Late last week, I got it in my head to try out some of the free website builders I’d never gotten around to exploring.

Thus commenced a wild web ride which lasted until last night.

I created about a dozen different sites, from static one-pagers to full-blown blogs and on into the arena of whole cloud-hosted content management systems. Yeah buddy. I tried out Joomla! I even used a Bitnami LAMP stack to deploy a Drupal CMS as a virtual machine in the Azure cloud.

What did I learn? Why, that WordPress is the best!

No joke.

Now, at this point, I could fairly easily put together one of those “12 Great Free Online Website Builders for 2019!” posts, complete with pros and cons.

The factor which struck me as perhaps most crucial in comparing advantages and disadvantages of the various services which offer free hosted sites was this: once you’ve created your site and it’s up and running, does it register as ‘Secure’ or as ‘Not Secure’ in browsers?

I had good fun creating sites with builders in the second category, but really, who’s going to invest much time and precious content in a site which browsers warn is ‘not secure’? It seems like a deal-breaker to me.

The builders in the first category are listed pretty much in order, in my estimation, simultaneously of complexity of editor and how worthwhile it is to build a site. That is to say this: WIX has a wicked-complex editor, which is a proverbial pain to use, and WIX has the potential to produce websites which I rank most worthwhile of all those I test-drove.

Why, then, if WIX is so worthwhile, is WordPress still the best? One word: community. What, pray tell, is the point of having a fantastic site floating unattached out there in the interwaters? WordPress is so much more than a site builder. But you know this. I am preaching to the choir, aren’t I?

Weebly, by the by, is right up there with WIX insofar as potential to create worthwhile, thorough-going sites, and has an editor which is far easier to use than that of WIX. Weebly’s probably where I would wind up, were there no WordPress.

But there IS WordPress, thank goodness, and after some time afield, it IS good to be back home.