Are you wondering which is a better platform among WordPress vs Wix?
Choosing a better platform for starting your website can be confusing, right? Then, you’ve come to the right article. We’ll be covering every point about Wix vs WordPress and see which is a better choice to make a website with.
WordPress and Wix are both very popular site builders to start a website or blogging. They are both known for their feature-rich and easy to use website building abilities. You can also see people pitting these platforms against each other.
However, with their increasing popularity, many beginners are confused about what is the best choice. In this article, we’ll compare these platforms and help you choose the best platform.
So, let’s get started.
A) WordPress vs Wix – Introduction
WordPress and Wix are both popular CMS platforms that come with an easy-to-use interface enabling beginners to create an online presence on their own. Plus, they offer tons of customization options to make your site unique. Yet, there’re differences in their workings.
Let’s begin comparison between WordPress and Wix.
What is Wix? – Overview
Wix is a popular website builder with features designed to help you make a unique and flashy website with ease. According to W3Techs statistics, Wix is used by 1.5% of all websites online and covers about 2.5% market share of the CMS industry.
It comes with a neat drag and drop site builder with tons of free templates to make your site. You only require minimal or even no coding knowledge to set up different kinds of websites in no time.
The most important thing to note is that it’s a fully hosted platform with its own web hosting service. Moreover, it offers you a subdomain that looks like yoursite.wixsite.com for the free package.
But you can still upgrade to its premium packages to connect to your domain and get access to eCommerce options.
What is WordPress? – Overview
WordPress is a well-known name in the website creation software market. Although starting out as a blogging platform, it’s now become the most powerful Content Management System growing and getting better every day. It now offers the best website building features one can imagine.
Comparing the usage percent of WordPress with Wix, it’s greatly popular than Wix. According to the same stats from W3Techs mentioned above, WordPress powers over 29% of all websites and it’s about 64% of CMS market share.
However, it’s important to note that there are 2 ways to use WordPress: i) the self-hosted WordPress.org and ii) fully hosted WordPress.com.
Both these platforms are based on the same WordPress software but how you can use them is different. Among them, here we’re mainly talking about the self-hosted WordPress.org, not WordPress.com. For more information, check out our article on WordPress.com vs WordPress.org.
Being a self-hosted platform means that you need to get a web hosting service on your own. However, it can come as low as $2.95/month. Check out some of the best hosting services.
B) WordPress vs Wix – Ease of Use
You need a simple platform where you’re able to set up your site easily, only then you can think of making it greater.
If your website platform is very technical, then you’ll need to use a good chunk of resources to maintain your site. With that, you won’t be able to focus on creating great products, marketing, etc. If that happens, it’ll be hard to keep your business running.
Now, let’s compare Wix or WordPress which is user-friendly.
How Easy is it to Build a Website with Wix?
Undoubtedly, Wix is one of the easiest website builder platforms out there. You don’t need to invest tons of time or require any expertise to get started.
The #1 reason why it’s beginner-friendly is that it’s a fully-hosted and drag and drop based website builder. It means you don’t need to buy set up web hosting or install any kind of software.
All you need to do is sign up on Wix.com and enter a few details about your website.
Next, you’ll find a simple drag and drop site builder. Its site builder allows you to edit your site using drag and drop editor which requires no coding knowledge at all.
From the Wix editor, adding different visual media, navigation bars, menus, and other site elements is a walk in a park. You can just go to Wix, set up your account, and start building your site in no time.
For your site’s design, it offers tons of templates that you can choose. Both free and paid themes are available.
Preview the templates as per your website’s niche and select one that suits your site.
How Easy is it to Create a Website with WordPress?
WordPress is free open-source software available for anyone to download and use freely. However, you need to get yourself a domain name and web hosting service to start.
So, first of all, buy yourself a pretty domain name from one of the domain registrar companies, like Namecheap. You can buy hosting from companies like DreamHost, SiteGround, etc.
Actually, most of these companies provide both domain and hosting. Some of them like DreamHost offer a free domain at the purchase of web hosting.
After you’ve purchased and set up the domain and hosting, next, you should install WordPress on your hosting account. But it’ll take just one click with most hosting providers.
Once WordPress is installed, you can go login to your WordPress admin dashboard and start customizing your website.
First, you can pick a good WordPress theme for your site. You can choose one from 8000+ free themes right from your dashboard.
Next, you can now move onto making and editing your site. For content editing, it has Gutenberg editor that allows you to edit content painlessly.
Plus, you can get different popular page builders like Elementor, Beaver Builder, etc. to help users set up a perfectly working site.
You get complete control of your site and define how it works. However, this requires some technical knowledge. But you can always set up a demo website on your computer by installing WordPress locally. You can try and test everything you want to on localhost, without any restrictions or fear of spoiling anything.
Winner?
It’s true that WordPress is also a very easy platform to create a website, however, in comparison with Wix, it’s a bit technical. You might need to follow some tutorial or require some technical knowledge along the way. Here, we’ve got the easiest website creation guide ready for you!
So, comparing WordPress head-on with Wix gives you a winner by a minimal margin, and it’s Wix.
C) Flexibility on WordPress vs Wix
For a functional and ever-growing website, you need a flexible website builder. It should allow you to change up how your site looks, add new elements and designs, include trending features, and more.
Hence, choosing a platform that ticks all the checkboxes for flexibility and functionality is important. Now, let’s compare flexibility on Wix vs WordPress.
Adding Features & Functionalities on Wix Website
Wix allows you to add tons of additional functionalities to your site via apps. There’s an App Market with 250+ apps that you can add to your site and a wide range of features.
There are many free and premium apps with features like adding social media buttons, email marketing, contact forms, and more. They are readily available via their App Market. App Market has a decent collection of apps but its small number is not a huge problem.
All these apps cover almost all the features users need and require for their site. Additionally, you can also add JavaScript and APIs to your site.
Adding Features and Functionalities on WordPress Website
In terms of adding new features, WordPress is the best platform out there. On the WordPress platform, you can add new features mainly via plugins and there are tons of plugins available.
The official WordPress plugin library has over 57,000 plugins that you can get for free. Plus, you can get almost the same number of premium and third-party extensions.
You can easily add plugins of your choice by going to its plugin library and adding the one you need. It’s super easy and requires no effort. Check our article on how to choose the best plugins for WordPress.
With so many plugins at your disposal, there’s a high chance you get a plugin for any kind of features you need. But if you don’t get one, then you can create a custom extension yourself. If you aren’t a developer, then you can even hire someone to develop a plugin for you.
Winner?
WordPress features plugins for almost everything you can think of. And with its massive library, you can choose between different options. So, the clear winner is WordPress in terms of adding features and functionalities.
D) WordPress vs Wix – eCommerce Options
You might be considering starting a website for your business or store. Or you might be starting a store completely online. Whatever the case, your site platform should be able to support an online store with all functionalities.
Creating an eCommerce Store on Wix
Although you can’t run an eCommerce site on their free plan, Wix offers a dedicated plan for eCommerce. The Wix eCommerce allows you to sell your services and products along with accepting payments using PayPal and Authorize.net with ease.
It’s also most suited for a small business or store. Especially considering it’s limited by payment portals, features, tax options and most importantly a paywall, Wix is not the best option to run a good-selling eCommerce site.
Creating an eCommerce Site on WordPress
WordPress comes with tons of eCommerce plugins that are focused on making an online store or an eCommerce site like WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and more.
WooCommerce is the most widely used eCommerce plugin. But, that’s not all. In fact, it’s the popular eCommerce platform in use, which powers about 30% of the top 1 million online stores.
With the WooCommerce plugin, you can easily create an online store to sell your services and products. Additionally, you can find tons of WooCommerce extensions that you can use to add various useful features to your eCommerce site.
Another alternative, Easy Digital Downloads is mainly useful for selling digital products like ebooks, software, etc.
Winner?
If you’re a small business and want to try out an online store, then Wix can be a good place to start. However, if you need good sets of features and flexibility, then WordPress with WooCommerce plugin takes the win.
E) WordPress vs Wix – SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is optimizing your site to help you rank better in search engine results. It’s the most important way of getting traffic to your site.
Hence, choosing a website building platform that allows you to make your site SEO-friendly is crucial.
Is Wix SEO-Friendly?
Wix does pretty well on its Search Engine Optimization (SEO). As it’s a fully managed site builder platform, it also has a complete SEO toolset built-in.
Wix SEO offers a mobile-friendly and responsive design to their site and the search engines love that. You can change its page title, alt attributes, meta description, and heading individually.
Also, you can choose a custom domain for your site if you are subscribed to its premium plans. It comes with SSL encryption for all of its plans which is good for ranking higher in the search engine results.
Besides, it supports SEO tools like 301 redirects and Site Booster to boost up your site SEO. These tools help you drive more traffic to your site and rank it higher.
However, Wix names the uploaded image with cryptic text themselves which can affect the SEO for the site especially a photography site or blog.
Is WordPress Good for SEO?
WordPress by default is already optimized for search engines. It includes many features that give SEO benefits.
The first one is its content editor which lets you structure your content in a way that’s easy to understand for both search engines and users. You can add a title, headings, image alt text, edit permalink, etc.
In addition, you can find plenty of great WordPress SEO plugins that allow you to properly optimize your site for SEO.
The most popular of the SEO plugins is Yoast SEO. It provides a bundle of SEO features like meta title, meta description, sitemap, and more. Not to mention, it lets you add a focus keyword for each article, and then it’ll provide you SEO analysis and also suggestions to improve.
Another major advantage of WordPress is that you can completely control your site and content to optimize it. You can choose to build your site using the fastest web hosting, SEO-friendly themes, and templates. Site speed is a key SEO factor, so you have a good chance to rank higher in search results.
You can also optimize images on the site using different plugins to optimize the load time and minify images.
Winner?
With options to use good web hosting, SEO-optimized theme & SEO plugins, WordPress site takes the win. Yet, Wix also should be considered good for SEO.
F) WordPress vs Wix – Security
There has been a surge in the number of cyber-attacks daily. Attackers are constantly looking for an opportunity to hack into a site, leak data, disclose information, etc. This just raises the importance of securing your site. You should be able to protect your site against threats like malware, spam, and attacks.
Choosing a platform that allows you to properly secure your site against a wide range of cybercrimes is crucial. First and foremost, your platform should allow for basic security methods like secure login and Two Factor Authentication (2FA).
Now, let’s compare security features on WordPress and Wix.
Is Wix Website Builder Secure?
Since Wix is a fully hosted platform, it takes care of all the hosting and server-level management of your site. This means a good chunk of the security aspect of your site is handled by the Wix team themselves. They are responsible for handling updates, backups, and securing your site.
You get an SSL certificate for your Wix sites with every plan. Wix protects your site and browser communication with HTTPS that secures the data from attackers or hackers. Your sites are SSL/TLS secured which is very crucial especially for an online store to protect customers’ online transaction details.
Because Wix handles everything, you’re only left with handling the login security and Two Factor Authentication (2FA). Don’t skip these what so ever.
Is WordPress Secure to Build Your Site?
Security for WordPress is quite different than the Wix. Since it’s a self-hosted platform, you need to take care of the hosting and manage the updates and backups for the site.
Therefore, the #1 thing to secure WordPress is choosing a hosting platform that’s very secure enough to withstand cyber-attacks.
For more security features, WordPress offers a pretty neat selection of security and backup plugins. For example, Wordfence is a powerful free WordPress security plugin that provides a guard against attacks, malware scanning, login security, etc.
Similarly, you can find plugins like UpdraftPlus for creating backups.
Although it seems more work compared to Wix, you get more control over the security of your site. The site can be as secure as you can make it. Additionally, the massive selection of security plugins allows you to properly guard your site against attacks like brute-force, malware, spam, and many more.
Winner?
Although you need to take care of everything yourself for WordPress, you can get many great security plugins to aid you in the process. You get control of every security aspect of your site. Therefore, WordPress is the winner.
G) Support – WordPress vs Wix
While getting started with making your site, you are bound to get stuck on some queries or issues. That’s where support from the developers or platforms come in. Choosing a website building platform that provides their customers with as much support as possible for every issue is what we need to look for.
Having a dedicated support team or forum with Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) ready to help users with any problem shows the credibility of the platform.
Now, let’s see which platform has better support features.
Support and Help Options for Wix Users
For support, the first place to go is Wix Help Center. It’s a huge library with hundreds of tutorials and guides on how to use Wix and how to solve common problems and issues.
They have an active community of people helping out each other and active forums with different questions answered. You can also find a good number of tutorials on other blogs online.
Wix also offers active support to their paid customers via phone or email. They have a support team ready to deal with your issues and troubles.
Support and Help Options for WordPress Users
Similar to Wix Help Center, WordPress.org also has a support page where you can find resources to get started with WordPress.
Plus, it has online forums where you can join and interact. You can post questions about any problem you encounter, and wait for someone from the WordPress community to answer.
If you didn’t know, the WordPress community a global community of WordPress developers, users, and everyone who works with WordPress. Having such a massive community of enthusiasts is one of the top advantages of WordPress. You can always find someone to help you.
Similarly, each plugin and theme for WordPress also have forums individually. You can also always check the official support for those particle plugins and themes for more help. For example, here’s a screenshot of the Yoast plugin’s support forum page.
In addition, you can find thousands of blogs like SiteSaga.com on the web that provide guides on using WordPress.
Winner?
WordPress has tons of online resources, active forums, and a community to help you around with it. Wix has a dedicated support team to help their paid users. Therefore, it’s a tie.
H) Cost – WordPress vs Wix
Now, let’s compare the cost of creating sites on Wix vs WordPress.
How Much Does it Cost to Make a Wix Site?
Wix has both free and paid options for building your site. However, the free plan compromises on lots of important features. For a small business or online store, going with the paid plan can give you lots of advantages over the free option without breaking your wallet.
You can subscribe to various premium packages of Wix yearly, bi-yearly, or monthly.
Some of the popular Wix packages start at around:
- Unlimited Plan: $12.50/month with unlimited bandwidth, free domain for a year, and 10 GB storage.
- VIP Plan: $24.50/month with added features like VIP support, and higher storage than Unlimited.
- Combo Plan: $8.50/month with 2GB bandwidth, 3 GB storage, and no ads.
You can also pay to only add a custom domain for $4.5/month however this plan features Wix branding ads on your site.
How Much It Costs to Build a Site with WordPress?
WordPress.org is a free website builder platform. However, you need to purchase a hosting plan and the domain yourself.
To begin with, you can try affordable hosting. For example, DreamHost provides you hosting service along with a custom domain name for as low as $2.59/month.
There are also varying hosting services with different conditions and features. You can check our article on the best hosting services for more details.
However, this doesn’t include the cost for premium plugins or themes you might add. So the actual pricing for maintaining a WordPress site can vary according to the owners.
I) WordPress vs Wix – Pros and Cons
Pros and Cons of Wix
Pros of Wix:
- Fully-hosted platform.
- Easy drag and drop builder.
- Requires no coding.
- A huge number of templates.
- Customization options using third-party integrations.
Cons of Wix:
- The free plan shows Wix ads on the site.
- A limited number of third-party extensions.
- Doesn’t allow custom domain for the free plan.
- Limited eCommerce features.
Pros and Cons of WordPress
Pros of WordPress:
- Full Control of your site.
- Huge library of free and premium plugins and themes.
- Flexible on adding different functions and features.
- Easy to use builders like Gutenberg, Elementor, etc.
- Has an active community and many expert support options.
- Cost-effective.
Cons:
- Slight learning curve compared to Wix.
- Manage your domain name and hosting service.
- Take care of performance and backups on your own.
You should be able to see which website platform works best for you. However, we don’t advise you to go for the platform solely based on an article. But rather, choosing the platform based on your requirement, testing and compatibility are very crucial.
If you don’t try out the platform and choose it without keeping compatibility in mind, then it might affect your productivity and the efficiency of your site in the long run. Therefore, it’s important you personally check out both platforms before you make your choice.
Conclusion
We hope this article helped you make a better choice and choose the best website platform among WordPress vs Wix. We also hope the differences and similarities of these platforms were cleared up to help you make a better choice.
Now it’s up to you to make the choice! However, our platform of choice would be WordPress.org.
On top of being an open-source platform with a wide library of plugins and themes, WordPress is a self-hosted platform that gives us the freedom of hosting sites on our own and deciding which is good. Moreover, it’s a great choice for scalability and functionality.
But it’s important you make your choice after proper analysis and check it out yourself. You might want to check our article on WordPress vs Blogger.