WordPress vs ClickFunnels

When it comes to making money online, there are a number of sites that can be used, depending on the path you decide to take. Today, we are going to take a look at two giants of the online world, WordPress vs ClickFunnels to see if you can save money while still building your business. 

Many don't realise that you a lot of these platforms can have multiple uses, or have hidden features that open up these abilities. For example, today we are going to look at the landing page and funnel building capabilities of both of these platforms. 

WordPress vs ClickFunnels - Why Are We Comparing These Two?

It's a good question, and to be honest, it's a pretty simple answer, every person who is building an online business wants to be able to capture leads, or people who are interested in their business. 

Be it via online adverts, social media or network marketing efforts, or simply having a link or pop-up appearing on a ready build website. You need a quick, easy way to grab an email, maybe a phone number and in return provide something back. Maybe it's a free course, a PDF, some advice, or whatever you feel is worth getting that email for. 

ClickFunnels has always billed itself as a way of 'getting rid of websites' and as a simple, no code way of building out landing pages, or funnels that anyone can use. If you haven't already, I suggest checking out the ClickFunnels review, to get yourself familiar with what it does. 

Whereas WordPress is usually seen as the nerdy sidekick that only top notch creators, coders and HTML wizards can get there head around. A cumbersome, difficult platform that isn't set up for landing pages, funnels or any kind of lead gen work. 

I wanted to see if that's true, look at the different use cases, see how they compare and see if some of these statements are simply outdated, untrue or possibly a bit biased. 

What Is A Landing Page Or Funnel?

First off, we need to understand what we mean by a landing page, or a 'funnel'. I am going to try and keep it to the most standard, vanilla definition we can for this, just to try and level the playing field a little. 

So, the usually definition of a 'funnel' or 'sales funnel' can be summed up as, 

The purchase funnel, or purchasing funnel, is a consumer-focused marketing model that illustrates the theoretical customer journey toward the purchase of a good or service - Wikipedia

The same can be summed up for the term 'Landing Page'

sometimes known as a "lead capture page","single property page", "static page", or a "destination page", is a single web page - Wikipedia

So, one is designed to take a potential customer from 'maybe semi interested' to 'purchasing your product' (The Funnel) and the other is solely designed to get a piece of data from someone, usually in the form of an email, a phone number or even both. 

Creating A Funnel Or Landing Page (How Easy Is It?)

Of course to be able to do a proper ClickFunnels vs WordPress article, we need to actually see how easy it is to create a landing page, or the more difficult one, a proper sales funnel. 

WordPress

WordPress is probably one of the most versatile bits of website building kit out there, with thousands of themes, many more thousands of plugins and multi-million different set up and configuration options, I usually tell people you will be hard-pressed to find something WordPress can't do. It's beauty is that you can take standard WordPress, find a plugin that does what you want, install it and there you go. 

For this comparison, that is what we are going to do, I have seen tons of articles out there that claim you need to learn HTML or coding to be able to build these landing pages or funnels, but that's like buying a Swiss Army Knife and only using the knife to try and screw a door handle back on. It has a screwdriver as part of the product, you might as well use it and stop being so stubborn. 

As such, I am going to use a paid for plugin called Thrive Architect to help build these landing pages, and funnels. Thrive Architect allows you to take standard WordPress and gives you a drag and drop style builder for you to create the pages you desire. No coding, no learning to hack the core underpinnings of WordPress, just a simple page creation kit. 

You can also use plugins such as Elementor that do very similar things, including a slightly limiting free version. 

You can grab Thrive from here (or read more about it here), it then requires you to upload the plugin to your WordPress site, and you are good to go. 

Thrive comes with 200+ different pages that have been pre-built or you can simply start from scratch, your choice really. I usually take a pre-built one, and then customise it based on my requirements. 

To build the landing page within WordPress, you need to create a new page, and then open up Thrive Architect, you are then shown a huge number of templates that you can use, depending on what your actual goal is. I will usually pick one that as the look and feel I am going for, then I can just swap out the colours and the text and I am good to go. 

The pages can be as long, or as short as you like. Each part of the page can be customised, much like you would if you where using a site such as Wix or SquareSpace. Click on the bit you want to edit, update the colour or words and save.  You have a landing page sorted, in a relatively short space of time. 

For funnels, it does get a little more difficult, WordPress, even with Thrive isn't a native funnel builder. To achieve a proper sales funnel requires some thinking and a little planning. 

You will need to create multiple pages, and then link each button to the next page. You are essentially doing what ClickFunnels does for you, but adding a bit of a manual step onto it. 

ClickFunnels

Now ClickFunnels has 1 job, and 1 job only, allow you to create landing pages and funnels, if it couldn't do that, it would be a pretty crap platform. 

You don't need any additional hosting and everything can be done on the ClickFunnels platform, with some relative ease. 

As with Thrive, you can pick pre-done pages or funnels, or you can create your own from scratch, depending on how savvy you are feeling. 

The main difference is that ClickFunnels will provide you with all the pages you need, in one place. Rather than having a central 'pages' tab, you are given a funnels tab. Even if that funnel contains 1 or 13 steps, they are each given their own funnel. 

This makes visualising them a lot easier, and bundles things together.

Once you have chosen your design, or funnel you can of course customise it. Again, much like WordPress and the plugins, they have a a page builder. I personally find it buggy and annoying. 

It's nice that each step is easy to connect though, you can tell a button to simply pass the user onto the next step in the funnel, you don't have to find the URL and direct them to that, it does it for you. 

Using ClickFunnels, you can usually get a new landing page, or funnel set up in roughly the same time as one on WordPress, anywhere from a few minutes, to a few hours, depending on the complexity. 

Costs

This is always going to be a deciding factor for people, though it's always worth keeping in mind, it's the return on investment, or time saving that should also be looked at. 

Unfortunately I can't tell you how quickly you will be able to create a landing page with either WordPress or ClickFunnels, so instead I will just give you the raw costs. 

I will assume that you have already purchased a domain name, if not you can grab one from 123 or NameCheap, for around $5, maybe $15 if you are feeling fancy. 

WordPress

To be able to get your landing pages built, you are going to need to get WordPress up and running, the usual cost is around $5 - $10 per month for hosting, obviously it depends on who you use, someone like SiteGround will probably cost you around $6 per month, while still being reliable.

Once you have the hosting sorted, you are going to need to grab yourself a landing page builder, my personal weapon of choice is Thrive Architect, which is either a one off cost of $69 for a single licence, or you can get their monthly membership, which is $19 per month.

Either of them work, and it depends on if you want access to all the tools they have on offer, or if you simply just want to use the power of the Page Builder. 

The other option is of course Elementor, which does come with a free option, but I found it quite limiting. The paid for option is $49 per year, for a single licence. 

That makes your first year cost if you decide to go with WordPress around $130 maybe $200 depending on the hosting you decide to get. There are also no limits to the number of pages, views or signups. Some hosts may limit your viewer numbers (so be sure to double check). 

ClickFunnels

You don't need any external hosting for this, and there are no one off costs for ClickFunnels, there is simply a monthly cost, depending on how much you want to get out of the platform. 

A basic, or 'standard ClickFunnels' account will run you $97 per month, this gives you access to the funnel building platform, with 20 funnels, with 100 pages across those funnels. 

 If you are feeling fancy and you need more landing pages, or funnels, then you will need to get the Platinum Account, this will cost you $297 per month, but it does also come with affiliate capabilities and it's own auto-responder (though an autoresponder is about $15 per month). 

Your yearly cost of ClickFunnels will be between $970 - $3564. You can save some money by buying the yearly membership (hence why the standard account could only cost you $970 a year). 

WordPress vs ClickFunnels - Is There A Definitive Winner?

When it comes to ClickFunnels vs WordPress, it really does come down to preference, time, belief in yourself and what you are truly trying to achieve. Most people claim that WordPress is simply too difficult and that ClickFunnels can save you tons of time, with simple drag and drop functionality and everything hosted in one place. 

But if you are simply using it to host a few simple looking pages, then I would argue that WordPress + a decent plugin can be as good, if not better than ClickFunnels, and give you a ton more freedom. 

Though, if you are a vendor, you sell products and you want to look at offering a number of upsells, or downsells, then trying to connect all those pages within WordPress is going to take more time and effort than someone may be willing to take.

With ClickFunnels you can pretty much instantly have the upsells, downsells and that 'funnel' added to your account without needing to create all the separate pages and URLS. That will save you time on the set up process, and possibly even the maintenance and upkeep. 

As with any business, or online venture, sit down, understand what you are really trying to achieve, see if you need a full 14 step funnel, or a simple capture page and purchase accordingly.