Prior to talking about the pros and cons of WordPress vs Wix, let’s do a little walk down memory lane regarding the history of creating websites. Before 2003, people and/ or businesses who want to have their own websites will either need to know coding or they will actually hire web developers to do up the websites for them as it requires in-depth knowledge and technical expertise of HTML (hypertext markup language) and CSS (cascading style sheets). Not to mention that they need to spend thousands of dollars just for a decent looking website.
However, 2003 changed all these when WordPress was launched. It was created as a content management system (CMS) and has become the world’s leading content management system. As of 2015, more than 23.3% of the top 10 million websites now use WordPress.
Numerous website builders were also birthed throughout the years and one strong contender is Wix. Sounds familiar? This is because they have massive advertising that include A-list movie stars, pyrotechnics and million-dollar budgets. You will notice their websites look cool and flashy, often stating how easy it is to set up your own ecommerce store.
If you have never owned a website before and are thinking of building one, here are 10 factors to consider when it comes to choosing Wix or WordPress as your website builder.
1. Interface Usability
Wix is one of the easiest website builders around, created for complete beginners who want to get a website running as soon as possible without all the coding hassle. No software installation is required and you get to edit everything in your browser. Whatever you see in your browser will be exactly what your website visitors see.
The Wix editor is simply drag and drop, foolproof and super intuitive. In short, it is ultra user-friendly. If you need more functionalities, all you have to do is add features from their App Market with just a click.
A helpful feature is the ADI editor, a Wix powered solution that creates instant websites with Artificial Intelligence Design. Users are asked a series of questions and the ADI builder will create the first draft of a website within minutes. It will also take existing content online to gather the website’s data (Facebook, LinkedIn or Google Maps). If the user does not like the ADI design, changes can be made easily. This is ingenious for people who are tight on time!
WordPress is well known for its wide selection of extensions and plugins but they are not always that easy to install or implement. It actually requires a bit of technical know-how and/ or some ability to understand their tutorials because when issues arise, it can take some time to find the right solution.
WordPress has just launched a more user friendly version to replace their classic editor – the Gutenberg that is a block based editor. With Gutenberg, you can arrange the entire layout within the editor and add multiple media types.
Verdict: Wix clearly wins this round as a user-friendly website builder and setting up one is so easy!
2. Design And Flexibility
Wix’s template library has close to 1,000 free templates. They are chic and modern, segmented into different categories (restaurants, fashion, blogs etc). A separate mobile version is available too but you would need to rearrange some elements to make the mobile version look aesthetically pleasing.
WordPress on the other hand, requires knowledge of CSS and HTML if you do not mind spending a few hours to find out on how to modify your template’s code to get the website you want. Despite this, it is still highly popular for 2 reasons. WordPress has tons of responsive themes online. They usually cost between $30 to $60 and most of them are responsive.
Additionally, when it comes to design and functionality, the user has total control and is able to customise the website to their desired look and usability. You can also hire a web developer to create a theme with unique features to make your website stand out and the best part? You can easily switch from one theme to another, unlike Wix where changes cannot be made once the site goes live.
While there are numerous free WordPress themes available, you should only use those from trusted sources as some of them might contain malware or hidden backlinks. Though the Gutenberg editor is only available for pages and blog posts currently, WordPress is planning to extend to entire websites by this year and that means users will soon be able to edit any part of their websites easily without any additional code or plugins. Talk about a game changer!
Verdict: Looks like WordPress is the winner in this round due to its flexibility in design and high degree of customisation.
3. Ecommerce
Wix has a dedicated online store section and it comes with numerous options for payments, automatic taxes, shipping etc. Moreover, new features are added all the time. Many businesses love Wix’s ecommerce interface as it not only supports digital goods, is one of the most affordable website builders but also has multilingual versions of your website so you are able to sell globally but you won’t have full control over the URL (uniform resource locator) which makes it slightly less than perfect.
However, the site loading speed tends to be slower due to their content rich themes and does not provide an ideal shopping experience which could hurt SEO (search engine optimisation). It is also not built for large stores as the site navigation is limited to one sub-level, making it difficult to organise larger product catalogues. Selling in multicurrency is not available too and could affect your business profitability.
With WordPress, the above issues will not arise provided you use a third party plugin. One common plugin is WooCommerce which allows you to do everything with a tad of custom code. It is free but you will have to pay for extra features such as the Stripe credit card payment gateway.
Verdict: WordPress, with WooCommerce, offers a complete eCommerce solution where Wix can only provide a very basic ecommerce solution. WordPress would be definitely recommended if you plan to scale your ecommerce business, especially when compared to Wix.
4. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search engine optimisation is the process of improving your website for better search visibility on search engines like Google. There has been equal debate on whether Wix or WordPress is more suitable for SEO and we believe it rings true for both.
Wix has all the essential SEO features required to rank a website and they include alt tags, meta descriptions and titles, 301 redirects, structured data and other built-in features etc. Not to mention, Wix also adds new features and updates to its SEO Tools on a regular basis. However, SEO is affected by site loading speed as mentioned earlier and images are automatically named when you upload them so you are unable to customise the URLs, making these the 2 greatest downsides of Wix SEO.
With WordPress, SEO is taken a higher notch due to its flexibility and wide range of plugins. Eg. RankMath, which is considered one of the top SEO plugins for WordPress and contains features for rank tracking, content optimisation, identifying indexing issues, internal link building, advanced schema generation and many more.
Verdict: Wix is generally good for most projects but if you want more advanced SEO tools, WordPress is a better choice with the right plugins.
5. Blogging
Wix’s blog interface is clean and simple. The options are easy to use even for amateurs and they include creating categories, tags, post scheduling as well as featuring related posts. The layout editor is not a drag and drop like the website editor and the posting features are decent but limited.
You can also add images, GIFS and dividers, galleries and videos but complicated stuff like tables will require HTML which can prove challenging for beginners. Nevertheless, it still serves as a good platform overall and provides a great start for new bloggers because it is easier to use and customise.
WordPress which is created as a content management system (CMS), has always been heavily focussed on blogging options and all the extraordinary features you need for writing impressive blogs such as categories, tags, RSS etc. Your blog look will be based on the theme you choose and that means certain features could malfunction unless you tweak them manually.
Therefore it is important that you do possess some technical knowledge before embarking on this journey because it will go a long way in helping you to create your dream blog. The Gutenberg closes the gap by giving you more control in the layout and blog content with options to add tables, galleries, columns etc.
Verdict: Clearly WordPress wins hands down here due to the design of its CMS interface.
6. Technical Support
Wix offers great technical support via phone support, live chat and forums. You may also find Wix articles and tutorials that are especially useful for beginners. For the very technical issues, you might experience some back and forth but they would eventually provide the right solution.
However, with WordPress, the support does not come readily as they do not have any official support. You will need to find your answer on the community forums but they are either a hit or miss and are buried in tons of comments before you find what you want.
To avoid this hassle and provided you have a little budget to spare ($15+/ month), you could also go for a web hosting service that is specialised in WordPress (Kinsta, Siteground etc). You would also get basic support with common WordPress issues. There are more affordable WordPress hosting options but you would get lesser support.
Verdict: Definitel