Wix vs WordPress. Which is which? When starting a website, you need to choose a website builder that’ll bring your idea to life. Too bad that you can't use them both, given that they are all ideal options for your business.
Both options guarantee a quality and usable website. They’re also cost-effective and easy to use. These similarities make it hard for some people to choose. They get stuck at choosing and end up wasting a lot of time that they’d use to grow their business.
In this blog, we’ll help you choose between Wix and WordPress so you can start building your site right away. Keep reading to learn the features that make each stand out.
WordPress at a Glance
WordPress is an open-source platform with thousands of plugins and themes to help you conveniently build and launch your website. Open source means that you can access it for free, modify and redistribute it.
WordPress is more of a content management system (CMS). It’s ideal if you want to have full creative control and independence over your website. Note: WordPress website builder is available in two options:
Hosted WordPress
The hosted WordPress is available at wordpress.com. Like Wix, it is available as a software as a service (SaaS) tool for creating and maintaining websites.
The hosted web platform requires you to sign up for a subscription plan to use all the features for building a website.
Self-hosted WordPress
The self-hosted option is the open-source kind you get for free on WordPress.org. You can download and install the software for free on your web server.
However, its free nature means you must buy your website hosting when using this option. On the bright side, it offers you plenty of freedom to customize your website.
You will also enjoy more flexibility with this option. You have the freedom to use plugins and themes that will allow you to develop a website that best serves your business needs.
Wix at a Glance
Wix is a SaaS tool that allows you to design, create, develop, and manage your website without writing a single line of code. The SaaS feature means it runs in the cloud; hence, you don’t have to install it anywhere. All you need is an internet connection to build and maintain your website from any corner of the globe.
Wix is a fully hosted website platform. The platform offers predesigned templates that enable you to create a professional website using a simple drag-and-drop technique.
Let's switch focus and compare the two based on their features and capabilities.
1. Ease of Use
As a first-timer taking a leap of faith in developing your business website, you want an option that will present you with fewer challenges. Simple online research will tell you that Wix is easier than WordPress.
On paper, you can't argue with those findings. After all, Wix offers a simple drag-and-drop technique for creating your website. Moreover, the templates you need to build your website are already predesigned. All the plugins and themes you need to build your website are also readily available.
Wix also goes a step further in automating your website-building process. They allow you to answer a series of questions on your website preferences, and Wix uses the information to help you load your dashboard.
But if you are building a website for content creation purposes like blogs, WordPress still has the edge over Wix on ease and suitability for use. Once you get past discovering your suitable plugins and themes, the rest of the process becomes more manageable.
Moreover, WordPress introduced the Gutenberg block editor to simplify the process of site building on their platform. The editor provides an innovative way to design your web pages using plugins like Beaver Builder or Elementor. The editor also simplifies how you write and edit posts on your site.
2. Mobile Compatibility
Statistics indicate that over 85% of the world's population has smartphones. Moreover, 92% of smartphone owners use mobile phones to access the internet. Therefore, general recommendation is that your website should be seamlessly compatible with all mobile devices.
Achieving mobile compatibility in your website begins at the web-building stage. The web design tools you use could affect your site's mobile responsiveness.
In the past, some websites built using Wix were sluggish in adjusting their layout to suit mobile devices. However, Wix is dealing with these challenges by introducing Editor X.
Also, creating a mobile responsive site is not a problem with WordPress. The tool offers you several mobile responsive themes to create more competitive sites.
3. Customization Options
You cannot improve your website's competitiveness if you cannot customize it to your business needs. Specifically, you want a website builder that offers you more design and attribute customization flexibility.
As you may have guessed, WordPress has the edge over Wix in providing customization capabilities. That is mainly because of its open-source nature.
Their customization differences are noticeable in the following aspects:
Themes and Templates
WordPress mainly relies on themes and plugins to offer you better website customization abilities. Therefore, as imagined, it has more to offer on the themes and templates front than Wix. WordPress offers a more extensive selection of themes and templates when building your website. The templates are available for free or on a premium.
As for the themes, WordPress has greater flexibility. You can use external themes or, better still, create your custom themes through coding. On the other hand, Wix also has a variety of free and premium templates. However, Wix doesn't offer the option to use external themes to customize your website.
Plugins, Add-Ons, and Apps
Both Wix and WordPress have various plugins, add-ons, and apps to customize your website. You use these tools to add options to your website, such as contact forms, social media integration, e-commerce functionality, and chatbot.
Again, WordPress tools offer you more flexibility when adding functionality and feature to your website. The presence of a large developer community working to improve the open-source platform offers WordPress a substantial competitive edge.
The community assures you that you can count on this community for support with these tools and that they are constantly being updated.
Switching Template
One major drawback of using Wix in building your website is that there are no takebacks after choosing your template. The only way to switch your template is to start the website-building process from scratch.
That is not a challenge you have to deal with when using WordPress to build your website. You can switch templates to suit your current website needs.
4. SEO Optimization
SEO optimization is a vital requirement for improving your website search ranking. Therefore, you need a website-building tool that allows you to add SEO plugins and tools to optimize your site better.
Both Wix and WordPress offer you this ability. However, it wins the contest based on the flexibility of the SEO plugins. WordPress allows you to include various plugins and tools for better SEO optimization. You can add tools for onsite SEO analysis, advanced XML sitemaps, and open graph Meta tags.
Wix has prebuilt SEO optimization tools and plugins that are easy to use. You don’t need external tools for SEO like with WordPress, hence your options are limited.
5. E-commerce
The ability to conduct business online has heightened the demand for creating a business e-commerce site. As a result, there’s a huge debate on which website builder provides better e-commerce capabilities.
Statistics indicate that WordPress’ WooCommerce is still the leading e-commerce software platform. It currently controls 39% of the e-commerce software market share.
WooCommerce has managed to achieve this feat because of its customization abilities. You can easily personalize your online shop like how you ever fantasized it to be. The WooCommerce already provides you with the following basic features:
Customizable WordPress themes
Hundreds of official extensions
Product sorting and filter capabilities
SEO integration
Shipping option
Secure built-in payment options like Paypal
Inventory management systems
Unlimited number of products, images and galleries
Product rating and reviews
Better reporting options
Ability to customize product pages using premium themes and plugins
That is not to say that Wix is lagging far behind with its e-commerce game. It’s quite the opposite, Wix e-commerce is working hard to take some of that market share off WooCommerce.
Their competitive strategy is providing a friendlier e-commerce software option for beginners. You will not find an e-commerce platform that’s easier to set up than on Wix.
Setting up your online shop and adding products is much easier on Wix. It also gets applause for having a nicer layout, making it easier for your customers to browse your products.
Moreover, you also get to enjoy the following features with Wix e-commerce:
Appealing product pages
Marketing and SEO integration
Store analytics
Store management
Wix has also been making competitive moves lately, like partnering with Amazon to improve your e-commerce potential. The idea is to expose your online Wix e-commerce store to a larger potential audience by allowing you to connect your Wix store to your Amazon account.
Let’s Help You Design a Standout Business Website
Creating your DIY website is now simpler with the availability of automated website development tools like WordPress and Wix. However, the challenge lies in customizing and optimizing the website to make it competitive. Get in touch with our website building and management experts to help you set up the competitive website your business needs.