WordPress and Wix are both platforms to build your own website – but both have different approaches. Let us look at these categories to see which platform better suits your needs:
- Cost
- Support
- Ease of Use
- Design and Layout
- Plugins and Apps
- E-commerce Comparison
- Blogging Comparison
- SEO Comparison
1. Cost
The cost of developing a website is a crucial factor when deciding which platform to build your website. The costs involved will often depend on your needs. However, it is difficult to compare the pricing of both WordPress and Wix because they are priced differently. Regardless, let’s see what each platform offers in terms of pricing and determine which one better suits your needs.
Wix
Wix offers a basic website builder for free. However, as a trade-off, Wix-branded advertisements are added to the top and bottom of your website. Furthermore, you cannot use a custom domain name for your website, so your website address will look like this: username.wix.com/sitename. This is disadvantageous for those looking forward to building up a professional website. The basic plan also does not offer important add-ons such as Google Analytics, eCommerce, Favicons, etc. You do have the option to upgrade to one of the premium plans offered to remove the ads and get the additional features.
Depending on the bandwidth, storage and add-ons you require, these are some of the paid plans available on Wix:
WordPress
On the other hand, WordPress is available and free for anyone to use. The catch is you will need your own domain name and web hosting to install it. There are a number of WordPress hosting providers that you can select from. Shared hosting can be available for as little as $4 per month, while you can expect to pay about $30 per month for managed WordPress hosting. If you prefer to use premium WordPress themes or plugins, you might incur costs as high as $1000, with annual running costs of $600.
Verdict: The cost depends entirely on your needs and how much resources you use. However, we do believe WordPress beats Wix in terms of flexibility in choosing from a variety of web hosting companies. WordPress edges out due to more flexibility.
2. Support
The availability and readiness of support is another critical factor to most users when it comes to choosing their preferred platform to develop their site. This is especially important for novices who have no to little experience of building websites.
Wix
Wix includes phone, chat and email customer support in all of their packages. The more expensive plans entitles you to VIP Support, which lets you skip the line.
WordPress
On the other hand, because WordPress is free and open source, they do not include customer support. However, the creators of several themes or plugins might include support as part of the cost.
Verdict: Wix wins as there is no official support from WordPress.
3. Ease of Use
Most beginners choose Wix or WordPress because they want to save costs on hiring a website designer. Both platforms allow you to create websites without learning to code.
Wix
Wix provides you with powerful and easy-to-use tools to build your website. It has a visual, drag-and-drop editor – similar to PowerPoint or Keynote in that it allows you to move any element to any place on a page. This is very intuitive especially for complete beginners. If you desire more functionalities, feel free to explore their App Market that lets you add features in one click. In Wix, you are working on a front-end interface, which means you can instantly see the edits on your screen as you make them.
WordPress
WordPress comes with a visual editor to write your content, and a theme customizer which allows you to edit your theme properties in a WYSIWYG (“What You See Is What You Get”) environment. It is known for its extensions and plugins, but might be challenging for some users to install or implement. The whole software requires slight technical knowledge, or at least the ability to follow some tutorials. Recently, WordPress has launched a new editor, Gutenberg, that allows you to drag and drop elements around your pages. Sounds similar to Wix? However, unlike Wix, you are still working on the back end of your site and will have to preview and publish your pages accordingly to see the front-end changes.
Verdict: While it is probably fair to say that neither platform presents a steep learning curve when it comes to editing a website, beginners will often find that Wix’s site builder is more user-friendly than WordPress. Hence, Wix is the winner here.
4. Design and Layout
Your site’s design and layout play a vital role in your success. Every site owner requires a design that not only looks good, but is also user-friendly and makes their brand outstanding.
Wix
Wix comes with around 300 free templates. All Wix designs are fully responsive and written in HTML5. Using the built-in tools provided, you can further customise your site design, edit the layout, and rearrange items according to your needs. While the number templates available pale in comparison to WordPress, Wix checks all apps for compatibility – this means you can be confident that they will almost certainly integrate perfectly.
WordPress
WordPress is an open-source CMS – meaning anyone can contribute to it.Remarkably, there are over 12,000 themes available. However, WordPress backends can get confusing, particularly for beginners. Incompatibilities might arise and fixing them often require users to make tweaks to code – something not everyone is comfortable doing. If you do not mind spending some time working out how to modify your template’s code, you can look forward to getting exactly the website you want.
Verdict: It depends on your needs. WordPress will suit those who prefer complete control and customisation and are willing to do occasional tweaks to CSS and HTML codes. On the other hand, Wix will be better for novices. Hence, we see this category as a draw.
5. Plugins and Apps
Plugins and Apps are third-party extensions that you can use in your platform to add more features. Wix terms this as “apps”, while WordPress terms this as “plugins”.
Wix
Wix comes with over 200 apps that offer a wide range of features such as adding contact forms, comments, social media buttons, email marketing, etc. Most apps are free of charge or have a lite version that comes with limited features. Others may require monthly payments. While the number of apps is not even close to that of WordPress, they cover most basic and conventional features website builders are seeking.
WordPress
WordPress boasts over 55,000 free plugins. This means that if you have a specific feature or look in mind, WordPress can most probably accommodate it. Wix will never be able to support as many features. Furthermore, if the plugin you require does not exist yet, you can take up the option of hiring a developer to create it for you as WordPress gives you full access to the code. Likewise, as with the design and layout, you might need some technical knowledge to install and utilise these plugins effectively.
Verdict: WordPress would be our preferred choice in this category. With the vast array of plugins available, there could be a solution for anything you need. While Wix’s apps are much easier to set up and maintain, your choice is significantly more limited.
6. E-commerce Comparison
Many beginners choose to build their website to start selling things online. Ecommerce is an important category to compare between the two platforms.
Wix
Wix has a dedicated online store section which you can make use of to sell your goods via a variety of payment options. However, there are a number of downsides that makes it better suited to small businesses. For example, the shipping and tax options are rather limited. This leaves medium businesses or those seeking to become one eventually potentially frustrated.
WordPress
WordPress overcomes most issues mentioned above provided you use a third party plugin. The WooCommerce plugin is a popular plugin that powers more than 42% of all ecommerce websites globally. You can do practically everything with slight custom coding. Furthermore, it is free, though you do have to pay for several extra features such as certain payment gateways.
Verdict: Wix works well if you are intending to be a small store. However, if you want to have a proper online store ready for ambitious growth, WordPress + WooCommerce offers much more flexibility, freedom and choices. WordPress has our vote in this category.
7. Blogging Comparison
Many users also look for an easier platform to start blogging. Both Wix and WordPress can be used to create blogs.
Wix
Wix has good blog options, allowing you to create categories, tags, post scheduling and featuring related posts. It has a very clean and easy interface that most users will grasp the concept of in no time. The posting features are decent but limited. You can add images, galleries, videos, GIFs and dividers, but for anything more than that, you require HTML knowledge, which could pose a challenge for beginners.
WordPress
WordPress started off as a blogging platform so it is not surprising that it has all the features you need out of the box such as tags, categories, RSS, etc. For instance, it has a native commenting system and some other advanced features that are missing from Wix. Again, a bit of technical knowledge is critical to help you develop the powerful blog you need.
Verdict: WordPress almost completely outshines Wix as a blogging platform. Wix blogs are too basic and lack several important features that WordPress offers.
8. SEO Comparison
After developing your website, one concern many developers will have is whether their site will show on search engines. Traffic flow to your website is important to get your business going, so a comparison of SEO features between the 2 platforms is provided here.
Wix
Wix does well compared to other website builders as you are given the option to change the page titles, alt attributes, have a great choice of headings, and more. However, this is only available for paid plans as the free plan does not allow for a custom domain and this makes it extra challenging to rank in search engines. Furthermore, Wix gives uploaded images cryptic names (such as d3aafdd63907s8~mv3.png), which could hurt image-based SEO websites like photography blogs.
WordPress
WordPress allows for the addition of plugins for full SEO capabilities. An example is Yoast SEO, which is free and a very powerful tool. Google Analyticator can also aid in your Google Analytics Integration. WordPress also performs better on the mobile SEO front, because creating fully-responsive WordPress sites (preferred by search engine algorithms) is no problem. Furthermore, you can choose whatever hosting you prefer for a WordPress site – meaning that you can go for the fast site speeds that Google and other search engines love.
Verdict: With the proper plugins, WordPress offers more than Wix in the SEO category. Hence, WordPress is the clear winner in the search engine optimisation department.
Conclusion
Both Wix and WordPress are great options for website builders. In our opinion, we prefer WordPress as a web publishing platform as it is an undeniably more powerful, more flexible, and better-established platform than Wix. It has a vast array of themes and plugins available and to top it off, its user base dwarfs that of Wix. If you are likely to have advanced e-commerce or blogging requirements, WordPress is our recommendation as it is significantly more flexible. On the other hand, users without any technical skills or budget to hire a developer may prefer a hosted solution like Wix, at least initially, primarily because it is easier to set up a Wix site than a WordPress one and official support is provided as part of your Wix plan.
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