WordPress Vs Wix: Mind waffles! It happens, especially when you don’t know what is the right choice for you.
This is what happens to some of the website owners, who want a graphical design interface and don’t come up with the solution whether they go for WordPress or Wix.
Surprisingly, both are best on their own terms. And it is up to you what quality you prefer over others.
To shake this topic simple, I try to give my opinion on what would be best for you.
Explicitly, there are a lot of differences between WordPress and Wix.
But they are very close. This makes a harder choice to go with.
So, stay tuned.
I try to give my honest overview and conclusion on every parameter I am going to state in this post.
These are some of the pointers that I am going to state in this simplified comparison:
Well, this could be the most dominating factor while choosing between WordPress and Wix.
As a beginner, it may be the hardest thing to come up with a budgeting plan of somewhat of which you have no idea.
So, let’s compare Wix and WordPress on the basis of cost efficiency and value of money criteria.
You can use and make your website with Wix for free.
But it is bad for your authority and authenticity. Why?
In a free plan, you are able to create a free website but with limitations— that no one wants on their website. These are:
These two limitations are not good for the business owner. That’s why I don’t recommend you to go with Wix free plan.
But, what about the premium plans of Wix?
They are good.
At a monthly subscription fee, you can get all the things that you are going to need to make your website live.
There are two categories of plan that you can choose from i.e. “Website plan” and “Business and eCommerce plan”
In a Website plan, you have to pay at least $14/ month to use their services. This includes linking custom domain, free domain for a year, SSL certificate, Wix hosted server with 3 Gb space and 24/7 customer care support.
For Business and eCommerce websites, the plans start with $23/month for their premium support.
All of these features are only available in the premium plans. That’s become a deal-breaker for the people who are unwilling to invest money in it.
Moreover, if you want some extra plugins or themes from their market store, you have to pay additional bucks, that’s again not desirable to non-investors.
For definition— WordPress is a free Content Management System (CMS). But for practicality— you can’t live your website effectively, for free.
How? This is how. First of all, for using the WordPress CMS, you need:
And both required initial investment. That’s why practically, WordPress is also not free.
However, there are a couple of major advantages of using WordPress over Wix in terms of price performance.
One is— the flexibility of pricing, which can range from $2/ month to $200/ month.
That gives a favorable advantage to different sections of users to develop a basic WordPress website.
Secondly, there are a lot of free plugins and themes.
The majority of WordPress users (more than 90%) use free WordPress themes for their website. And when it comes to plugins, the user % goes beyond 99%.
That means, there are hardly any WordPress websites that are not using free plugins.
Profoundly, as a beginner, you don’t need premium themes and plugins. So, you majorly have to invest in hosting and domain names. That’s all.
Both are subjectively free. But both require an initial investment.
In terms of high-cost factors, monthly subscription cost, and fixed costing, Wix could be a deal-breaker.
In terms of money, it requires a lot— only if you want to make a branded website. Otherwise, if you can cope with the Wix subdomain name, you’re good to go with its free version.
While starting a branded WordPress website with free plugins and themes — it is easy and cost-effective.
Moreover, for WordPress, add-on such as hosting and domain name, you have a lot of options to choose from.
My Verdict: WordPress is far- far more favorable to cost-efficiently and quite value for money deal than Wix.
This is crucial, especially for beginners.
As more and more people lean on online platforms like youtube and websites to start a side hustle.
That means a higher section of users are beginners.
So, I personally add this criterion in differentiating between WordPress and Wix.
It is as simple as signing up. Requires only 7 simple steps and majorly requires at most 30 mins.
Just follow the following pointers, and set up your first Wix website.
1. You have to visit the Wix home page and sign up with your best credentials.
2. In the signup process, you have to choose a plan to which you are going to subscribe.
3. In the My Site Window, you have to click on “Create a new Website”
4. Now, the follow-up page asks you about your niche category such as blog, fitness, designer, events, and so on. You can choose accordingly.
5. After that you have to choose whether you want to create your Wix Website with “Wix ADI” or “prebuilt Wix Editor”.
Wix ADI asks some follow-up questions to get the best possible website layout for you. On the other hand, the Wix Editor option gives you a wide field of prebuilt website templates to choose and edit from.
6. Do some tweaks like color change, logo upload, fonts adjustment, website name, etc.
7. All Done, Just publish. Your website is live.
Therefore, Wix offers you one of the easiest and sophisticated methods of creating a website.
It’s a little bit complicated.
Precisely, you have to invest your time and money to learn the initial setup of WordPress.
Honestly, it is not that much hard.
But it can bleed you in anger if you fail to do step accordingly.
One of the major disadvantages is, you have to do two different jobs and it may require patience.
These are connecting your domain name to hosting and secondly, initialing the WordPress setup.
Connecting domain names is almost the same as connecting to a Wix account.
But what makes it hard or easy, is installing WordPress websites on your hosting. And it is up to your hosting provider control panel on how easy it will gonna be.
For instance, most big hosting companies either have their own control panels such as Bluehost and Hostinger, or they have a Cpanel such as A2hosting and Siteground.
These companies use the one-click installation for WordPress. And, that is easy. The following image shows the Cpanel account to setup WordPress.
But, if you are going to host your website on unmanaged hosting such as Digital Ocean, you have to feed a lot of codes to do the simple installation.
And I personally don’t recommend it.
Wix offers you one of the easiest and sophisticated methods of creating your website. It is easy. It is lite.
More importantly, you don’t even host your website by yourself. They do for you. Hence, no coding from your end.
Conversely, the ease and hardness of the initial setup of WordPress depend on your hosting provider.
In the majority of cases, you just need preliminary guidance like some youtube videos to set up your first WordPress website.
My Verdict: There is no way WordPress can beat Wix in its easiness of creating a website.
The ease of customization is a big relief for beginners.
Most beginners, even some non-technically guys, want this feature.
They don’t want to lean their head on the technicality of customization and usage with coding.
They just need a simplicity on which they can work on and don’t want to hire some website developer. And after all, that is not the reason why they are looking for the best self-managed CMS in between Wix or WordPress?
Simple, hardcore, and fluent editing with Wix.
Wix offers a simple and beginner-friendly module for editing and customizing your website.
Its drag and drop module is considered to be the easiest way to manage and change the look of various elements of your website.
They give you the most advanced features without using a single coding tool.
More importantly, all the blocks are responsive.
This led your mobile or tablet users to get the most profound experience. And this is also quite an important criterion when it comes to google.
The “single window customization” gives you the flexibility of changing and editing every element on a single page. This is true not for a page element but also for publishing posts, uploading media, or adding social share buttons.
Honestly, you will love its beginner-friendly approach for creating your first website.
Unlike Wix’s one window customization, WordPress’s customization is different from site to site (more accurately to the theme of the website).
Though you can do some visual customization but its level of customization and editing again depends majorly on the theme.
Moreover, WordPress does have a theme editor but not that much editable like Wix. In addition, you can’t change the menu, sidebar, header, and footer from a single window.
There is not a single customizer window. To customize them, you have to follow back to different sections in the WordPress dashboard.
One of the most lacking features of WordPress posts are, they all look the same. And you can’t do much about it.
Apart from this, themes have their own customizing panel that again adds some initial learning.
If you’re a beginner, it can cost you hours and hours of customizing to get what you’re hoping for.
Wix is easy to customize and has a single edit window whether it is for the home page or any page on your website.
You can customize, edit the website with the single drag and drop module.
On the other hand, WordPress is not beginner-friendly and you need to learn how to customize and various paths sections for more profound editing.
But if you do it one time, I bet you, it will give you the ability to customize your website on your own terms by using the right set of plugins and themes.
My Verdict: No doubt, Wix is the winner in this section. Wix defeats WordPress in all terms of easiness of customizability and usage.
Every business or blog needs a special design. As an owner, everybody wants their website to look elegant, fresh, and unique.
For this, people usually want something that is different and gives a unique representative of their product and service.
So, let’s have a look at the difference between WordPress and Wix in terms of design flexibility.
As mentioned in the above pointers, Wix is easy and full of customization.
In short, it is different. And you can make your own design with their drag and drop elemental window.
Using Wix, you never end with customization, and you don’t need to buy too many addons or themes to get the look that you want from it.
Moreover, you don’t need to be an expert or good at coding to build a website of your choice. It is very simple.
Apart from this, you can also get a dedicated supportive design based on your niches and categories. For this, you just have to answer some questions during the initial setup (like the following image).
All the design elements are very attractive and responsive, so you don’t have to deal with buying a new theme for your Wix website.
Though it is easy it may cost you some time to get used to this layout elemental design.
WordPress is king when it comes to design flexibility.
The skin of your WordPress website— is the theme. And there are thousands of free and premium themes that can let you do customization that even Wix’s website isn’t able to do.
Please Note: I am not saying it is easy to get the design of your wants. But my point of saying is, “There are a lot of themes and page builder plugins that help you to check your design needs”.
However, sometimes WordPress themes and page builders aren’t able to fetch your needs and for that, you need to know some coding.
And that could be harder for non-coder guys.
I know, it is not beginner-friendly, but once you learn the basics and invest some time, you will do all the things in a very similar way to Wix.
Wix’s drag and drop elemental window lets you do most of the customization that you needed for your website.
But, it is not that much more capable than WordPress.
WordPress has tons of themes and page builder options to stage your website as a wedding bride.
However, in WordPress, you have to invest some time in learning and doing a little bit of elemental coding to get the desired result.
My Verdict: WordPress is better at design flexibility because of numerous free themes and page builders than Wix.
Security is the utmost for website owners.
Everyone wants a secure website and defining the best platform between Wix and WordPress could be a tedious task.
But I am going to give you the best possible values in terms of security. Stay tuned.
First of all, Wix sounds more secure.
Practically, it is the most favorable and secured platform to run a static website.
Why?
Because they host your Wix website on their own servers.
It’s their responsibility. And they are good at their work.
I am not saying that your Wix website can’t be hacked. But everything is hackable— even big companies like google.
So, the Wix website can not be 100% secure.
Most of the Wix hacks are DOM XXS hacks. And the best part is, Wix’s technical team fixes this, or any, for you with their premium plans.
DOM XXS hacks are the exploited codes that majorly used to redirect a site’s URL to some malicious website.
The security of WordPress depends majorly on the hosting providers.
Most of the hosting companies use their supportive tools to manage malicious code and malware on your hosted WordPress database.
These tools provide crucial security but not technical support.
That means if your website gets hit by some hackers, it’s up to you, how you can get rid of them.
In those scenarios, you have two options:
However, there are some hosting companies like Siteground and A2 Hosting that claims to provide a secure environment for your website.
Also read this – Best WordPress Hosting Providers
So, always buy hosting from a reputable company.
In addition, you can also install some security plugins such as Wordfence, Sucuri, etc.
About 64% of websites on CMS are on WordPress.
This means that the number of hacks on WordPress is 10000x more than what you see on the Wix.
It is simple maths.
But it doesn’t imply that the WordPress Website is more secure than Wix.
With Wix premium plans, it’s Wix’s duty to protect and deal with any vulnerability that happens to your website.
This made it easy and viable in terms of dealing with online security threats.
But if you are a WordPress user, your website security is your duty. And for beginners, it could be hard.
My Verdict: Every website can be hacked whether it is Wix or WordPress. However, Wix tends to be more viable to deal with hacks and online threats with their active 24×7 hrs support.
Plugins and Apps are the addons that give a flexible approach to add certain functionality to the website.
Moreover, these are some of the determining factors for the choice for most of the users who want to add a custom tool to their website.
Let’s have a look at each CMS in terms of plugins functionality.
In Wix, there are more than 300 free and premium plugins that you can use to evaluate a specific feature.
Most of the plugins are made by Wix itself. While some are from unofficial developers.
In addition, you can also conjoin some specific tools to the Wix website using javascript and API set up.
Though the 300 number seems small, you almost get all the functionality that you need. Payment setup, booking, google maps, and so on are some features that you get from the Wix app store.
However, the major drawback— not developer-friendly. That makes it hard to manage websites for big companies.
The most likable thing with WordPress is its flexibility to add codes and plugins.
The WordPress app store has ample tools, plugins, themes, that never end with your imagination work.
The exact number could be in thousands.
In spite of that, you can get the most out of WordPress in terms of adding more functionality to your website.
The free plugins are more than enough to run a successful website.
However, if you want additional features, you can simply download them from their app store or upload them manually.
As WordPress is an open source software, you can hire some developers to code them for you based on your requirement.
There is no limitation except, some plugins can conflict with other plugins and might break your website.
That’s why you should take regular backups of your website. Check the best backup plugins for WordPress.
With Wix, you get all-around accessibility to add basic functionality to your website using their app store, manual javascript, or API integration.
All of these functions can also be available in WordPress. Plus, there are a lot of options, for example: for a backup website, there are 10+ plugins.
Moreover, WordPress gives you more adaptability to add developer plugins—for example: adding custom tools such as a saving calculator.
This can’t be possible in Wix by using plugins.
But one demerit is, some WordPress plugins can conflict with other plugins and may break your website.
My Verdict: If you deal with some plugin’s conflict— the chance of which is very less— WordPress defeats Wix circumstantially.
“I want to sell my product online, which is best? WordPress or Wix?” I would say, it depends.
There are a lot of criteria that you should consider while adding a shopping cart to your website or opening a full shopping site.
So, let’s differentiate WordPress and Wix based on their eCommerce ability.
To add a carting ability to your Wix website, you have three major plugins. All these plugins come with the premium subscriptions of “Business and eCommerce plan” which start at a cost of $23/month.
With this, you can set up a small scale eCommerce website. These plugins are able to create, register new users along with a payment gateway for various online transitions.
You can also use these tools for taking paid appointments for your saloon, restaurants, and even as a consultant charge.
However, Wix is not recommended to set a true eCommerce website.
With the WooCommerce plugin, WordPress is considered to be the most favorable CMS for starting a true eCommerce website.
WooCommerce plugins don’t only do all the stuff that the Wix plugin can do but are also capable of generating tax invoices for your product and services.
It is also compatible with various payment gateways such as PayPal and Pioneer to accept international payment.
However, to set up a fully WordPress based eCommerce website, you have to hire some technical employee that can code custom scripts as per your requirements.
Wix, with its premium plans, you can develop a sophisticated eCommerce website. All three plugins do their job perfectly,
However, if you are looking to develop a large eCommerce website, WordPress is better than Wix. But you might need to hire some professionals to manage WooCommerce plugins.
Please Note: If you really want to start a true eCommerce website, I would suggest, you should go with other CMS such as BigCommerce and Shopify.
My Verdict: WordPress is better for both small and large scale eCommerce websites than Wix.
Every site owner has a dream of getting organic traffic.
To get traffic organically, you have to do SEO for every page or post that you want to rank on Google.
Doing SEO is crucial. It is vital. And you have to have a good understanding of it.
Some common terms that I am going to use in this difference between WordPress and Wix are SERPs titles, meta description, customizable URLs, Image alt text, SSL, Google analytic, and 301 redirects.
Wix is quite good at doing SEO.
Wix offers you to change the title of the page, meta description, customize your post URL (but to some extent) and image alt text for your specific post.
Features such as 301 redirects and free SSL— on every premium subscription— aren’t required to install specific plugins.
All the above-listed features are inbuilt to Wix.
But the sad part— first, they are not good at URL structures, secondly, they aren’t good for image-based websites.
The URL structure of the Wix website usually has no option to remove the categories or tags from the URL.
And when it comes to SEO image optimization, though you can add alt text to an image, but you can’t give a specific file name to them.
They are automatically generated on their upload which is alphanumeric.
To a fresh installation, without any SEO plugin, you can’t do much SEO.
However, tools such as link changer, allow or disallow search engine crawlers, and alt text for images are some of the inbuilt SEO parameters.
Therefore, you need an SEO plugin to win the search ranking.
For that, plugins such as Yoast— most recommended, All in One SEO, Rank Math are some of the SEO plugins that you have to install in order to perform the majority of SEO friendly customization to your post.
This includes editing the SERP title, meta description, adding dates to post, ranking factors, etc. are some features that you can get from these tools.
Here, you not only fully customize your URLs but also the file names of your image. Hence, WordPress is better for image-based websites.
In addition, you have to install an SSL certificate from yourself— WordPress doesn’t do this for you. However, the majority of hosting providers can help you with that.
Wix prebuilt SEO features don’t depend on other plugins. WordPress needs some external plugins to do SEO.
To completely define the difference between WordPress and Wix in terms of SEO, the following table gives a detailed listing.
SEO Features | Wix | WordPress |
SERP Title | Yes | Yes, with the plugin |
Meta Description | Yes | Yes, with the plugin |
Custom URL | Yes | Yes |
Image Alt text | Yes | Yes |
Image File Name | Auto-generated code | Customizable |
301 redirects | Yes | Using hosting providers |
SSL certificate | Yes | Configured externally |
Canonical tags | Yes | Yes, via the plugin |
Add Google Analytics | Yes, externally | Yes |
My Verdict: Wix is good at doing SEO without any external plugins. However, using the right set of SEO plugins, WordPress sites can be leveled up to a Wix website.
For bloggers, the essence of writing is far more important than the artibutory design of the website.
Blogger’s major objective is to publish content that is helpful for their visitors.
So, if you want to be a blogger and want to know— from WordPress and Wix which is better, then this portion alone, solves your problem.
The blog elemental design is not like the traditional drag and drop website design.
The blog editorial page has a different layout.
Honestly speaking, in my point of view, it little bit resembles the medium.com blog page.
It is clean. It is simple yet modern.
In the Wix blog editor, you will have a limited option of customization.
Here, you can add different text forms, images, galleries, Gifs, and dividers along with some common features such as adding categories, tags, and post scheduling.
Some pointers that can make Wix a not-so-choice for bloggers are:
It is simply awesome— I mean it.
WordPress offers two sets of blog editors for this post and pages. These are a classic editor and Gutenberg block editor.
Surprisingly, both are good.
The classic editor gives almost all of the same editor window as MS Word. While block editors give you a clean editorial design in form of blocks.
Apart from this, there are other page editors that can be used to add more flexibility to customize a single page or post.
Plugins such as Elementor, Thrive Architect, Divi page builder are good for editing a specific page.
In addition, you will get all the features such as managing tags, categories, RSS feeds, post scheduling, backdating posts, private posts, and many more…
And when it comes to blog editors, you can make your text as well other elements more appealing using various other shortcodes and plugins.
Wix doesn’t offer that many post elemental features as WordPress. It offers just the basics. And you can’t do much on it.
Moreover, you can’t export your comment to different CMS — this is the most deal-breaking element.
On the other hand, WordPress is full of blog elements that help you to post your article in a more elegant way. Plus, all the drawbacks of Wix are covered by WordPress.
My Verdict: No doubt, WordPress is far far better than Wix in terms of choosing a blogging platform.
Server maintenance and uptime are two crucial parameters that govern the stability of your hosting.
When you’re running a big business, you can’t afford to lose any of your customers. Therefore, many of the hosting companies leverage their performance for maintaining uptime close to 100%.
So, let’s have a look at the difference in hosting between WordPress and Wix.
Wix based websites are hosted on their dedicated Wix server.
Though the loading time of a Wix website depends on the number of images a page has. But as per our test, their website performance is fabulous.
Our demo website hits 90+ score every time on the Pingdom tool and 95+ on GTmetrix Score.
This also true for the Google PageSpeed Insight where it hits 89 in the mobile test, and 97 in the desktop test.
All these results are very pleasing.
However, I little bit disappointed with its uptime. You will get uptime with an average of 99.8%.
There is no way that we can compare WordPress —in full— with Wix.
This due to the fact that WordPress websites are hosted on different companies’ servers whose uptime may vary.
However, if you compare most of the leading hosting providers, they can offer about 99.9% of uptime. While some of the companies fail to level to 99.9%.
So, you can say, it totally depends on hosting providers on which WordPress website is hosted.
Wix offers a remarkably stable environment for their premium subscriber with a good uptime over to 99.8%.
While in WordPress, the uptime and server maintenance is restricted to which company you prefer to host your website.
So, uptime may vary.
But if you buy from reputable hosting providers such as Siteground, you will get an uptime of 99.9%.
My Verdict: If you want to have a big website, 99.8% of uptime (about 4 hours of downtime in 30 days) can cost you losing reasonable traffic. So, don’t go with Wix (only for bigger websites). Instead, go with WordPress along with reputable hosting providers.
Switching the CMS is merely not easy. This is a terrible idea if you don’t know how to do it professionally.
This not only can break your website structure but you can also lose your hard-earned google ranking.
Wix is easy to use but migrating from Wix to other CMS such as WordPress could be hard.
Here importing data is very limited.
You can only import posts, pages, and images along with some general settings of permalinks from Wix.
All of the major imports are done using RSS features. That limits the importing ability.
Moreover, you can’t migrate comments—as they are through Facebook. This will hurt the SEO ranking to some extent, especially when your website is competing with higher authority websites.
With its unscalable possibility and open source software, it is much easier to import or export a WordPress website.
Though personally, I never heard of a person who has a well-established WordPress website and he/she has moved it to another CMS, except eCommerce websites to Shopify or BigCommerce.
First of all, don’t switch your CMS.
If it is necessary, I will suggest hiring a professional. Otherwise, you might lose your rankings.
Now, I would say, moving a Wix website to or from another platform is quite difficult in comparison to WordPress.
And I am not going to verdict my option on this.
The online world is very fragile.
You never know when your website needs technical support.
It may be because your website gets hacked, or your website pages are loading slowly, or you mistakenly run the wrong code.
To cope up with this situation, you as a beginner, need support.
So, let’s have a look at these criteria in differencing between WordPress and Wix.
They are ready. They are active. And they guard your website against any online threats and hacks.
For getting their support, you just have to request a quote and help will reach you in a couple of minutes.
To get in touch, you can outreach them via:
You can contact them for any of the issues that you’re facing. Their service is 24×7 active with multilingual language support.
Practically, you don’t need direct support from the WordPress team, unless you’re a developer.
For most of us, we only need a good hosting provider help and support team.
There are few, very active and popular hosting support teams including Hostinger, A2 hosting, siteground, and Bluehost.
With Wix, you will get all types of support related to your website— in one place.
They can help you in your conflicts with HTML or CSS codes along with server related issues.
Conversely, for any issues on your WordPress website, you can’t call your hosting provider to fix the HTML or CSS codes for you, or in case of your website breakdown.
They majorly— as per my experience— do one thing, is that they restore your website from previous backups.
My Verdict: Wix wins here with its all in one support team.
Finalizing between Wix and WordPress could be even harder.
But the following comparison table gives you a flare advantage for choosing a platform for your business.
S. No. | Features | Which is Best? |
1 | Value For Money | WordPress |
2 | Initial Setup | Wix |
3 | Ease of Customization and Use | Wix |
4 | Design Flexibility | WordPress |
5 | Security and Firewall | Wix |
6 | Plugins and Apps | WordPress |
7 | eCommerce Functionality | WordPress |
8 | SEO Marking | Wix & WordPress |
9 | Blogger Friendly | WordPress |
10 | Server Maintenance and Uptime | NA |
11 | Migration and Switching CMS | NA |
12 | Help and Support | Wix |
As per the above table, among 12 distinct parameters, each lightened with:
With the practicality approach, WordPress wins by Wix with one additional point.
But I would say, these pointers alone can’t describe which platform is best for you.
It depends on your own needs and business.
So, I came up with some of the questions that help you find the best platform between WordPress and Wix.
For blogging, WordPress offers you tons of customization options to beautify your posts along with their simple blog editors (classic and block).
While in Wix, you have limited customizable options for your written post, and for more customization you have to use HTML codes that make it difficult for beginners.
Both are equally good. But if you’re going to get a high amount of traffic or you have a large audience, it’s better to go with WordPress because of its 50k+ plugins and themes that make your work easier.
Wix is easy and beginner-friendly. Using the Wix drag and drop menu, you can easily make an attractive website. You don’t need to be good at CSS or HTML. You just have to show your creativity.
While in WordPress, there are a lot of customization options, but they are not in a single window. Moreover, to customize different WordPress themes, you have to hover to different sections. Hence, not beginner-friendly.
As per stats, Yes. But, there is no guarantee for full proof security of any platform because even bigger giants such as Google can also be hacked. However, the best part with Wix is, your website safety is on the Wix team and they do their job perfectly.
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