If you are planning to build a website for your business, the question of which is the best platform to build a website would have crossed your mind several times. Wix and WordPress are two popular website platforms that can be considered for building your business website.
But out of the two, Wix vs. WordPress – which is the better website platform? This question is not very easy to answer since both Wix and WordPress are efficient systems and both have their own pros and cons.
Hence before choosing the best platform for your website, it is important to understand their differences and determine which of them is a better platform for your website?
WordPress has been in the market for a long time and millions of websites have been hosted on WordPress. Wix on the other hand is comparatively a newer player but it is fast making some impressive strides with its powerful features and great user interface.
Before determining that in the face-off between Wix vs. WordPress which is a better website platform, we need to understand their main difference.
The key difference between the two is that Wix is a website builder whereas WordPress is a content management system. Both platforms enable their users to build stunning websites in a very simple way.
What is Wix?
Wix is a website builder that offers several website building tools allowing you to build a website on your own. It is very easy to use and requires no technical knowledge or coding skills to build a website on Wix. It is ideal for beginners.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a content management system that offers advanced features and customization options for building and managing a complex website.
A CMS helps in customizing the design of your site, adding multimedia, and organizing the content. Building and launching a website on WordPress is a long and complex process.
In this article, we are going to compare Wix vs. WordPress and list out their pros and cons that can help decide on the better choice for your website development needs.
Wix vs. WordPress Ease of Use
Building a website on Wix is very easy. After signing up on Wix, you will be asked what kind of website needs to be created.
Wix will route you to its collection of templates for your chosen category and then you can make your choice and start work on it. You can use Wix’s colorful drag-and-drop editor and also create new pages with the help of a drop-down menu without having to leave the editor.
In comparison, WordPress is a CMS, and working on it, in the beginning, can be a little intimidating. Though there are thousands of articles and tutorials available online on how to create new pages and how to choose the right theme, getting to know WordPress can take a while and is not very easy to understand especially for beginners.
From an ease of use point of view, Wix is a better choice than WordPress as it is simple and easy to understand.
Wix vs. WordPress Price
Wix offers a limited basic web builder version for free however, it is ad-supported. To opt for an ad-free version, one needs to upgrade to the premium version. Their premium paid plans start at $13 per month.
The higher plans offering unlimited bandwidth, more storage, built-in analytics, etc. cost around $17 to $39 per month. The biggest drawback is that with Wix you cannot have your own custom domain name; your website address would be username.wix.com/sitename.
WordPress is open-source software that can be downloaded for free. However one has to understand that you need to have your own domain name and web host to install it. You need to buy your domain name, pay the web host, and purchase any premium plugins or themes if required.
Depending on your budget, you can opt for the basic plan of a WordPress hosting provider like Bluehost which costs only $2.75 per month, including a free custom domain name.
If you are ready to spend then you can go for a managed WordPress hosting provider like WP Engine for $29 a month. The cost of your WordPress may increase if you wish to purchase some plugins or themes; however, there are thousands of plugins and themes on WordPress which are available for free.
The cost of building a WordPress site will increase if you want to use premium WordPress themes or plugins. However, if you don’t want to invest in premium themes and plugins there are thousands of free WordPress themes and plugins available that you can choose from to reduce costs. You can customize your WordPress site using any plugin without having to upgrade the hosting plan.
In the comparison of Wix vs. WordPress for the price, WordPress is a better option as you have the flexibility to choose from the various plans available from a variety of web hosting companies.
The cost of your website will depend on which resources you use. With Wix the options are limited and the main drawback is that you don’t own your domain name.
Wix vs. WordPress for SEO
Optimizing your on-page SEO with Wix SEO is very easy. Adding image alt-text, Meta descriptions, headings, and custom URLs to web pages was never so easy.
With Wix, you can create 301 redirects and hide pages that you don’t want to be searched by the search engines. You can also integrate Google Analytics and Google Search Console for optimizing the website.
However, Wix does not have certain functionalities that can help optimize the technical SEO. The biggest disadvantage of Wix is that it uses Javascript for displaying its URLs, which are not readable by the search engines making it difficult for the search engine crawlers to crawl, thereby affecting the website’s search engine ranking. Because of the Javascript, the code gets bloated on several Wix sites, resulting in increased loading times.
Similar to Wix, WordPress also allows adding of image alt-text, Meta descriptions, headings, and custom URLs to the WebPages. Its permalink structure is comparatively more user friendly than Wix’s.
With WordPress, the users can maintain granular control over every part of their code, right from HTML to CSS. Though WordPress does not have much built-in SEO, it offers several advanced SEO hacks and plugins through its plugin directory.
Rankmath SEO is the most popular SEO plugin which offers suggestions on how to create readable text, how to use the keywords, optimizing the Meta descriptions, etc. WordPress also has several plugins that can help with optimizing technical SEO.
While comparing Wix vs. WordPress for SEO, we can conclude that the SEO options from Wix are probably suitable for beginners, if your business is in a competitive niche, then it is better to go for WordPress as it offers several plugins which can optimize your website for the best.
