. It is worth asking, honestly, whether your business plans to stay exactly the same size and shape for the next five years, because that is the scenario Squarespace suits best.
Umbraco deserves respect. It is a serious, open-source .NET CMS used by large organisations that need heavy customisation, complex content structures, and enterprise-level control. If you are running a business with a substantial in-house development team and specific architectural requirements, it is a legitimate option.
For a typical small or medium UK business, it is usually the wrong tool for the job, not because it is bad, but because it solves problems most small businesses do not have.
Unless your business genuinely has the development resources and complexity to justify it, Umbraco tends to be solving a problem you do not have.
If you run a small or medium business in the UK and want a site that can grow with you, gets proper SEO support, and does not lock you into one agency’s proprietary system, WordPress is the sensible default in the overwhelming majority of cases. That is not us being biased because it is what we build. It is the reason we chose to build on it in the first place.
Squarespace suits a genuinely narrow use case: small, simple, unlikely to need custom functionality. Umbraco suits the opposite end: large, complex, with a development team already in place. Most businesses we speak to, across Doncaster, Barnsley, Rotherham, and Sheffield, sit firmly in the middle, needing something flexible enough to grow but not so complex it needs its own IT department. WordPress is built for exactly that middle ground.
If you are weighing up which platform actually fits your business, rather than which one has the nicest homepage demo, we are glad to talk it through properly. No pressure, just an honest look at what your business actually needs.
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