WordPress vs Wix – Which is better?

Wordpress vs Wix

WordPress vs Wix

Which is better?

Unless you’ve paid in the tens of thousands or maybe even hundreds of thousands – chances are you’re running websites on CMS – content management systems like Squarespace, WordPress or Wix. Each of these have pros & cons. Which we’ll explore below.

About WordPress

Wordpress launch

 

 

It’s important to realise that WordPress.com isn’t the same as WordPress.org. WordPress.com is the companies own website with its own hosting & packages. It’s much more limited than wordpress.org because .org is open source and web developers can move it on to high performing servers. WordPress websites makeup at least about 25-26% of the internet today and are by far the best content marketing CMS owing to being built for blogging.

WordPress is highly optimised for SEO & is suitable for small-scale businesses to large-scale businesses. It does, however, require some technical knowledge to make the most of its design potential and maintenance is required to keep its plugins and version updated. Basic computer knowledge to use it’s CMS to post blog posts – the interface is similar to a basic word document.

WordPress has a highly engaged developer community that continually develops plugins, themes and more for it. These plugins range from free easy to use plugins to very expensive monthly options which completely change the dynamic of the website. Thanks to the numerous plugins, page builders and plugins – WordPress is by far the most scalable and most suited to grow your business and grow with it.

WordPress has been trusted by some of the top brands in the world including BBC America, Sony music, Walt Disney company & more.

WordPress in summary

  • Opensource
  • Highly adaptable and scalable
  • Requires some technical knowledge to implement & run
  • The best CMS for SEO
  • Uses plugins that require updating
  • eCommerce functionality

Pros 

  • Much cheaper than paying for a custom website and custom CMS
  • Trusted by over a quarter of the internet.
  • Very scalable & secure when a technically minded WordPress developer set it up.
  • Excellent for SEO
  • Your website can become almost anything, membership websites, booking websites, eCommerce stores – WordPress is very flexible.

 

Cons

  • Price range to set up can vastly change depending on the functionality required.
  • Not secure if set up by a non-technical user – WordPress hackers will pry on users who don’t take the steps necessary to secure their website.
  • Requires some learning to use.
  • More expensive upfront if using a website designer/developer.

 

About Wix

Wordpress vs Wix - Which is better?

Wix is a cloud-based HTML site-building platform where users can develop websites with no coding knowledge with online drag and drop tools. You can create a website, blog, single page, online store, portfolio & more.

Wix & Squarespace both have easy to use website editors that make it simple for anyone to create their own website. The builder is simple enough to use but the SEO functionality of the website suffers.

A key problem with these services is the same that WordPress.com suffers from, in choosing to use these services,  you’re more or less stuck on them and you’re at the mercy of the service in terms of pricing should they decide to raise prices or that you need one of the higher end packages. WordPress.org allows you to have your website hosted on any server.

You’re stuck paying monthly for as long as your website is active. The cost of setting up one of these websites looks appealing at first due to the low-cost setup but long term, you’ll end up paying more than an investment in a website. As the server costs for your own website could be the same in a year for a wordpress.org website as you could be paying monthly on a Wix website.

Wix offers a free option with limited space (500mb) and a .wix domain name which is a good option for users just starting out with no funds but ultimately looks unprofessional. The free option also includes adverts on your website that you can only remove if you pay for a premium plan.

Wix ultimately is a service which helps non-website technical minded individuals get a website up and running with relative ease. It doesn’t, however, scale well and should your business outgrow it – you’ll have a headache getting your content transferred across to a publishing platform like WordPress.  As far as SEO goes, it’s getting slightly better but still pales in comparison to WordPress as any web developer could tell you & is very bad for eCommerce SEO.

Summary

  • Wix helps non-technical users quickly get a website up and running
  • Wix does not scale well
  • Wix has limited SEO options – (How your website gets found)
  • Wix is a service, you only have control over your website for as long as you pay their monthly plans, even then you don’t have full control of your website.

Pros 

  • Cheap to set up
  • Free option
  • Easy to use
  • Has an eCommerce option suitable for very small shops
  • Built-in CDN
  • Less flexibility – fewer things to go wrong
  • Wix support

Cons

  • Doesn’t scale well
  • SEO functionality is limited
  • Hard to transfer content away should you need to improve your website.
  • You can’t optimise your website or change the server – Wix websites slow down during peak times.
  • No optimisation means no speed optimisation – Wix website is fairly heavy on Javascript which means you’ll never reach the same speed load time of an optimised WordPress website.
  • Limited Features
  • You have to pay the same amount monthly for the lifespan of your website to be ad-free or use the eCommerce features
  • As a service – should the business go bankrupt or run into issues (not likely but a possibility) then your website is gone also.

Wordpress vs Wix - Which is better?

The Bottom line

The smart decision is WordPress for long-term scalability & features, there is a steeper learning curve to WordPress however so any serious business should expect to invest a good designer and have the costs upfront, any good website will pay for itself over time.

The SEO functionality of WordPress & optimisation and ability to completely modify your own website & functionality makes it a much better choice than Wix. If you can’t afford a website developer and don’t expect much from the online side of your business – Wix is a quick and easy short-term solution to get something online quick that isn’t a social media network.

Wix can provide a cheaper website editor should you know how websites function can be fairly useful. If not your website can look very amateurish and slow. Having researched multiple Wix websites despite being on the same servers, website speed can range from 3 seconds load time to 24 seconds plus with scripts seeming to be the main issue, not that WordPress doesn’t suffer the same issue with inexperienced users.

Wix allows you to build your own website but won’t give you the web designers experience of building a website or knowledge, nor will it provide the same SEO functionality that WordPress provides and ultimately the main objective of having a website is for it to be seen & found.

Most WordPress designers can attest to having to move many Wix websites over from Wix to WordPress once the user realised how quick they had outgrown the service & platform functionality. Ultimately right now and in the past, WordPress is and has been a much better platform, though should Wix expand beyond only serving to non-technical users & opening up their platform a bit – allowing their editor/service to be used open source similar to WordPress.org – that situation could change.

Finally, if you’re using any content marketing plan – WordPress really wins out for integration with other services.