Wix vs WordPress. Which One Suits You Best?
A website is an extremely important element when you are beginning to launch your online presence efforts because it will give your business credibility and let your customers know who you are and what you have to offer. If you are looking to create a very well functioning website (which you should), how and where you create your website is very important towards achieving this goal.
In this post, we have gathered all the things that matter to you, about two of the most popular platforms out there for creating a website: Wix & WordPress; Our goal is to get you headed in the right direction on your online presence and marketing.
Wix:
Let’s start our assessment by learning a bit more about Wix. This web development platform is fast and easy to use and it’s very friendly for total beginners. Sites done with Wix are in many senses managed by them which as you may suspect has its pros and its cons.
Creating a website on Wix is basically done by dragging and dropping off the elements that you want on your site, to where you want to locate them. It is so friendly that you can possibly have your site up and running (although not likely ranking organically in search engines) in 1-2 days. When you create your site using tools such as Wix, there are better chances that it will look as you envisioned it (esthetically speaking) since you directly alter its appearance choosing the layout and colors of your preference without the need of any programming knowledge.
While it is true that Wix can help you build your site quickly and easily, this usually comes at the expense of lack of certain functionalities and will be directly affected by the capability you have of customizing your site.
Whether this represents too big of an issue for you or not, it’s good to have in mind that Wix might already have all the solutions you need, albeit with some limitations which could have an impact if your site is designed and built for commercial purposes.
WordPress:
When it comes to WordPress, there’s certainly a different tone to it. WordPress is a free Content Management System software that allows you to create any type of website you need. WordPress has become the most used platform for website creation nowadays, it is very secure, robust, and theoretically you could build your site from the ground up without programming know-how, nonetheless, you’d have to spend upwards of 30 hours just learning how to make use of the CMS and it can sometimes become a little messy if you’re not very tech-savvy.
When you are starting to create your site with WordPress you are required to have hosting but the software remains free. It then has thousands of themes and plugins through which you’ll have endless customization options available to pretty much do just about anything need to get done with your website.
There is a thin line you don’t want to cross by adding too many elements or overloading the back-end with plugins that could end up negatively affecting your site (i.e. slowing down your loading times) instead of enhancing it, so once again, it’s worth reiterating that it does demand a certain level of knowledge for its proper use.
If you’re willing to go through the time investment and learning curve involved in you being able to fully take advantage of the WordPress CMS and all its functionalities, it will probably end up being a worthy investment.
Let’s Put Them to the Test: Wix vs WordPress.
There are so many different opinions about Wix and WordPress that sometimes you end up with more doubts than before you began doing your own research. To make things simple for you, we’ve compared Wix and WordPress based on different categories that are important to the user so that you can have a global perspective of their performance.
How easy are they to Use?
We’ve already mentioned that Wix is a more user/beginner-friendly platform due to the fact that it’s easier to move the elements freely, not only when arranging them but also because it directly alters how your site will look, therefore, Wix probably has an edge in the ease-of-use category. WordPress does allow you to create a site looking exactly as you’d like it to, but to do it smoothly and at the same speed as Wix, you’ll have to possess a good amount of technical ability, which can be obtained through tutorials on and off WordPress.
How Effective are they for SEO?
This is one of the most crucial aspects to consider because there is no point in having a nice website if nobody can find it. If your site isn’t ranking, it’s not useful to your business or brand because it isn’t connecting you with your potential customers.
Unlike most opinions out there, Wix does actually have decent SEO tools that are useful, however, the ones available for WordPress have a greater impact on your SEO efforts. You can count on very useful features and plugins like Yoast SEO, minification and cache optimization plugins, Google Analytics integration, and other plugins to really commit on your SEO efforts.
Are they ideal for Blogging?
When it comes to blogging, the same aspects we’ve shared about both apply to this category. You could use Wix for blogging easily, but again, you get very few options. WordPress, on the other hand, covers a really wide territory when it comes to blogging, in fact, when it was originally launched almost two decades ago, they even started as being a platform for blogging. WordPress does take the lead when it comes to blogging, in part due to the WordPress Multisites capabilities which makes it possible to host your own blogging community as long as you have a WordPress website.
Are they Cost-Effective?
If you’re wondering whether these two sites are free, the answer is yes and no. Wix lets you create your website for free, the caveat is that it includes ads and certain restrictions. To access free hosting and other premium features such as being free of ads, they offer 5 main premium packages.
When it comes to WordPress, the software you install to create your site is free, but you are required to pay on your own for a few features like hosting. Other premium themes or plugins could have a cost as well. However, because in WordPress there is a ton to choose from, the price range can be fairly broad, going from almost nothing (simply paying for hosting) to a couple of hundred dollars of investment depending on the themes and plugins you decide to choose.
Let’s compare one of the most popular packages on Wix. The package lasts for 3 years. When we calculate the real cost of it ($524) versus the cost on WordPress ($194) for the same amount of time, you do end up paying less in WordPress. One very important factor to consider is whether you’ll be the one in charge of making the edits on your site yourself or whether you’ll have to hire someone to help you with it, if you need to hire, the costs will be considerably higher!
Management & Control
WordPress is a Content Management System tool, so you do have control over your website. The main issue with Wix instead is that you don’t have the same level of granular control over your website. Generally, even your domain is under their name. If you wanted to export your site from Wix, you simply couldn’t because Wix sites and all of their content is hosted exclusively on Wix’s servers, and cannot be exported elsewhere. Hence, your only other option would be starting your site from scratch again and taking all the previously invested time as a loss. In this category, we do have a clear winner in WordPress.
Site Backups
Backups are extremely important to your website. You wouldn’t want to be in a scenario where you lost all your data and didn’t have a proper backup.
We do always recommend to keep your own backup, but when it comes to these particular platforms, Wix acts as your host so you have to trust that they have their backup even though there’s always a risk of them losing all data as it has happened in the past with other platforms. This scenario, of course, is rare but it’s good to keep in mind. Within Wix, you can duplicate your site at any given time to manually create a backup so it’s a fairly quick and simple procedure.
What happens with WordPress is that they do ask you to have a host anyway. Keep in mind that if you make a big mistake with WordPress you can delete your site and if you didn’t save a backup, all your content and data will be gone. As discussed previously, WordPress counts on a vast range of plugins, some of which you could use to generate a backup of your site.
In this category, due to the simplicity of generating a backup on both platforms, we can call it a tie.
Solving Issues
If you’re experiencing some type of technical problem on any of these platforms, the help you receive from them are totally different from each other. Finding help on Wix is just as easy as creating a site with them because you know that you should get in contact with them directly.
Now, remember that learning curve we talked about regarding WordPress? If you find yourself going through that learning curve, you could easily get lost within the technicalities. It doesn’t mean you don’t have anyone to ask for help, but you do have to know who to call.
If for instance, your site goes down, you should call your host, but another reason why you may experience an outage could be related to outdated plugins or many other factors unrelated to your hosting provider and in such cases, you’re pretty much on your own. When it comes to support, Wix offers better support but that is only because it is designed to provide such support. In the case of WordPress you’ll find most of the support coming from the community itself.
Final Thoughts & Advice
It is obvious that neither Wix nor WordPress will be ideal for every single user out there. After discussing these main aspects we hope to have helped you identify which one is the best for you, because this directly depends on what you’re specifically looking for.
With that in mind, please take notice that if you have a few marketing goals in mind, from a commercial perspective it is wiser to go with WordPress and even though it has its cons, they can easily be worked through with the proper assistance and determination.
If you want to power your site with WordPress and take your online presence one step further but don’t know how, we encourage you to get in touch with us to help you with everything there is for you to know about creating your website.