Creating a website for an online business is one of the first and most essential steps to building an online presence. That’s why most entrepreneurs put a lot of time and effort into designing one. Less than a decade ago, building a website from scratch was only reserved for skilled web developers. Today, everyone can do so.
Thanks to a colossal increase in demand, dozens of website builders help online businesses enter the market. In today’s breakdown, we’ll have a close look at Wix vs WordPress, the two web-building giants that, when combined, make for the most internet websites out there. You’ll walk away today knowing their key differences and being able to decide which one is better for your online business.
What is Wix?
Wix has turned into an essential player in the website building world over the past few years. It hosts more than 160 million websites, and there are obvious reasons why. In addition, it offers myriad possibilities for small online businesses to develop professional, elegant websites with very little investment.
The platform offers a free and a paid version and has become the go-to for restaurants, small businesses, online stores, artists, etc. You can think of Wix as a pre-fab house where all the parts are ready for you to put together. Its basic structure is already there, and you just paint the walls (theme customization) and add furniture of choice (photo galleries, apps, and similar.)
What makes Wix a great website builder is the beginner-friendly drag-and-drop editor that makes it a breeze to design professional websites without coding. In addition, Wix comes with everything you need to start an online presence, including hosting and tech support. Consequently, you don’t need to look for a web host, and the technical issues are in the hands of their in-house team.
What is WordPress?
Even if you’ve just started exploring the web development industry, chances are you’ve heard of WordPress. It’s the world’s most popular website builder, powering more than 43.2% of all websites currently on the internet, which equates to over 708 million websites.
You most likely didn’t know that there are two different WordPress solutions: WordPress.com and WordPress.org. The latter is a content management system (CMS), while the former offers blog hosting services. In today’s breakdown, we’ll compare the CMS solution to Wix.
WordPress.com is a self-hosted software serving as the preferred solution for millions of websites, and it’s for a good reason. It offers complete access to all WordPress features and gives the user full control over the website. In addition, there are thousands of customization options with the possibility of adding free or paid custom plugins and themes.
Now that you can see a broad picture of the two website building giants, we can break their features down in detail. We’ll discuss their differences in design, ease of use, pricing, plugins, eCommerce, security, support, blogging, SEO, and maintenance.
Design
Design and layout are what puts a face on your online business, and they are the first thing visitors notice once they land on your page. Therefore, it’s essential to have a website appearance that speaks to your audience, matches your logo and business personality, and is easy to navigate.
Wix has a collection of more than 900 pre-designed, fully responsive templates. With their built-in tools, you can redesign, change the layout, or tweak things any way you like. In addition, you can find e-commerce, hobby, business, and other niche templates.
Compared to Wix’s 900, WordPress has way more themes available for download. We can count them in the thousands, and they include free and premium themes. The main difference is that the latter offers more features and support options. In addition, many highly customizable themes, such as Astra, come with excellent features for free.
One massive difference between Wix and WordPress is that Wix doesn’t allow changing website templates once installed. With WordPress, you can change your theme anytime. This leaves room for design growth and improvement, which is an essential factor to consider when choosing a web builder in the long run.
Verdict
Due to its advanced flexibility and the option to change themes, WordPress wins in terms of design and layout. However, Wix users may find the templates a bit limited, especially once the website starts growing. We believe that making minor tweaks and customizing your website’s design is a must, and that’s why we prefer WordPress.
Ease of Use
Both Wix and WordPress offer a coding-free website design experience, which is the main reason behind their popularity. This makes them both relatively convenient and easy to use. However, there are a few differences that go in favor of one or another.
When signing up for Wix services, you get a set of relatively straightforward tools to create your website. The central feature is the drag-and-drop editor that lets you select just about any element on your web page and start editing WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) style. This way, you get to track changes in real-time and decide whether you like the final look or not at the same time.
Users usually appreciate being able to drop items around, rearrange the content, or add media in such a friendly environment.
WordPress, however, comes with its block editor that lets you edit website pages, offering a live preview. The whole concept consists of adding and manipulating blocks of content, including text, buttons, background, galleries, headings, and more.
Thanks to the many robust plugins and themes, web design with WordPress has never been more straightforward. For example, you can install drag-and-drop plugins such as Elementor that let you manipulate pages as easily as with Wix.
Verdict
Both Wix and WordPress score equally in terms of ease of use. Thanks to a wide range of plugins, WordPress users can create professional designs as quickly as Wix users but with more customization options.
Pricing
Pricing is likely one of the most important factors to consider when starting a new website for your online business. That’s why we’ll provide you with a detailed overview of how much you’d spend by opting for either of these web builders. Of course, web design and maintenance services usually depend on your needs, but you’ll be guided toward the best option to fit your budget.
As you learned reading this article, Wix offers a free website builder plan. However, you may want to steer clear if you have big plans for your online business. Otherwise, your domain would include the website name and look something like username.wix.com/yourbusinessname. Also, the basic plan lacks necessary add-ons, including Google Analytics, e-commerce, and more.
The platform offers four premium plans, with the monthly prices as follows:
- Personal ($9.00)
- Premium ($18.00)
- Business ($40.00)
- eCommerce ($70.00)
All plans offer a custom domain, a free SSL certificate (which proves your website is secure), and customer support. Also, all programs (except the Connect Domain) let you remove Wix Ads and allows you to have a personalized website built around your brand.
The most popular option is undoubtedly the unlimited plan with unlimited bandwidth and 10GB of storage space. It also comes with handy features such as the Site Booster App that helps SEO, and the Visitor Analytics App, letting you see your site stats.
If you’re running a website that accepts online payments, you can choose between three business and e-commerce plans starting from $17 (Basic) and continuing to $25 (Unlimited) and $35 (VIP) per month. They all include features such as secure online payments, recurring payments, customer accounts, domain name, no ads, unlimited bandwidth, and much more. You can also include unlimited products and start a subscription program with the Business Unlimited and Business VIP plans.
WordPress doesn’t come with pricing plans and is free, open-source software. However, you can probably guess there has to be a catch somewhere, so here it is:
- You must choose your own hosting provider. WordPress doesn’t offer hosting services, and you must sign up with a separate web host provider for that. There are dozens of options offering decent solutions for as little as $2.75 per month (Bluehost)
- Premium plugins and themes. Customizing your website and improving its functionality may cost quite a few dollars if you decide to take it all-premium. An average premium theme can cost around $60 per year, while plugins can cost anywhere from less than $10 up to a few hundred dollars per month. Of course, the pricing entirely depends on your business’s needs, and some robust marketing plugins come with premium prices that could cost even a few thousand dollars per year
- E-commerce integration. If you plan on running an e-commerce business, be prepared to spend a few hundred dollars per year for a stable solution
With these expenses combined, you can spend anywhere from $50 up to a couple of thousand dollars per year for premium WordPress services.
Verdict
WordPress, being a “free, open-source” CMS, may trick many users into believing it’s an affordable platform. However, if you’re just starting and are on a limited budget, you might be better off with one of Wix’s subscription plans. Sure, you can find many themes and plugins, and other features for free on WordPress, but many of them may come with limited possibilities. That’s why we proclaim Wix to being a more budget-friendly solution.
Plugins
Plugins (or apps) are indispensable features for every modern website, regardless of the web builder. In WordPress, they are called plugins, and Wix calls them apps. Without them, you wouldn’t be able to insert contact forms, track user activity, do email marketing, customize pages, and much more.
Wix offers a couple of hundred apps with a wide range of functions such as adding social media buttons, galleries, comment sections, and more. Some apps are free, while others require subscription-based payments that vary in price.
There is a relatively small collection of apps, but everyone can find enough to satisfy every online business need.
WordPress is the ultimate plugin heaven, with more than 60,000 free plugins in its directory. There are also thousands of premium plugins on other marketplaces. This diversity gives WordPress leverage in the third-party software race.
Thanks to the whopping number of plugins, you can customize your website in any way you want. Whether you’re starting a membership site, selling online courses, or running an e-commerce site, there are plugins for everything.
Verdict
WordPress beats Wix (and just about any other website builder) in terms of plugins. Of course, there’s a plugin for everything, and new ones come daily. Indeed, Wix also has an emerging app library, but it’s still quite limited compared to the competitor.
e-Commerce
For online businesses built around e-commerce, having a good website for day-to-day handling operations is essential. With the ever-growing popularity of e-commerce websites, we feel like it’s beneficial to test Wix vs. WordPress in this field.
We already mentioned that Wix has separate plans for e-commerce and businesses. Unfortunately, you can’t run an e-commerce site with the free program. Instead, you can use Wix’s in-built payment system or add new gateways such as PayPal or Authorize.net. Their Wix Payments charges a 2.9% transaction fee with an additional 0.30 in the U.S.
The great thing is that Wix lets you sell as many products as you like. These can be digital, physical, or service-based. It’s also possible to make discount or promotional codes, control shipping options, access guest checkouts, track inventory, and much more.
Just like Wix, WordPress has a relatively straightforward system for creating online stores. In addition, one of the world’s most popular plugins, WooCommerce, lets you manage e-commerce with ease. The free version has just enough features for any beginner online store and enables you to sell physical, digital, or subscription-based goods.
When it comes to design, you can find hundreds of professional WooCommerce themes to make your store stand out from the crowd.
Verdict
Wix has a decent e-commerce solution that will work just fine for small online businesses. However, it doesn’t get much better than WordPress (combined with WooCommerce) for a flexible and dynamic online store. With limitless possibilities, you can freely grow your store as much as you want.
Security and Backups
By signing up for a Wix premium plan, you get a built-in SSL security certificate. This feature makes your website safe from data breaches, and visitors will have an easier time turning into customers by knowing their data is protected. Plus, Wix has an autosave feature that lets you save different versions of your website. Wix apps are fully integrated into the company’s system, making them generally safer than WordPress plugins.
WordPress, being the world’s most used CMS platform, is a common target for cyberattacks. Also, it heavily relies on plugins that anyone, including hackers, can create. That’s why you should be extra careful when downloading plugins from the directory. Always look for verified, highly rated, and frequently updated solutions with at least 1,000 downloads.
With WordPress, you’re in charge of system backups. Fortunately, dozens of free plugins such as UpdraftPlus let you schedule automatic backups, export files, and more.
Verdict
Wix is a clear winner in terms of security. Unfortunately, WordPress is more prone to cyber-attacks compared to Wix. This issue is entirely understandable, given that most websites in existence use WordPress. There is also a relatively unprotected plugin directory that is especially prone to malicious attacks and uploads.
Help and Support
When it comes to tutorials and helpful articles about creating a website, both platforms do a tremendous job. WordPress has a well-developed community of enthusiasts, bloggers, and YouTubers that offer solutions for a wide range of website creation problems.
Due to its closed system, Wix has a customer support service you can contact over the phone or email every day from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. EST, Monday through Friday. Unfortunately, this service is not available at WordPress, but their active community is all over Facebook and YouTube. There’s also a helpful website called Wpbeginner, built to help WordPress newbies in their website creation journey.
Neither of the website builders currently offers live chat support.
Verdict
Wix wins the round here due to in-house support, in addition to online articles and tutorials. However, what works in favor of WordPress is that more websites are built on it, and there are many more resources online for whatever issue you might have.
Blogging
Whether it’s your primary focus or you just want an addition to your online store or business, blogging plays a vital role in your online presence. It’s essential to have an easy and convenient blogging platform that will make your daily or weekly posting routine as straightforward as possible.
Both Wix and WordPress offer blogging possibilities that are just enough to make beautiful blog posts. However, there are some differences. With Wix, you get all the essential features such as categories, tags, photos, and videos. However, comments are slow and a bit more complicated to manage compared to WordPress. Most users install third-party commenting apps such as Facebook. Also, Wix doesn’t let you create private posts, and its blog post interface uses a somewhat limited text editor when it comes to text formatting.
WordPress, on the other hand, is primarily built to be a blogging platform. That’s why you’ll find all the blogging features you could need to run a blog of any kind. In addition, its famous Gutenberg block editor has beautifully designed layouts to create fantastic posts.
Verdict
There’s no doubt about it; WordPress is the clear winner when it comes to blogging. Wix’s too-limited features make it an under-average blogging solution, while WordPress wears the crown. However, if you’re thinking of using a blog for brand awareness or similar purposes, we recommend sticking with WordPress.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Over time, Wix has developed a more sophisticated Search Engine Optimization (SEO) system. It now has just enough easy-to-use features to help you rank higher on Google. It requires zero coding and comes with Google integrations but is quite limited for advanced SEO.
The lack of advanced SEO features makes Wix a good solution for small businesses or bloggers since it only covers the basics. Some of its features include meta title and description, custom URLs, image alt text, 301 redirects, SSL encryption, and Google Search and Analytics. On the downside, it doesn’t offer sitemaps, so you’ll have to use Google Search Console to manage that part.
WordPress itself doesn’t offer many SEO features. Instead, it’s the plugins that make it one of the best website builders for SEO. Plugins such as Yoast SEO and All in One SEO (AIO SEO) make it hard for any competitor to come even close.
If you plan on launching SEO campaigns and have a lot of content you want to rank high on Google, consider WordPress. Its premium tools offer everything Wix does, plus advanced XML sitemaps, on-site SEO analytics, and more.
WordPress’s premium plugins do cost more than Wix’s, but they offer more possibilities. For example, Wix’s Site Booster app is part of the premium plan, making it a more budget-friendly option.
Verdict
Both platforms offer solid SEO solutions. They have all the essential features any young online business can need. However, when it comes to advanced options, WordPress + Yoast is the clear winner.
Maintenance
There’s much more to a website than posting content and designing pages. Some housekeeping is required to keep all data in place and systems up to date. Wix has automatic platform updates deployed to your website, so you don’t have to lift a finger. That’s a considerable advantage for nonskilled online business owners who have difficulty keeping things in place.
WordPress, on the other hand, lets you do all the site maintenance. For example, whenever there’s a platform update, you’ll get a notification in the user panel, and you must manually install the latest version. There is usually a link to follow along with instructions, so the whole process is relatively straightforward.
It’s also essential to keep your WordPress plugins and themes updated. Otherwise, you risk hurting your site performance and conflicting the tools. Most popular plugins get regular updates, which is a good thing. However, you need to be more careful with customized solutions that require you to do the work.
Verdict
Due to its automated website updates and backups, Wix wins this round. With Wix, you won’t have to worry about outdated apps or running malfunctioning ones. Instead, all technical work is in the hands of the in-house team, making sure nothing harmful happens to your site performance. Even if it does, they’re the ones to solve it.
FAQ
Is Wix Easier Than WordPress?
Wix wins the battle in terms of ease of use. You’ll hardly find a website builder that’s easier to use than Wix (maybe Weebly.) Moreover, its drag-and-drop editor is very straightforward to learn and doesn’t come with a steep learning curve.
WordPress scores a bit lower in terms of ease of use for several reasons. First, it requires you to find a web hosting provider on your own. Then, it takes some time to get used to their user panel that comes with a bit of a broader learning curve than Wix. On the flip side, WordPress offers way more customization options, making it worth investing the time into mastering its ins and outs.
Is Wix Bad for SEO?
The answer to this question depends on the type of website you’re running. Wix has just enough features to cover the needs of a small online business website, blog, or portfolio site. There are, however, more SEO advanced features over at WordPress.
Wix has its SEO built-in, so you don’t have to mess with plugins. It also connects your website to Google Analytics, which is the primary feature for any successful SEO campaign. However, it gets tough once you get past the search results milestone, as Wix doesn’t do much more than that.
Can You Switch From Wix to WordPress?
Absolutely. It’s not uncommon for small business websites to outgrow Wix and look for more sophisticated solutions. In most cases, they migrate to WordPress. There are, however, a few things to set up beforehand for the transition to run smoothly.
First, you need to purchase a hosting plan with a hosting provider. Then, you should install WordPress and choose a proper theme. Unfortunately, when it comes to content transferring, Wix doesn’t offer direct ways of doing so because it’s not an open-source platform. What you can do is import its RSS feed to your WordPress user panel (Tools -> Import).
Importing RSS will transfer your posts, but you need to apply other techniques for sharing photos. For example, you can manually save them to your desktop and upload them to WordPress or activate plugins such as Import External Images. This plugin can import local copies of linked images in a post.
Wix vs. Squarespace
Wix and Squarespace make most of the website building market (not counting CMS such as WordPress), which means they both are trendy and valuable platforms. They both function similarly, require no coding knowledge and make room for beautifully designed websites.
The main difference between Wix and Squarespace is the page editor. Wix allows moving elements anywhere on the page, while Squarespace has a structured editor that doesn’t let you do so. You can only drag content into columns and rows.
The competitors share a similar approach to mobile apps, eCommerce, email marketing, galleries, and audio players. Wix does have more features, but Squarespace seems to handle them better.
Overall, Squarespace may be a better option due to its cheaper plan, the industry’s most beautiful templates, and the stable page editor. However, that doesn’t mean Wix is the wrong solution. Ultimately, the choice mainly depends on personal preference.
Is Wix Cheaper Than WordPress?
By looking at the pricing plan, Wix technically is cheaper. There is a free option that gives you a domain name, which is a good deal you can’t find at WordPress. However, hardly any online business can benefit from Wix’s free plan. It offers a domain name, but not a custom one. It also adds branded ads on your website, doesn’t offer Google Analytics, e-commerce, or other extensions.
On the other hand, WordPress is a free-to-use open-source platform, but it does need you to invest in a domain name and web hosting. However, you can sign up for these plans starting from $3 per month, which beats Wix’s $12 per month Business Unlimited plan. There are also charges connected with WordPress regarding premium themes and plugins and tons of free solutions to satisfy most small online business needs.
As you can see, Wix may seem cheaper at first sight, but it may be more expensive in the long run. This ultimately depends on how you plan on using these website builders.
Recommendations
Our final verdict of Wix vs WordPress leans in WordPress’s favor. This robust CMS platform offers high-end customization features that make it possible to design comprehensive websites of any kind. It does have a bit steeper learning curve compared to Wix, but the benefits are numerous.
Ultimately, Wix may be a better choice for small online businesses with little to no traffic and business owners dedicated to creating their website with no previous web design knowledge. They will most certainly enjoy the platform’s seamless drag-and-drop page design editor.
In the end, for Wix vs WordPress, the final choice comes down to your online business’s needs. You can always start simpler (Wix) and then migrate to WordPress as your website grows. If you have enough time and energy to invest in mastering WordPress, we recommend starting there.
Building a Strong Online Presence
Choosing between Wix vs WordPress is like choosing between two favorite cakes. They’re both fantastic, but each has something that makes it unique. What matters when choosing the right website builder is that it’s convenient, offers enough features to build a robust online presence for your business, and leaves room for growth. Hopefully, you can now make a choice between Wix and WordPress, understand what each has to offer, and have a clearer picture of which solution is better for your online business.
