No hosting to buy, no theme to configure, no plugins to update, no security scanner. Your site is built from your Google listing and it stays working.
WordPress runs a huge share of the web and it deserves to. It is also the reason a lot of small businesses have a website that has not been touched since 2019 — the person who set it up has moved on, the theme wants updating, one plugin has broken the contact form, and nobody can log in.
Clay is the opposite trade. You give up the ability to do absolutely anything, and in exchange there is nothing to maintain: no host, no version numbers, no backups to remember, no plugin that stops being supported. The site is built from your Google listing and it keeps working while you get on with the business.
WordPress wins every row about power, and those rows are real. This page is about what it costs to keep.
WordPress is free. The hosting is not, the premium theme is not, the booking plugin is not, and the four hours somebody spends when an update breaks the layout are not.
Add them up over a year for a café or a salon and the number is usually larger than a website plan — and it arrives unpredictably, which is worse.
Who you are, what you sell, when you are open, where you are, how to reach you. WordPress can build that, and it can also build a newspaper, which is why the setup takes an afternoon.
Clay only builds the five pages, so it can build them before you have finished your coffee.
Type your name — Clay pulls your photos, hours, reviews and contact details straight from your Google listing.
Choose a look and Clay builds a full site around your content. Change anything with a tap — no code, no templates to wrestle.
Publish to your own name.clay.site in minutes. Add a custom domain and connect your own tools whenever you're ready.
Open one. It is the live site in a frame, not a screenshot — so what you see is what it looks like right now.
There is no importer. For a five-page business site that is usually fine — the photographs and hours come from Google and the rest is a few paragraphs to paste. If your site is a hundred posts deep, keep WordPress.
Your Clay site is server-rendered with proper titles, descriptions, structured data and a sitemap, so search engines read it well. If you are moving a domain across, keep the same page addresses where you can and redirect the rest.
No. Clay has its own shop for a business selling a manageable number of things. For a real catalogue with stock rules and shipping zones, WooCommerce or Shopify is the right answer.
No, and that is a genuine difference: with WordPress you can take the whole thing and host it yourself. With Clay you can take your content and your domain, but not the engine.
We do, and you generally will not know it happened. There is no version of Clay running on your hosting that can fall behind.
The form is part of the site and mails you with the sender's address as the reply-to. There is no plugin to install, keep updated, or discover has been broken for three months.
Search your business and see your site in seconds — free, no signup.