Wix vs WordPress – Which One is Better? (Pros and Cons)

We’ve worked extensively with WordPress, but we understand why users often consider Wix instead, especially with its appealing TV commercials.

WordPress is the world’s most popular website builder, and it has earned that reputation through flexibility and features. But it’s not the only choice, and many newcomers wonder if Wix might be a better fit for their needs.

In this article, we will dive into a side-by-side comparison of Wix vs. WordPress, covering the pros and cons of each. With our insights, you’ll get a clearer view of which platform suits your project best.

Note: This article compares Wix vs. self-hosted WordPress.org, NOT WordPress.com. See the difference between self-hosted WordPress.org vs. WordPress.com sites.

We have broken down this comparison into different categories:

Let’s see how Wix and WordPress stack up into each of these categories.

Pricing and Costs

The cost of building a website is a major factor when choosing a platform. We know how important it is to find a solution that meets your needs and stays within budget. Our goal here is to help you get the best value for your investment.

Let’s compare the pricing of Wix and WordPress to see which option gives you more flexibility for the cost.

Wix Pricing Comparison:

Wix offers a free basic website builder. However, we found two major limitations with this free plan.

First, Wix adds branded ads at the top and bottom of your website. Second, you’re limited to a Wix subdomain, so your site address will look like username.wix.com/sitename rather than a custom domain.

Additionally, the basic plan doesn’t include essentials like Google Analytics, favicons, or eCommerce features. To remove ads and access premium features, you’ll need to upgrade to one of their premium plans.

Each Wix premium plan comes with different storage and bandwidth limits.

The best value plan from Wix is their Core plan at $29 per month.

If you need eCommerce capabilities, their Business plan at $36 per month includes standard eCommerce features.

Note that these costs do not include additional apps from the Wix App Market that you may want to purchase to expand your site’s functionality.

WordPress Pricing Comparison:

The WordPress software is open source and free to use, which is one of the reasons it’s so popular.

We often get asked why WordPress is free and if there’s a catch.

The main thing to remember is that you’ll need a domain name and web hosting to use WordPress.

There are several great hosting options available. For more information, see our guide on choosing the best WordPress hosting company.

For those starting, we recommend a basic plan from Bluehost, which starts at $1.99 per month and includes a free custom domain name.

Why We Recommend Bluehost

• We’ve used Bluehost ourselves and found it reliable and fast. (See our Bluehost review for more details)
• It’s affordable and offers a free domain name.
• It provides 24/7 customer support, which is great for beginners.

If your budget allows, you may want to consider a managed WordPress hosting provider like SiteGround (Starting at $2.99).

WPBeginner and many of our partner companies are hosted with SiteGround. See our case study explaining the reasons for switching to SiteGround.

For more WordPress hosting recommendations, see our pick of the top WordPress hosting companies.

Your total WordPress costs may increase if you opt for premium themes or plugins (similar to apps for WordPress).

However, thousands of free themes and plugins are available, allowing you to add features to your site without upgrading your hosting plan.

For more details, see our guide on how much it costs to build a WordPress website.

WordPress also supports eCommerce out of the box. You can use the free WooCommerce plugin to create an online store on your WordPress site.

For a detailed cost analysis, see our article on how much it costs to build an eCommerce website.

Conclusion:

WordPress outshines Wix with flexible plans from multiple hosting providers. Your choices determine your costs, and WordPress offers full control over customizing your website.

Ease of Use Comparison

Most beginners choose Wix or WordPress because they don’t want to hire a website designer. Both Wix and WordPress allow you to create websites without learning to code.

Let’s examine which one is easier to use for beginners with no coding experience.

Wix:

Wix comes with powerful and easy-to-use tools to build your own website. It offers a simple drag-and-drop interface where you can select any element on your site and start editing it in a WYSIWYG interface.

You can drag and drop items anywhere on your site, rearrange things on your pages, write content, and add media in a user-friendly environment. Many beginners would find this feature a blessing as it saves them from dealing with code.

WordPress:

WordPress comes with an incredibly powerful WordPress block editor that allows you to edit your pages with a live preview.

This allows you to create visually stunning layouts by adding blocks. There are blocks for all common elements like text, headings, buttons, background images, galleries, and more.

WordPress also gives you access to thousands of themes (website templates) to use on your site.

Each of them is also completely customizable using the live theme customizer or the full site editor.

Need even more code-free ways to edit your website visually? WordPress has some of the most intuitive drag-and-drop page builder plugins. These drag-and-drop editors provide you with even more tools to create professional-looking websites without writing code.

For example, you can use a page builder like SeedProd or Divi that lets you build completely custom websites without writing any code.

These options give you many more choices and tools to edit your website.

Conclusion:

Wix and WordPress are tied in terms of ease of use. Both offer easy, code-free ways to write content, create pages, and manage business and eCommerce websites.

Wix does a great job with its editor interface, but it lacks advanced capabilities. WordPress offers ease of use that can be extended with a slight learning curve, which is great in the long run.

Design and Layout in Wix vs. WordPress

Your site’s design and layout play an important role in your success. Every site owner needs a web design that’s not only good-looking but also user-friendly and makes their brand stand out.

Wix:

Wix comes with more than 900+ pre-made templates to choose from. All Wix designs are fully responsive and written in HTML5.

Using the built-in tools, you can further tweak your site design, change the layout, and rearrange items as you see fit.

Designs are available for every kind of site. Templates are divided into categories like business, eCommerce, hobbies, arts & crafts, personal, and more.

One big disadvantage is that once you have selected a template, you cannot change it. You can modify it and customize it as much as you want using only the built-in tools, but you cannot switch to another template.

WordPress:

There are thousands of free and paid themes available for WordPress.

Free themes come with limited support, but they also go through a strict review process. Paid themes generally offer more features and come with premium support options.

WordPress themes range from small personal sites to full-fledged eCommerce sites. Most themes come with built-in customization options of their own. You can also use one of the many styling plugins to further style or customize your WordPress themes.

Users can download free themes from the WordPress.org directory. For paid themes, there are several WordPress themes and theme shops like Astra, StudioPress, Themify, CSSIgniter, and more. See our list of the best commercial WordPress theme shops.

Furthermore, you can hire a developer or learn to create a custom theme for your company.

You can also use a plugin like SeedProd, the best drag-and-drop website builder, to easily create custom WordPress themes without coding.

You can also create landing pages, sales pages, product pages, or even a coming soon page, regardless of your theme.

For more details, see this tutorial on how to easily create a custom WordPress theme using SeedProd.

More importantly, you can change your WordPress theme and use a different theme anytime. This allows your website design to grow and evolve with your business.

Conclusion:

WordPress has a much larger range of themes and design layouts than Wix. WordPress users can also easily switch themes or customize them as much as they want without restrictions.

Plugins and Apps

Plugins and apps are like third-party extensions you can use with your platform to add more features.

Wix calls them apps, and in the WordPress ecosystem, they are called plugins.

Let’s compare apps and plugins available on both platforms and what you can do with them.

Wix:

Wix comes with 500+ apps that you can add to your site. These apps offer a wide range of features like adding contact forms, an image gallery, comments, social media buttons, email marketing, and more.

Many of the apps are free or have a lite version. Other apps require monthly payments and vary in price. Even though there is a limited collection of apps, they cover the most commonly requested features by site owners.

WordPress:

At the time of writing this article, more than 59,000+ free plugins are available in the WordPress.org plugin directory alone. Not to mention, premium plugins are available on other marketplaces.

The saying goes: if you can think of a feature, a WordPress plugin probably makes it happen.

Whether you want to create a contact form, install Google Analytics, build a membership website, or sell online courses, there’s a plugin for that.

You can do just about anything you like with WordPress. There are plenty of plugins, both free and paid, which you can use to build the website of your dreams.

Check out our list of the best WordPress plugins for more recommendations.

Conclusion:

WordPress easily beats Wix in this area as well. Even though Wix’s app library is growing, it is still limited compared to the huge choice available to WordPress users.

Wix vs. WordPress – Which One is Better for Blogging?

Many users are looking for an easier platform to start blogging. Wix and WordPress can both be used to create blogs. Let’s take a look at which one does it better.

Blogging with Wix

Wix allows you to easily add a blog section to your website. It has all the basic blogging features you’ll commonly use. For example, categories and tags, photos and videos, archives, etc.

Comments on Wix blogs are slow and not as easy to manage as WordPress. Many users end up installing third-party commenting systems like Facebook or Disqus, both of which require users to create accounts.

It also lacks features like backdating posts, creating private posts, and more.

The writing interface for blog posts differs from that of the Wix website builder. Instead, it uses a plain text editor, which is very limited in formatting options.

Blogging with WordPress

WordPress started as a blogging platform and evolved into a full-blown website builder. Today, it powers over 43% of all websites.

It has all the blogging features you’ll need, like a native commenting system and all the advanced features that Wix lacks.

It comes with the powerful Gutenberg block editor, allowing you to create beautiful layouts for your blog posts.

Most importantly, you can extend your blog using plugins and add any feature you can think of.

Conclusion

WordPress outshines Wix as a blogging platform. Wix blogs are too basic and lack several important features. If you are thinking about starting a blog, then Wix doesn’t even come close to WordPress.

Wix vs. WordPress eCommerce Comparison

Selling things online is another important feature that most beginners look for. Let’s see how WordPress and Wix compare in eCommerce.

Wix:

Wix offers eCommerce with their paid plans. This means users with the free plan cannot run their eCommerce store on Wix without upgrading to a paid plan.

With Wix Stores, you can accept payments using their native payment system or third-party apps to connect to different payment gateways, including PayPal, Authorize.net, and more.

If you choose to use Wix Payments, they charge 2.9% of the transaction amount + 0.30 USD for the US region. As you sell more products, this processing fee becomes substantial.

There are a few third-party apps that you can use to help promote your store and sell things online. The overall features of the eCommerce platform are limited, too.

WordPress:

WordPress makes it super easy to create your online store using WooCommerce, which is the most popular eCommerce platform in the world.

WooCommerce supports popular payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal, Klarna, direct bank transfers, and more.

Plus, there are no additional transaction fees. You only have to pay your payment processor fees, which you have to pay with any platform.

Plenty of other eCommerce plugins are available for WordPress that you can use to sell physical or digital goods, services, events, subscriptions, and more.

WordPress is also the best platform for selling digital subscriptions using MemberPress. It allows you to sell online courses, pay-per-view content, and membership plans for your online community.

Alternatively, you can use the WordPress plugin Easy Digital Downloads to sell digital downloads like eBooks, music, software licenses, and more.

If you don’t want to use a full-fledged shopping cart plugin, you can use WP Simple Pay. It provides the easiest way to accept online payments.

Most eCommerce plugins for WordPress even have their own dedicated themes and add-on plugins. See our list of best WooCommerce themes for some excellent examples.

Conclusion:

If you want to build a proper online store and be ready for growth, WordPress + WooCommerce offers much more flexibility, freedom, and choices than Wix.

Data Portability Options in Wix vs. WordPress

Data portability allows you the freedom to move your content away when you need it. Let’s look at how Wix and WordPress help you move your content and use it elsewhere.

Data portability options in Wix

Wix offers very limited options for moving your content to another platform. You can only export your blog posts in XML format. You’ll have to manually download your pages, images, videos, and other content.

According to Wix documentation, all your content is hosted exclusively on Wix’s servers and cannot be exported elsewhere.

Moving your content to another platform, if needed, makes it a bit difficult. However, you can still transfer some of your content atleast. See our article on how to switch from Wix to WordPress for more details.

Data portability options in WordPress

WordPress is a proper content management system that makes it extremely easy to export content. Its one-click exporter allows you to download your content in XML format.

Since it is a self-hosted platform, you can create complete WordPress backups, download your media files, and even manually export your WordPress database.

You can then easily move your WordPress site to a new host if you are not satisfied with your current WordPress hosting company.

Conclusion:

WordPress is a lot better when it comes to downloading and moving your data. Wix, on the other hand, makes it quite difficult to move your content away.

Final Verdict: Wix vs. WordPress – Which One is Better?

WordPress is far superior to Wix as a web publishing platform for any website. While Wix offers an easy-to-use website builder, you can accomplish much more with WordPress over the long run.

See our guide on how to make a website using WordPress for step-by-step instructions.

Frequently Asked Questions – Wix vs. WordPress

Do you still have a few questions? Here are some of our users’ most commonly asked questions when deciding between Wix vs. WordPress.

1. Which one is cheaper, Wix or WordPress?

Wix offers free plans with a branded domain name and advertisements. Paid plans allow you to remove the branding and use your own domain name. They start at $16 per month and have very limited storage and features. Your costs increase if you want to upgrade to more feature-rich plans.

On the other hand, WordPress just needs hosting and a domain name. For instance, you can start with Bluehost for $1.99 monthly with a free domain name and SSL certificate. Considering that it also gives you the flexibility to add any feature to your website, WordPress becomes much cheaper in the long run.

2. Can I transfer my domain away from Wix?

Yes, you can transfer your domain away from Wix. However, Wix makes transferring your website files and content a bit difficult. For more details, see our article on transferring a website from Wix to WordPress.

3. What are the pros and cons of using Wix?

For a quick comparison, here are some advantages and disadvantages of using Wix over WordPress.

Pros:

• You don’t need to install software or manage updates on Wix.
• It offers a simpler and easy-to-use interface to edit websites.
• Wix is a hosted solution, so you don’t need to worry about backups and security.

Cons:

• Wix is more expensive than WordPress in the long run.
• It is very limited in terms of functionality when compared to WordPress.
• It has fewer design choices and third-party integrations.
• The eCommerce and business features are nowhere near what other platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce offer.

4. Which platform offers more storage and bandwidth?

Most WordPress hosting companies offer unlimited storage and bandwidth. Compared to Wix, which limits the storage space based on your chosen plan. For instance, their basic plan gives users just 500 MB storage, 1 GB bandwidth, and no video hours.

5. Which one is better for SEO: Wix vs. WordPress?

WordPress is better for SEO as you can use SEO plugins and tools to add open graph meta tags, create advanced XML sitemaps, perform on-site SEO analysis, and more.

We recommend using the All in One SEO (AIOSEO) plugin to improve your rankings.

Wix offers some search engine optimization features built into their platform. This allows you to perform basic SEO for your website.

We hope this article helped you compare Wix vs. WordPress and learn their pros and cons. You may also want to see our article on easy-to-start online business ideas and how to increase your website traffic without spending too much money.

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