Wordpress vs Wix

27th November 2019
|In Wordpress
|By Si Pierce

When building a new website, one of the most important early decisions you face is… which platform to use?

There are many traditional content management systems to choose from, including Joomla, Drupal, Concrete5 and of course, the most popular of all, WordPress. These all require installation on a server, usually through a hosting account, and often involve a great deal of initial setup (and in some cases a very steep learning curve).

But in recent years a new type of website-building platform has emerged. Hosted ‘do-it-yourself’ site builders including Wix, Squarespace and Weebly are becoming an increasingly popular choice, especially amongst those with no prior web building experience. They offer a simple and intuitive drag-and-drop interface in which to build your pages, making the website building process much simpler and less technical. For a monthly fee you’re provided with all the tools to build and maintain your website with little to no prior experience, and hosting is included.

Wix is one of the most popular of these do-it-yourself site builders, and so it’s often compared to the most popular website platform in the world – WordPress. Here, we’ll look at the pros and cons of Wix and WordPress. Which should you choose for your next website project?

For this article, we’ll be discussing the self-hosted WordPress software available from WordPress.org, rather than the all-in-one hosted alternative WordPress.com. Prices, features, information and terms referenced in this article are correct at the time of writing in 2019 and are subject to change.

WordPress vs Wix: Table of contents

WordPress vs Wix: Overview

Before we get into the differences between each option, lets look at the fundamental idea behind each platform:

Wix: designed for beginners, with simplicity in mind. It’s a subscription service that’s easy to pick up and use, with a selection of pre-built templates designed for complete beginners to create a good-looking, functional website.

WordPress: a complete, self-hosted website management platform that can power almost any kind of website. Intended for anyone from intermediate users to developers, with a large selection of plugins and templates (or ‘themes’). WordPress websites can be hosted by virtually any web host.

WordPress vs Wix: Ease of use

Wix makes it very easy to quickly build a basic, good looking website with very little web design knowledge. It offers a drag and drop page builder that, while a little clunky and unpredictable at times, simplifies the page-building experience.

The downside, however, is that Wix has sacrificed flexibility to bring you this simplified experience. So whilst it’s a great tool for building basic pages, it’s not so easy to take your website to the next level and build something more complex or bespoke.

With WordPress the situation is reversed – WordPress is almost infinitely flexible. Being open source software with a powerful plugin and templating architecture, you can build almost anything with WordPress. The downside to this extensibility though is that WordPress has a steeper learning curve. While there’s a massive selection of website templates (or ‘themes’ as WordPress calls them), the closest WordPress comes to emulating the Wix page builder is with its fairly basic ‘block builder’ for editing the content portion of your pages. However this, coupled with a good theme, will be an acceptable combination for most websites. And once set up, a well-build WordPress site can be very simple and straightforward to use.

But that’s not the whole story. Keep reading to find out how the simplicity of a Wix-like page builder can be easily added to WordPress.

WordPress vs Wix: Functionality

This is an area where WordPress shines. WordPress has a massive and ever-growing library of free and premium plugins that make it possible to build any kind of website – currently there are over 50,000 free plugins available for WordPress.

There’s around 3,500+ free WordPress themes available to download through WordPress.org, and you can purchase 8,600+ premium themes through ThemeForest. WordPress themes can often be customised extensively to suit your needs.

Themes and plugins are simple to install through the WordPress interface. Beyond this, it’s possible to add your own bespoke functionality to WordPress using custom PHP code. If you want your site to do something bespoke that can’t be achieved through an existing plugin, a developer can build that functionality for you.

Because WordPress can be extended in almost any way imaginable, powerful page builders such as Divi, Beaver Builder and Elementor bridge the gap between the power of the WordPress platform and the simplicity of services such as Wix. So with a few extra steps during the initial setup, it’s possible to have a powerful WordPress-based website with a simple drag-and-drop page builder, giving you the best of both worlds.

Wix has much more limited functionality. Its equivalent of plugins are called ‘apps’, and there’s a very limited selection of around 300 apps in the Wix app market. If you’d like to add a function to your Wix site that isn’t included here, you’re pretty much out of luck. It’s possible to use an ‘iframe’ to include bespoke, externally hosted content on your Wix site, but this essentially means embedding another website onto your Wix website, and it comes with some big limitations.

WordPress vs Wix: Ecommerce

Did you know that as well as being the most popular Content Management System in the world, WordPress also powers more ecommerce sites than any other platform? The WooCommerce plugin extends WordPress with some serious ecommerce functionality and currently accounts for over 29% of all ecommerce sites, according to Datanyze.

WooCommerce is a free, powerful, feature rich and very capable ecommerce solution. Out of the box it’s a great platform for most simple online stores. Beyond that it’s flexible and extendible through the use of extensions, making it a powerful choice for powering almost any kind of ecommerce outlet. Some WooCommerce extensions are free, some require an initial purchase, and some require an annual subscription.

But WooCommerce isn’t the only way to turn your WordPress site into an e-commerce powerhouse, at there are countless other ecommerce plugin options available to WordPress, with plugins available for very specific types of online store such as digital download sites, event booking sites, etc.

Wix offers ecommerce on its more expensive plans, either through its online store app which can be added to your existing site, or by choosing one of the many ecommerce store templates when you initially build your website. This is a very straightforward and easy to use ecommerce solution that’s great for simple online stores with basic products. If you want something a little more complex this is where Wix falls down, lacking the flexibility to power anything but a basic ecommerce experience.

WordPress vs Wix: Maintenance and security

WordPress is an open platform, and like all other content management systems it requires regular maintenance and software updates. This is essential for security and keeping your site running at its best. WordPress is one of the easier platforms to keep up to date, with a very straightforward update manager. These updates can become complex on more complicated sites with a large number of plugins.

A stand-out feature that differentiates WordPress from other content management systems is automatic updates. WordPress handles minor core updates and core security patches automatically.

The bottom line though is that the responsibility for keeping your WordPress site up to date lies with you, the owner of the site. You’ll either need to keep your site updated yourself, use a WordPress Managed Hosting service, or employ the services of a WordPress maintenance company to do the work for you at a cost.

Wix on the other hand requires no such work on your part. It’s a closed platform subscription service with no software to install or maintain, so you never need to worry about keeping things up-to-date. Simple.

WordPress vs Wix: Owning your data and migrating your site

This is an area where there are huge differences between Wix and WordPress.

With Wix, you’re limited to hosting your site with… well, Wix. Wix is a subscription service that provides the platform and the hosting in one package for a monthly or annual fee. You can export some of your content into an XML file, but essentially it’s not possible to transfer your existing Wix website away from Wix. If you build a Wix site, you’re stuck with Wix unless you want to re-build it somewhere else.

When you build your website with Wix, your site and its content is at the mercy of Wix. Their terms of service are subject to change at any time. At the time of writing this article in 2019, their terms state that Wix can choose to terminate their service to you at any time, in any manner, and for any reason, without prior notice.

The paradigm is completely different with WordPress. With WordPress, you own your content and are in complete control of it.

WordPress is not a subscription service, but open-source software that you install yourself on a hosting package you purchase through the web host of your choice. There’s an almost unlimited number of web hosts to choose from, and it’s possible to move your site from one host to another. If you decide to move away from WordPress completely, it’s even possible to export your content from WordPress into another content management system.

You are bound to your web host’s terms of service, and these vary from host to host. Should your web host choose to discontinue their service to you, switch to a different host.

WordPress vs Wix: Search Engine Optimisation

When looking at each platform’s Search Engine Oprimisation (SEO) capabilities, it’s important to first have an understanding of the differences between on-page and off-page SEO.

Off-page SEO refers to the actions you take outside of your website to improve your search engine rankings. These include backlinks, social media marketing, content marketing and so on. Your choice between Wix and WordPress will have little bearing on the effectiveness of your off-page SEO strategy.

On-page SEO refers to the optimisation of your website. The capabilities of the platform you choose to build your website with can have huge implications for your on-page SEO strategy.

Historically, Wix had a bad reputation for SEO. You may have read blog posts that claim Wix websites are not well optimised for search engines, and this used to be painfully true. Wix was once powered by the Flash browser plugin which was very poorly optimised for search engines. This is where much of the bad reputation comes from.

Wix ditched Flash, and these days it’s a modern HTML5 platform. However, even since this change, Wix has struggled to shake off its poor SEO reputation with bad implementation of some SEO basics in the early days of its new modern platform. Issues included a bad URL structure (using special characters) and missing alt attributes for images. These problems were fixed back in 2016, and in 2019 Wix added some new SEO features such as support for rich search engine results and canonical URLs.

So Wix has overcome most of its SEO issues in recent years, with the page builder now following many SEO best practices. There are still lots of SEO negatives on the Wix side of the fence, such as not being able to customise your site’s sitemap or robots.txt files, and not supporting Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP).

Wix offers an SEO ‘Wizard’ tool to guide you through the basics of optimising your pages, but this tool is very simplistic. Wix offers the basics, but it doesn’t offer many of the in-depth SEO features enjoyed by WordPress users.

With WordPress, it’s a completely different story. SEO best practices have been built into the platform since its inception, making it an ideal basis for a well-optimised site. Out of the box, WordPress code is clean and well structured; the URL structure is SEO friendly and completely customisable; and optimising images with alt attributes and descriptions is intuitive through the media manager.

There’s a lack of built-in SEO tools, but this is easily remedied by the abundance of free WordPress SEO and social media plugins, such as the popular Yoast SEO tool, giving you complete control over your SEO strategy and providing a wealth of utilities to make your site perform its best.

WordPress vs Wix: Support

If things go wrong with your website, or you’re not sure how to perform a specific editing task, where do you turn?

With Wix, you have a dedicated support team to fall back on. Wix offers telephone and email support as well as a knowledgebase support articles. If something goes wrong with your Wix site, Wix themselves are your first port of call. As they are the sole company running the platform, Wix should be able to solve most problems you encounter.

As with any customer support service however, the support you receive is only as good and as knowledgeable as the person dealing with your enquiry. If your enquiry is a very specific, unique edge case, you might find that Wix support can’t solve your problem. In short, your mileage may vary.

Things work a bit differently on the WordPress side. There’s no overall ‘service’ that every WordPress site runs on, so who you contact for support might depend on how your site was set up and what kind of problem you’ve run into. This can make it a bit difficult to know where to turn when things go wrong.

If a web development agency or freelancer built your site, they’ll likely be your first port of call for most WordPress problems. If your issue is related to hosting, your web host should be able to help.

Who can you contact if you need help with a WordPress site that you built yourself? This is where things are a little trickier. Luckily with WordPress you’re never alone, thanks to the massive community of WordPress users ready to help you out at WordPress.org where you can ask questions and browse a huge archive of support threads.

In addition to this, there’s a wealth of helpful WordPress blogs (just like this one!) brimming with useful tips and advice just waiting to be discovered.

Alternatively, why not hire the services of a professional WordPress support company?

WordPress vs Wix: Cost

Wix has a number of packages to suit any budget, from a free ad-supported tier up to a ‘VIP’ business package. The available features vary by package.

Prices also vary by country and are subject to change at any time. At the time of writing (November 2019), Wix charges very competitive rates for an all-in-one solution: between US$13 and US$22 per month for non-ecommerce packages, and up to US$49 per month for ecommerce solutions. Visit the Wix site for up to date prices.

WordPress costs are a lot more difficult to articulate, because there’s a huge array of providers to choose from and different ways to maintain your WordPress installation. To host your own WordPress website and manage your own WordPress software maintenance, you’ll just need to purchase hosting and a domain name. A hosting package could cost as little as US$4 per month, with domain name prices ranging from around US$10 per year.

This route makes WordPress a very cost-effective option, but expect to pay more if adding a premium WordPress theme, page builder or some premium plugins to your site – some of which might require a one-time purchase, with some commanding a regular subscription fee.

If you want help with managing and maintaining your WordPress installation to keep it up-to-date and in tip-top condition, you have a couple of options. You can upgrade to managed WordPress hosting, with prices ranging from around US$30 per month with providers such as Kinsta or US$35 per month with WP Engine.

Alternatively you can employ the services of a WordPress maintenance service. This is the more costly option, but provides peace of mind for a safe, secure and well-performing WordPress installation. See my article about WordPress maintenance services for more insights.

WordPress vs Wix: Which should you choose?

If you arrived here looking for the definitive answer of which platform is the best, sorry to disappoint. Every website is different, so the best platform for you depends on what you’re looking to get out of it.

If you are:

  • Looking for an easy, beginner-friendly way of creating a simple website
  • Happy to work within a platform that is optimised for simplicity not flexibility
  • Not concerned about the ownership and portability of your data
  • Want a single point of contact when things go wrong
  • Want to pay a simple, low monthly or annual fee

…then Wix is probably a good choice. Remember that point about flexibility however – if you outgrow Wix or just want to jump ship, moving your site elsewhere is probably going to be difficult.

For everyone else, WordPress is probably the better choice. While it’s not as user-friendly to initially set up, it’s easy for most people to pick up the basics and maintain a WordPress site.

  • WordPress is flexible when it comes to designing, adding functionality and optimising your website.
  • WordPress offers great ecommerce functionality through the WooCommerce plugin, which is simple to use and powerful enough to operate everything from a simple online store to a large and complex ecommerce outlet.
  • You have full ownership and control of your data, and WordPress makes it easy to migrate your data elsewhere should you want to.
  • WordPress provides virtually unlimited options for hosting and support to suit all scenarios, thanks to a huge number of hosting companies and maintenance services, as well as the massive online WordPress community.
  • Add a page builder such as Divi, Beaver Builder or Elementor to your site to get the best of both worlds – the power and flexibility of WordPress with the Wix-esque simplicity of a page builder.