Well . . . the truth is that I'm not ENTIRELY done with Wordpress (at least not yet, more on that later).

I started my own little law practice back in 2010.

At the time I decided to start my own law office, I was admitted to the bar and had worked a couple of entry-level legal jobs for about a year and a half.

I graduated law school in 2008, at the height of the Great Depression.

Add to that I was recovering from Crohn's Disease that ravaged my body (thanks to no health insurance at the time).

Finding a good legal job was a challenge then.

The jobs I managed to work for that year and a half paid me literally less than I would have made in retail.

Go figure.

Anyways, I share that because when I decided to start my own business, I had zero savings, and miniscule budget.

I was fortunate that my parents owned commercial property that was vacant.

I used an old desk, put in a few used chairs, had my laptop and printer, and my law office was born!

I don't know if you've ever started a business, but I made this slight miscalculation.

You see, I thought that people would line up to come see me and hire me.

I remember actually telling myself that, conservatively, I expect someone to hire me every 3 days.

Haha!

That wasn't a slight miscalculation.

It was a GROSS MISCALCULATION RIDDLED WITH LAUGHABLE AND INSANE ASSUMPTIONS!

I was young, though, and I wanted to make this work.

I didn't have a budget for traditional marketing, like radio or newspaper ads.

I looked into having a website built, but back then, websites were still predominantly being custom-built.

Fortunately, I had a friend who is a software developer.

He kept himself apprised of all the latest tech happenings (tho not sure how we missed bitcoin).

He had heard of some new plug and play website setups, so he helped me do that.

My first website - a JOOMLA based website!

Maybe not what I would use today, but I was super happy that I had a website!

Shortly after that, Wordpress started gaining traction, so my friend eventually set me up there, and now I was really humming!

There I was. Wordpress website. Not having to pay a website deisgner for coding, for changes. I just had to bother my friend from time to time. Haha!

Over time, Wordpress grew and grew, and became more and more powerful, more robust, more adaptable.

I stuck with it. It was all I knew and, because of my limited budget, all I could afford.

At some point a few years in, I felt comfortable running my own website.

Heck, it was a Badge of Honor!

I had several overhauls, and eventually used Thrive Themes (excellent theme library that I highly recommend if you're using Wordpress).

In the last few years, however, I started to notice that my Wordpress site became bloated.

Lots of plugins.

Load time was not good.

Conflicts would occur when plugins updated.

My site would crash and go down.

I would find someone on Fiverr to fix it, which they would be able to.

When I would look at my site's backend, however, I would always notice MORE PLUGINS!

I was tired of and done with more plugins.

I was tired of and done with figuring out hosting issues.

I was tired of and done with receiving email notifications in the middle of the night that my website is down!

In the last couple of years, I've started some other business projects, including affiliate marketing and a podcast.

I knew from the start of these new projects that Wordpress was NOT the way to go.

Enter: ClickFunnels

I searched for alternative website platforms to host my new project websites.

Here are the things I wanted:



1) I don't have to waste time and energy babysitting the site for updates

2) I want to avoid headaches of having to find a tech guy for my site going down or some hosting conflict

3) It must allow me to be able to still design my own websites without having to know any coding

4) It must be able to create things in addition to pages, like membership sites

5) It must be affordable

Now that I had these 5 base criteria, I started searching.

The all-in-one hosted solutions, like wix and squarespace, didn't resonate with me.

I didn't want my websites to be mere templates with few text, color, and image mods.

I wanted to be able to build my websites.

I looked at some other page/funnel builders, including FastPages.

Again, didn't cut mustard.

I knew about ClickFunnels from years prior.

(I was going through my emails, and the oldest email I have from ClickFunnels goes back to January 16, 2016, so I've been aware of it for a while!)

I liked the simplicity of ClickFunnels versus other site builders.

It reminded me a lot of the iOS vs Android debate.

The cost, though, I found was always a bit much.

At this point, though, I was willing to give it a shot.

I hopped onto a ClickFunnels webinar, and ended up getting a 6 month subscription (and the cost came down to $167/month, a significant savings from the normal $297/month).

I put up some site pages using ClickFunnels, as well as a membership site.

I don't know what to say, it just never felt right.

The interface was always clunky and felt outdated.

Page paths were uber-confusing.

SEO was an absolute after-thought (and for someone like me that loves the power of a blog, that was an issue).

Ultimately, I think ClickFunnels is a good solution for a lot of people, and it just wasn't that for me.

Hello, GrooveFunnels!

While on Facebook earlier this year, as I was growing in my affiliate marketing journey, someone sent me a link to GrooveFunnels.

I may have, at best, taken a peep at it, but didn't really think about it much, especially because I wanted to make ClickFunnels work for me in that 6 months I had it.

Alas, it got to the point where my ClickFunnels subscription was winding down.

I finally decided to check out this GrooveFunnels thing.

Right away, with just the free version, it matched all the basic things that ClickFunnels could do.

Even more, I could see what the vision was.

It literally spoke to my wants and needs - a blend of Wordpress and ClickFunnels - the best of both worlds!

The page builder was intuitive (especially coming from Wordpress and Thrive Themes), and also felt like it had more easy-to-access-and-understand customization options than ClickFunnels.

I built my first landing page in a few minutes.

I checked out the checkout page.

The GrooveFunnels platform was, admittedly, in beta, and the price of the full lifetime license was going up soon.

I had to decide - give ClickFunnels another 6 months, or go all in with GrooveFunnels.

Well, if you read the headline of this article, you knew the answer to that question.

I went with GrooveFunnels.

Remember my list of things I wanted in my website host:

I don't have to waste time and energy babysitting the site for update: GrooveFunnels is self-hosted, so I don't have to worry about plugin and theme updates or conflicts. CHECK!

I want to avoid headaches of having to find a tech guy for my site going down or some hosting conflict: I don't have to worry about my site going down in the middle of the night because of plugins or a theme update, so sayonara Fiverr website person! CHECK!

I wanted to be able to still design my own websites without having to know any coding: No coding necessary! GrooveFunnels has a drag-and-drop page builder (along with templates to help you get started, if you so desire) that is easy and intuitive to use. CHECK!

I wanted to be able to do create things, like membership sites: GrooveFunnels can't support this - yet! You see, GrooveFunnels is in beta, and the roadmap is expected to be complete in Q1 2021 to include the page builder, membership site, video hosting, email autoresponder, webinar module, quiz/survey module, native cart and checkout, and more! So for the moment, GrooveFunnels doesn't check this box, but I fully expect it to in a few short weeks.

I needed it to be affordable: I'll share this here. GrooveFunnels offered a LIFETIME LICENSE to its entire platform for ONE-LOW PRICE! All that stuff above - page builder, membership site, video hosting, email autoresponder, webinar module, quiz/survey module, native cart and checkout, and more - is included FOR LESS THAN ONE YEAR OF CLICKFUNNELS! This was a HUGE CHECK!

As a result, I did not renew my ClickFunnels subscription, and I'm now fully into GrooveFunnels.

Now, it's one thing to just tell you I'm into GrooveFunnels, and maybe that will help your decision-making if you're thinking about a website service.

I, however, would rather show you some real-life use cases that I've built using GrooveFunnels.

(As a word of caution: I'm always making edits and testing things. If you click on a link and it shows a dead page, it's likely because I'm working on something. Check back in a few hours once I've finished my tinkering.)

One of the first pages I created was a brand page for myself. I had no idea what I wanted this to be. I just decided to create a simple info page with a couple of my favorite affiliate links.

Here is a landing page I created for my law office, driving potential bankruptcy leads to book a consultation with me. This was super simple to create, probably no more than an hour.

This is my podcast website. For the moment, each episode page has to be manually created (takes about 10 minutes), and I fully expect this to get much easier once the GrooveBlog platform is released.

This is a real estate lead generation page I built for a real estate agency near me. I removed all of the noise that you find on most real estate websites to make it clean, buyer-focused, and really a tool for sellers to get their house sold more quickly. They love it, and have already seen traffic and leads from it! (I should've charged them!)

Finally, this is a simple affiliate bridge page I created.

Someone signs up, I get their email address, and then on form submission, they are taken to the product page via my affiliate link. Easy peasy.

My Recommendation? GrooveFunnels!

At this point, you likely know my recommendation for a website service.

It's GrooveFunnels.

Even at the beta stage that it's in right now, it does MOST of what I want it to do. (I really wish the membership site function was fully built out.)

As I mentioned in the beginning, I'm not fully done with Wordpress.

You see, I have been building my law office website over the last 10 years, and it's developed a lot of SEO equity and goodwill.

If I decommissioned that website for a new one built in GrooveFunnels, I would lose all of that equity and goodwill that I built over the last 10 years.

I don't want to do that.

So I will keep Wordpress just to keep that website up and not lose the SEO juice the site already has.

Everything else I build moving forward, though, is with GrooveFunnels for sure.

If you're looking to switch website builders, I would highly recommend checking out GrooveFunnels.

You can sign up for a free account and play around with it.

At the time I wrote this, GrooveFunnels allows you to build 3 sites in the free account, and you also don't have access to all of the other components, like video hosting, webinar, email autoresponder, quiz/survey, etc.

If you play around with it, and you like it, GrooveFunnels is still currently offering a LIFETIME LICENSE to the ENITRE platform for ONE LOW PAYMENT.

That, for me, is an incredible value.

And this is why I switched from Wordpress and ClickFunnels to GrooveFunnels.