Wordpress is a great website platform and CMS (content management system), but it’s built for engineers and agencies, not small, service-based business owners who have a million other things to worry about. While powerful, Wordpress is complicated to set up and keep up-to-date, and having an outdated website is not a good look for any gym, fitness or wellness business. Your web presence is the face of your brand after-all.
Zipper is purpose-built to enable wellness business owners to get online quickly, improve their online presence, and market their business in less time and at a fraction of the cost of hiring a marketing agency to build you a Wordpress website. We help you launch a new, professional and modern website fast, allowing you to rest assured that you’re making a beautiful first impression. We ensure your website not only has the right content but is also optimized for great performance and leads.
Here are some of the top reasons service-based business owners prefer Zipper.
Both Zipper and Wordpress are great options for building and maintaining a web presence. With both services, you can create an attractive website, showcase your team, take online bookings (although with Wordpress you'll have to integrate a booking system), and promote your small business's services. The key difference between Zipper and Wordpress lies in the time, effort, and expertise required to establish a great online presence.
Wordpress provides all the tools you need to design and optimize your website, but it has a steep learning curve and can be easily misconfigured. Without proper search engine optimization (SEO), your site may not perform well in search results, and you'll have to integrate an SEO tool, like Yoast, to manage SEO. Additionally, ensuring your website looks great on all devices—phones, tablets, and computers—requires experience, custom coding, and thorough testing.
In contrast, Zipper not only offers the tools to create an impressive website but also provides world-class support. Zipper handles everything for you, though it includes an easy-to-use website editor if you wish to make changes yourself. Our simple process involves asking for basic information about your business, such as your services, operating hours, team members, and location, as well as gathering any photos or videos you may have. Most customers complete this onboarding process in a 10-minute survey.
From there, Zipper takes the collected information and builds a professional, technically sound website that aligns with your brand. This process typically takes a couple of days.
Time to launch a new Wordpress website
Time to launch a new website on Zipper
Since we built Zipper specifically for small service-based businesses, we have deep industry expertise that allows us to deliver high-quality websites that help you get new member or client leads and more bookings.
One of the main differences between Zipper and Wordpress is who is responsible for creating content and setting up your website. Wordpress is a DIY website builder. While it offers the same technical capabilities as Zipper, it requires you to handle the actual implementation. For many businesses we've worked with, this can be daunting. Even if you make your website look great, there can still be issues with performance and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Zipper, on the other hand, is a DIFM (Do It For Me) website platform. While you can still use our dashboard to make common content changes, the initial website setup and design are handled by Zipper. Our dashboard allows you to update your business's hours of operation, contact information, photos, staff profiles, and service listings.
Both Zipper and Wordpress offer customization options for your website content.
Wordpress is a comprehensive website builder that allows you to customize every aspect of your site's layout and design elements. This high level of control is powerful but can also be prone to errors. Since Wordpress is designed primarily for agencies and engineers, it is easy to make mistakes that affect usability, performance, mobile-friendliness, and SEO. Fixing these issues can be costly, with skilled Wordpress consultants charging $75 or more per hour. In fact, many of Zipper’s customers started with Wordpress and switched when they encountered challenges in building or managing their websites and web presence.
Zipper provides less customization than Wordpress, focusing more narrowly on the needs of small businesses. While extensive customization might seem like a plus, it often leads to more problems than benefits. Many small business websites underperform because they are poorly designed, lack optimization, and miss vital information about the business.
Zipper offers a dashboard that allows you to customize your website's content, photos, and branding. For 90% of our customers, this level of customization is sufficient for a great website. For the remaining 10%, we provide expert website managers at no additional cost to add custom content and sections to your website.
Wordpress doesn't provide support for online bookings out of the box, while Zipper does.
Yes, Zipper does support booking. We can help you manage classes, 1:1 appointments, punch cards, and one-off events.
However, if you're looking for advanced reporting and analytics and have more than 6 locations, we'd recommend looking into a more advanced booking platform and CRMs, which we can integrated into your Zipper site.
All website builders use templates, at least as a starting point. The difference with Zipper, is we've built our website builder with a "block-based" model. This means that 5-7 blocks, or sections, make up a template page. With the dozens of different blocks we have, this means there are thousands of different template variations, so no two websites look the same.
With Wordpress, you will also use templates and likely a plug-in like Elementor, but you will not have hundreds of different block variations to further customize your pages to make them truly your own.
100% customized templates built by an agency can cost anywhere fm $5,000 to $25,000 depending on your needs. If you have a massive website budget (ie you're a large franchise), then getting custom templates developed by an agency might be the best bet.
Zipper is the in-between of a standard Wordpress website template and a 100% customized website.
Wordpress is a perfect fit for wellness businesses that meet any of the following criteria:
Zipper, however, is a better fit for a service-based local businesses that:
At first glance, Zipper may appear to be more expensive. But, when you consider all of the costs of building, optimizing, and maintaining a website, Zipper is a smart choice.
It's recommended to redesign your website every 3 years which is included with Zipper, as we stay up to date on current designs and trends
Overall, business owners who choose Zipper over Wordpress save time, avoid frustration, and end up with a website that looks and performs better. If you’re looking to quickly establish a professional online presence for your local business, Zipper is the clear choice. Get in touch and we'll build you out a free draft.
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