Overview

If you're a beginner in web development, you might've gotten a lot of suggestions from the net about choosing WordPress over full-stack development and vice-versa.

Comparing the amount of time taken to learn. How much important is it in the industry? How relevant it is to you and what you're trying to achieve? And how much will it help pay your bills?

Taking the above questions and much more into account, you might still be confused about which one to choose over the other.

Let's also take into account any No Code platforms in this discussion.

Quick Intro to WordPress

WordPress is a free and open-source content management system written in PHP and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system, referred to within WordPress as Themes - Google

You can literally create websites within a matter of minutes and get them up and running immediately.
A multitude of websites ranging from simple portfolios, product display, and research websites to complex eCommerce websites, blogs, registration apps and much more! WordPress has it all, the great part is that you don't need to know how to code to create WordPress Websites.

Other Platforms like Wix, Ghost, and Squarespace also allow you to do the same.

Full-Stack Development

Full-Stack Development is a journey of creating websites from scratch. Building the frontend and the backend of the application using various Tech Stacks.

This involves putting in the hard work of learning programming languages, building out projects, facing lots of errors and making lots of mistakes.

Learning Full-Stack development takes time and hard work. And the work that you put in will definitely pay off in the long term.

Developing websites by yourself will give you a lot of space to customize things to your own requirements and not give in to the constraints of No Code platforms.

Discussing WordPress vs Full-Stack Development

Both are awesome and are extremely relevant. It's the use case that should be taken into account when you're trying to choose what to move forward with.

If you're simply looking to put some content out on the web, without the hassle or learning how to code. Or if you want to learn a way to do it for others (freelancing) by creating static websites, then No Code platforms should be your go to!

They're easy to pick up, build, maintain and deploy.

However you'll be limited with the plugins and themes that are provided by these platforms, it'll be tough building on top of them if you have no knowledge of development.

Developing products, services, and apps and customizing to the very minute details require you to learn development. And that's the great part about it, you learn and implement stuff that No Code platforms do not have the option for.

Learning Development also opens doors to opportunities that you might've not had with working with WordPress alone. You even get to create plugins for WordPress.

Different Perspectives

If it's something that is short term, or something that you're looking to get done quickly. WordPress is what you should choose.

When it comes to creating Web Apps specifically, you'll need to learn Development. In the long run of learning, it will pay much better than limiting yourself to WordPress alone.

The Best of Both Worlds

Something I've been noticing recently is that many SaaS founders use the combination of both No Code platforms and the knowledge of Full-Stack Development to their advantage.

They create their product page with No Code Platforms for the purpose of marketing and advertising their product/service. And when it comes to their actual service, it's fully built from scratch and customized to the service they're providing.

Move forward with the one that suits your needs, and also learn how to leverage the best of both worlds.

Thanks, Chandana for coming up with this amazing question! And Thina, Himanshu, Avichal, Arindam and Snehil for giving their insights as well.