So who would you choose Clickfunnels or WordPress? Would a WordPress website work wonders for your business, or would the dedicated business tool ClickFunnels bring in more leads?
Which of these market-leading products is better at generating fresh customers for businesses who trade online? We’re about to compare both and find out.
Operating a successful business on the internet is reliant on regular trade, and a constant flow of new customers.
The problem is that the conventional way of attracting new customers costs a lot of money, either by paid advertising or direct marketing.
Anybody who’s set up a business online knows that investing money is crucial, but spending that money wisely is even more important. Spending wisely means seeing a return on that investment.
The majority of us who do business through the internet are not trained computer programmers or website builders.
That means we can’t just create great landing pages ourselves without any help, and so we need great software to do it for us.
Based on performance, in my opinion that comes down to a choice between WordPress and ClickFunnels.
In the early stages of assessing both options you may find it a bit overwhelming. Even though WordPress is designed to be user friendly, it looks confusing to someone with no experience of creating web pages.
ClickFunnels looks a lot easier to use, accompanied with on hand training you will understand the a price tag of $97.00 upto $297.00 a month, it’s a heavier but smarter investment.
Because ClickFunnels offers 14 day free trials, the best way of comparing both seemed to be going through the ClickFunnels trial for two weeks, recording our thoughts, and then compare that with spending 14 days using WordPress; so that’s exactly what we did.
ClickFunnels or WordPress? Now we can give you those thoughts and findings in full.
Cost Effectiveness
We’ll start with cost, because for most people that’s likely to be a primary concern. Most business owners will accept a steeper initial outlay if the benefits in the short to mid term are worth it, so when we look at cost effectiveness.
Remember we have to consider not only what it costs to get started, but what clickfunnels or wordpress can potentially do for you over time.
ClickFunnels: will allow you to trial the product for free for fourteen days, and then requires payment to continue. At that stage, you can select one of two options.
Option 1 – The Starter Package: This has a cost of $97 per month, In return for that you can create up to twenty sales funnels, and over one hundred landing pages for your website, as well as capacity to receive up to 20,000 visitors to those pages on a monthly basis.
Option 2- The Etison Suite: This costs more at at $297 per month But in return for that, you get everything that the starter package entails and a huge amount of awesome additional features.
These features include their Actionetics, Backpack affiliate systems, list building software, access to ClickFunnels pricing as an affiliate and several more extras we’ll discuss later on.
Take a look at these two short videos, so you'll get a better understanding of Actionetics and Backpack.
The Etison Suite version of ClickFunnels may be better thought of as an ‘all in one’ package for attracting and processing customers online.
WordPress pricing is definitely lower than ClickFunnels, but is harder to work out. Hosting, themes and any chosen plug-ins all cost money with WordPress.
See above for pricing options, This only covers the basics, and doesn’t factor in anything like paying designers, any additional specialist themes that WordPress offers, or any of their dedicated e-commerce add-ons.
But its worth noting there are a lot of free plugins that are very effective and you can run a successful website with just these.
Also worth noting is there is plenty of tips and training you can find either on wordpress forums or YouTube.
At face value, that makes ClickFunnels at least $1000 more expensive over the course of a year than WordPress, even for the basic package.
That’s a significant cost. ClickFunnels would argue that you can use their software to replace your entire existing website and sales funnel methods, thus saving thousands of dollars.
WordPress would point out that they’re far cheaper to set up, and let you do the basic job of getting set up and positioning yourself to receive leads. We’re going to need more information before we make a decision! 
User-Friendliness
ClickFunnels contains so many helpful tools and extras that it can be a little overwhelming.
They use terms you may never have come across before, and they have more versions of sales funnels than you ever imagined to exist.
Fortunately, their in-product support is excellent. Every time you select a funnel, you have the option to watch a short tutorial video which tells you what it is, and what it does.
Watching videos is easier and faster than reading endless pages of instructions, so this is a great feature.
Before long, you’ll have a grasp of what each function is for, and which ones are relevant to you and your business.
When you’ve determined the type of funnels and pages you need, ClickFunnels helps you to build an entire journey for each visitor to your page, designed to gently guide them from curious browser to new customer.
Take a look at this quick run through on how to set up your chosen landing page.
Choose which method you want to build your funnel, for this example below, we have gone with the classic funnel builder.
Then we choose the type of funnel we want to build, lets go with collecting emails.
Lets Build a Landing page!
There are literally dozens of templates to choose from or you can start from scratch and create your own original masterpiece!
Your all set to create your new landing page hit the edit button and have fun!
The two week trial is long enough for you to see the process beginning to work, and it’s impressive.
In its marketing, ClickFunnels makes the bold claim that it’s possible to go from starting the software for the first time to having your first page online in ten minutes.
That might be possible if you have a working understanding of some of the terminology, but for most people it will likely take longer (but not as long as you might think).
There’s plenty of help on offer from the person who created the software; internet marketing entrepreneur Russell Brunson. When we say ‘he wrote the book on online marketing’, we really mean it; he’s written best-sellers!
His books contain a lot of tips and tricks relating to building a business empire on the internet.
Even if you choose not to continue using ClickFunnels after the two week trial, the books are still worth buying and reading just for the insider information and practical advice.
These two books have helped many people focus and understand how to build a business SUCCESSFULLY! Russell gives back with these, that's why they are FREE…what a nice guy 🙂
There’s no denying that WordPress does provide extensive options in terms of plug-ins and themes, but many of them come with their own cost, and so trial-and-error can quickly become expensive.
This is a picture of the “back end” of a website, it very easy to create content and publish it online. Hit the post button to begin writing your content.
Add the Title of your post and get creative…write your masterpiece. This is a very simplified demo of a wordpress blog, you can find out the step by step process, how to start a successful blog here.
There’s nothing within WordPress as useful as the ClickFunnels videos to help you understand what’s what.
You’ll likely be faced with a choice of either investing a lot of your own time to learn it, or more of your own money to get someone else to do it for you.
Because WordPress is vastly popular, and open-sourced, there is plenty of information available online to help you learn how to use it, including webinars and courses.
Even if it seems confusing at first, almost anybody can become an expert with it once they’ve acquired the technical knowledge.
Only you know how much your professional time is worth on a daily or hourly basis, and how much of that time you want to spend learning the intricacies of the software.
Return On Investment, who wins clickfunnels or wordpress?
When it comes to making a decision regarding clickfunnels or wordpress there’s a huge difference between the initial outlay on ClickFunnels, and the initial outlay on WordPress. That makes a ‘fair’ like-for-like comparison difficult.
As the old saying goes, though, ‘time is money’, and WordPress will take more time to pay dividends for you than ClickFunnels will.
When you’ve taken the step of paying for ClickFunnels, after two weeks, you’ll have learned almost everything you need to know about it.
The pages you create are already optimized for sales purposes, and don’t need adjustments like WordPress pages do.
Creating a new page is as easy as loading the software, choosing a funnel, selecting a few options to tailor it, and then setting it live.
When you’re in a rhythm with it, you can go from start to finish with creating quality new pages in less than an hour.
WordPress will cost you less, and so it doesn’t need to do as much to make a return against that investment. ClickFunnels costs more, but does more; and should also do it faster.
Customer Support who holds your hand better ClickFunnels or WordPress
We found it easier to get into difficulty when using WordPress. Because the pages aren’t as ‘clever’ in the way they optimize or arrange themselves as those generated by ClickFunnels.
One wrong choice can make a mess of your website, and fixing it can involve further time and effort. In the meantime, if anyone does visit your page, it leaves an awful first impression.
Getting customer support from WordPress isn’t always quick, which adds to the problem. You can’t do more than posting on their forums and request assistance.
There are plenty of well-meaning users who will try to help you, but if there’s a technical issue that only WordPress staff can fix, you might be waiting a while.
By contrast, ClickFunnels provide customer support by way of an instant messenger, which is a live chat service and therefore much faster.
You can’t always find someone to speak to straight away, but the wait time is usually between ten and twenty minutes, which isn’t bad.
When you are connected to someone, they’ll start trying to fix the issue straight away.
ClickFunnels or WordPress, who wins when it comes to SEO?
WordPress provides access to a number of plugins that focus on SEO, some of which come with a price.
The plugins they offer often come with the freedom to include your own meta descriptions and meta tags; if, of course, you know what you’re doing.
Access to amenities isn’t really the issue with WordPress, knowing how to incorporate and use them is. The Yoast plug-in is particularly useful.
ClickFunnels contains its own set of options in relation to Search Engine Optimization, including the ability to edit meta tags and descriptions.
As it focuses on building landing pages more than it does boosting search engine rankings, it doesn’t have as many features for SEO as WordPress does.
ClickFunnels is there to help convince the people who do arrive on your website to buy from you, rather than to improve the way Google interprets your website.
Demand On Time
So the 80/20 rule comes into play here, especially for a solo entrepreneur, you want to be spending 80% of your time on money making ideas not on anything technical.
Even if you’re not, you’ll likely have to hire the time of a professional to assist you with WordPress in order to get the best out of it, or at least tie up your IT department to focus on the task.
With WordPress, we found that we could create a basic website of five-or-so pages after around a day’s work. The software helps your pages to rank on Google, which is great, but it does mean that even the pages you don’t want Google to index get listed if you don’t know what you’re doing!
You can find the settings to edit this and correct it, and you may have a better grasp on what you’re doing than we did when we tried, but it’s a risk you ought to be aware of.
Once the pages were uploaded and linked together, adding a sales funnel took roughly a further two days. Three days in total may not sound like a lot to get up and running, but all of these tasks can be achieved in as little as two hours with ClickFunnels.
To use a metaphor, it’s like flying to your destination as opposed to taking a boat. It’s more expensive, but it’s a lot faster.
ClickFunnels are also much quicker to respond if and when something goes wrong; which is less likely with their pages anyway, because they’re easier to build.
ClickFunnels or WordPress: Who Wins?
This will depend on how your financial situation, what your level of technical experience is, and how much of your own time you’re prepared to invest.
Paying for ClickFunnels should mean you get things done faster, with less effort, and to a higher final standard.
That’s not to say a high standard can’t be achieved through WordPress, but there’s a greater demand on you to get to that level, and it will certainly take longer.
The best way to test it for yourself is to take a ClickFunnels 14 day trial, set up a WordPress site at the same time, send paid traffic to each of your sites if your able or you can use free methods which you can learn more about here, and see which one results in more leads. We expect the results to speak for themselves.
To give you a clearer picture, look at our comparison table below, now who would you choose clickfunnels or wordpress?
| ClickFunnels | WordPress | |
| Cost | Free for 14 days, then $97 per month for standard package, or $297 for full suite | Roughly $160 per year, notwithstanding design costs, additional plugins or any further support or functionality you may need |
| Ease of Use | Perfect for those with no technical experience. Once you’ve learned about the funnels and how they work, everything flows smoothly | Challenging if you’re not technically minded. Less support available, and more likely to require the additional cost of hiring a professional web designer. |
| R.O.I. | More expensive to get started, but easier to set up and get online, and starts repaying its cost much faster | Lower initial cost but takes time to get a fully functional site online, and therefore slower to make returns |
| Support | Support via instant messenger, in real time, plus tutorial videos for all major functions | Forum support only, unless further support is available through your hosting company |
| SEO | Basic SEO functionality, with the ability to edit some meta data. | Complete SEO suite available via plugins, especially Yoast |
| Speed to completion | Can be completely up, running and generating leads within 24-48 hours | Depending on your programming skill, may take several weeks to be finished and generating leads. |
| Flexibility | All pages are based on templates, which work without further input from you, and can be edited and branded to suit your company | Unlimited choices, but themes allowing lots of editing can be expensive to acquire. |
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