WordPress vs Carrd: Which Website Builder Should You Actually Use in 2026?

Last updated: February 2026

I’ve been working with WordPress for close to 20 years. I’ve built dozens of sites on it, recommended it to countless clients, and I still believe it’s one of the most important things that ever happened to the web. WordPress democratized website creation at a time when building anything online required a developer and a budget.

But here’s what I’ve learned from years of helping solopreneurs and small business owners get online: most of them don’t need WordPress. They think they do — because WordPress is what everyone talks about — but what they actually need is a fast, professional one-page site that they can launch in an afternoon, costs almost nothing to run, and doesn’t require ongoing maintenance. That’s where Carrd comes in.

This isn’t a “WordPress is dead” article. WordPress powers over 40% of the web, and it absolutely deserves that position. This is an honest comparison to help you pick the right tool for your specific situation, because choosing the wrong one costs you time, money, and headaches.

The 30-Second Version

If you need a blog, a large content site, an online store with inventory, or a complex multi-page site with custom functionality, use WordPress.

If you need a professional one-page website for your business, a landing page, a portfolio, a link-in-bio page, or a simple product page, use Carrd.

Most small businesses, freelancers, and solopreneurs fall into the second category, even though they’ve been told they need the first.

Cost: Not Even Close

Let’s talk real numbers, not marketing numbers.

WordPress (self-hosted, WordPress.org):

The software is free. Everything else isn’t. Here’s what a typical small business WordPress site actually costs per year:

• Domain name: $10-20/year
• Hosting: $120-360/year ($10-30/month for managed hosting that actually performs well — those $3/month shared plans will make your site crawl)
• Premium theme: $50-100/year
• Essential plugins (security, SEO, backup, forms, caching): $100-300/year
• SSL certificate: usually free with hosting now, but not always
• Maintenance (updates, backups, troubleshooting): your time, or $50-200/month if outsourced

Realistic annual cost for a decent small business WordPress site: $300-800/year. And that’s if you’re doing the maintenance yourself. If you’re hiring someone to handle updates and security, add another $600-2,400/year.

Carrd:

• Domain name: $10-20/year (same as WordPress)
• Carrd Pro Standard: $19/year (includes hosting, SSL, custom domain, up to 10 sites)
• Template (optional): $9-29 one-time purchase
• Maintenance: none. Zero. Carrd handles everything.

Realistic annual cost for a professional Carrd site: $30-70/year. That’s it. No hosting to manage. No plugins to update. No security patches to worry about.

The cost difference is roughly 10x — and that’s before accounting for the time you spend maintaining WordPress. For a solopreneur whose time is worth $50-100/hour, the hidden maintenance cost of WordPress can easily add another $500-1,000/year in lost productivity.

Set up Speed and Learning Curve

WordPress: Even with modern page builders like Elementor or the block editor, going from zero to a live, professional WordPress site takes days to weeks for most small business owners. You need to choose a host, install WordPress, pick a theme, configure plugins, set up security, optimize performance, and then actually build your pages. If you’ve never done it before, each of these steps involves research, comparison shopping, and troubleshooting.

The learning curve is real. WordPress is incredibly powerful, but that power comes with complexity. The admin dashboard alone has dozens of menu items. Plugin conflicts are a regular occurrence. Theme updates can break your layout. Database optimization is a thing you’ll eventually need to deal with.

Carrd: You can go from nothing to a published, professional website in a single afternoon. Pick a template (or a Carrd template designed for your industry), customize the text and images, connect your domain, and publish. Done.

There’s no hosting to configure, no plugins to install, no database to manage. The editor is visual and immediate — what you see is what visitors see. If you’ve ever used a presentation tool, you can use Carrd.

If you’re new to Carrd, our complete guide on how to use Carrd walks through every step. For more advanced customization, we’ve also covered how to customize your Carrd template for maximum impact.

Performance and Speed

This is where things get interesting — and where my love for WordPress gets tempered by reality.

WordPress: A freshly installed WordPress site with a lightweight theme is fast. The problem is that no real-world WordPress site stays that way. Every plugin you add introduces database queries, additional HTTP requests, and JavaScript. A typical small business WordPress site with a page builder, contact form, SEO plugin, security plugin, analytics, and a few others can easily make 80-120 HTTP requests per page load.

You can optimize WordPress to be fast — caching plugins, CDN configuration, image optimization, database cleanup, lazy loading — but that’s all extra work and extra plugins, which somewhat defeats the purpose. If you’re interested in going the WordPress route and want it to be fast, we’ve written about the best WordPress themes for Core Web Vitals.

Carrd: Carrd sites are static single-page applications. There’s no database. No server-side rendering. No plugin overhead. Pages typically load in under 1 second because there’s simply less to load. Google’s Core Web Vitals — the performance metrics that directly affect your search rankings — are almost always green on Carrd sites without any optimization effort on your part.

For small business websites where speed directly impacts both user experience and SEO, this is a significant advantage. Your visitors won’t wait. Google won’t wait. A Carrd site is fast by default; a WordPress site is fast only if you make it fast.

Design and Customization

WordPress: Unlimited flexibility. If you can imagine it, WordPress can build it. Custom post types, conditional logic, dynamic content, multi-language support, membership areas, forums — WordPress has a plugin or a code solution for almost anything. This is its greatest strength and the reason it powers everything from personal blogs to enterprise websites.

But for a small business that needs a services page, an about section, some testimonials, and a contact form, this unlimited flexibility is like buying a commercial kitchen to make toast. The tool is far more capable than what you need, and that capability adds complexity you’ll have to manage.

Carrd: Carrd is deliberately constrained. You build single-page websites with sections, and the editor gives you a focused set of tools — text, images, videos, buttons, forms, embeds, icons, and tables. You can’t build a 50-page content site or a multi-product e-commerce store.

But within those constraints, the design quality is excellent. Carrd templates are clean, modern, and responsive. You can customize colors, fonts, spacing, and layout without touching code. And if you do know CSS, Carrd’s Pro plans let you add custom code for more advanced styling — we’ve written about CSS image hover effects you can use on Carrd for an idea of what’s possible.

The constraint is actually a feature: it forces you to focus on what matters. Your visitors don’t need 50 pages. They need to understand what you do, trust you, and take action. A single well-designed page does that better than a sprawling multi-page site with a confusing navigation menu.

Maintenance and Security

This is the category where WordPress loses badly for small business owners who aren’t tech-savvy.

WordPress: WordPress requires active, ongoing maintenance. Core updates, theme updates, plugin updates — they happen frequently and ignoring them is a security risk. WordPress sites are the most targeted CMS on the internet precisely because they’re so popular. Outdated plugins are the number one attack vector.

A responsible WordPress site owner needs to regularly update core, themes, and plugins (while checking for compatibility issues), monitor for security vulnerabilities, manage spam and bot traffic, optimize the database, renew SSL certificates (if not automated), maintain backups and test restore procedures. This isn’t optional. An unmaintained WordPress site will eventually get hacked, slow down, or break. Many of the small business WordPress sites I’ve encountered over the years were running outdated plugins with known vulnerabilities. The site owners had no idea.

Carrd: There is no maintenance. Carrd is a managed platform — they handle hosting, security, SSL, uptime, and infrastructure. Your site runs on their servers and they keep everything updated. You never need to worry about plugin conflicts, security patches, or database optimization because none of those things exist in the Carrd model.

For a solopreneur running a business — not a website — this is the correct trade-off. You should be spending your time on customers, not on WordPress admin.

SEO Capabilities

WordPress: WordPress has a robust SEO ecosystem. Plugins like Yoast SEO and Rank Math give you granular control over title tags, meta descriptions, canonical URLs, XML sitemaps, schema markup, and more. You can create extensive content hierarchies with categories, tags, and custom taxonomies. WordPress blogs can target hundreds of keywords across hundreds of pages.

If your business strategy is content marketing — publishing blog posts regularly to attract organic search traffic — WordPress is the clear winner. Carrd simply can’t do this.

Carrd: Carrd gives you the SEO essentials: custom page titles, meta descriptions, Open Graph tags, and clean URLs. For a single-page site, that’s really all you need. Your site will get indexed, and you can rank for your brand name and key service terms.

Where Carrd falls short is content marketing at scale. You can’t publish blog posts, you can’t create new pages targeting new keywords, and you can’t build the kind of deep topical authority that WordPress enables.

But here’s the nuance: most small businesses never actually do content marketing. They set up WordPress intending to blog, write three posts, and then never touch it again. Those three orphaned blog posts from 2023 aren’t helping your SEO — they’re actually hurting it by making your site look abandoned. An up-to-date Carrd site with a strong title tag and a clear value proposition will outrank an unmaintained WordPress blog every time.

If you’re serious about content marketing and have the time and discipline to publish regularly, WordPress is the right choice. If you just want your business to show up when someone Googles your name, Carrd is enough. For a deeper comparison of approaches, you might find our guide on adding a blog to Carrd useful — there are creative workarounds.

E-commerce

WordPress + WooCommerce: Full-featured e-commerce. Product catalogs, inventory management, shipping calculations, tax automation, coupon codes, customer accounts, order management — WooCommerce can handle it all. If you’re selling physical products with variations, managing inventory, or processing high volumes of orders, WordPress + WooCommerce is the serious option.

Carrd: Carrd isn’t an e-commerce platform, but you can sell on it. Stripe and PayPal integrations let you accept payments directly. For digital products, courses, ebooks, or single physical products, you can set up a simple buy button and checkout flow. Pair Carrd with Shoprocket and you get a lightweight shopping cart with product management — enough for a small catalog without the overhead of WooCommerce.

Check out our Shoppo template to see what a Carrd-based single-product store looks like, or the digital product template for selling courses and downloads.

When to Choose WordPress

WordPress is the right choice when you need multiple pages with complex navigation, a blog or content marketing strategy with regular publishing, a full e-commerce store with inventory management, user accounts, memberships, or community features, custom functionality that requires specific plugins or custom code, or a large-scale site that will grow to hundreds of pages. In these cases, WordPress’s complexity is justified because you actually need the capabilities. The overhead is worth it.

When to Choose Carrd

Carrd is the right choice when you need a professional one-page website for your business, a landing page for a product launch or campaign, a portfolio site to showcase your work, a link-in-bio page as a Linktree alternative, a simple site for a local service business (salon, contractor, consultant), a SaaS landing page to validate an idea, or a personal brand or about-me page.

For each of these use cases, Carrd gives you a faster, cheaper, and simpler path to a professional result. You can browse industry-specific templates for hair salons, construction companies, hotels, B2B SaaS, freelancers, photographers, and many more.

The Hybrid Approach

Here’s what a lot of people miss: you don’t have to choose exclusively. Many of the smartest small business owners I work with use both.

They run their main website — the one customers see — on Carrd. It’s fast, professional, and costs almost nothing to maintain. Then they use WordPress for specific needs like a blog, a knowledge base, or an online store on a subdomain.

This gives you the speed and simplicity of Carrd where it matters most (your main website) while keeping WordPress available for the things it genuinely does better (content publishing, e-commerce). You get the best of both worlds without the compromise of either.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Final Thought

The PressWork framework that once lived at this domain tried to solve a real problem: making WordPress easier for everyone. It offered a drag-and-drop editor when that was revolutionary. It prioritized responsive design when half the web was still fixed-width. And ultimately, it shut down because even with great tools, WordPress required a level of ongoing commitment that many users couldn’t sustain.

Fifteen years later, the tools have changed, but the core question hasn’t: what’s the simplest path to a professional website for your business?

For most small businesses, the answer is no longer WordPress. It’s a fast, purpose-built one-page site that you can launch today, that costs less than a coffee per month, and that you never have to think about maintaining. That’s what Carrd delivers, and that’s what our templates are built to help you do — get online fast, look professional, and get back to running your business.

👉 Browse Carrd templates for your business

👉 Learn how to use Carrd — complete guide

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Carrd better than WordPress?

Neither is universally better — they’re built for different purposes. Carrd is better for simple one-page websites, landing pages, and portfolios where you want speed, affordability, and zero maintenance. WordPress is better for complex multi-page sites, blogs, and e-commerce stores. For most small businesses and solopreneurs, Carrd is the smarter choice because it delivers what they actually need without the overhead of what they don’t.

Can I switch from WordPress to Carrd?

Yes, and many people do. If your WordPress site is essentially a single page of information about your business (services, about, contact), you can recreate it on Carrd in an afternoon. Set up your Carrd site, point your domain to it, and you’ll immediately benefit from faster load times and zero maintenance. Check our complete template collection for a starting point that matches your industry.

Can Carrd rank on Google?

Absolutely. Carrd sites are fully indexable by Google and support custom title tags, meta descriptions, and clean URLs. For brand searches and local service queries, a well-optimized Carrd site can rank just as well as a WordPress site. Where WordPress has an advantage is in targeting dozens or hundreds of different keywords through blog content — something Carrd isn’t designed for.

How much does Carrd cost compared to WordPress?

Carrd Pro Standard costs $19/year and includes hosting, SSL, and support for custom domains across up to 10 sites. A comparable WordPress setup (hosting, theme, essential plugins) costs $300-800/year. The total cost difference over five years is roughly $100-150 for Carrd vs. $1,500-4,000 for WordPress.

Is WordPress still worth learning in 2026?

Absolutely — if you need what it offers. WordPress is the most powerful and flexible CMS available, and it’s the right tool for content-heavy sites, large organizations, and developers building custom solutions. But learning WordPress just to put up a simple business website is like learning video editing just to crop a photo. The question isn’t whether WordPress is good (it is). The question is whether it’s the right tool for your specific need.

Have questions about whether WordPress or Carrd is right for your business? Drop me a line — I’ll help you figure it out.