Wix or WordPress? Which is the best platform for you to build your business website right now?
Estimated reading time: 9 minutes
This is something I’ve been asked a lot over the last year. For me there is only one winner and you won’t be surprised to hear that I think it’s WordPress.
In this post when I talk about WordPress I mean a self hosted version of WordPress where you pay a hosting company such as SiteGround, Lyrical Host or TSOHost to store the files needed to for your website.
Check out this post for my pick for best WordPress hosting for beginners.
BUT, are there situations where Wix might be the better choice? Well my friends, there’s only one way to find out.
Let’s meet the contenders
WordPress
Up first is the undisputed ruler of the internet WordPress who, at the time of writing, powers almost 30% of all websites. That’s around 75 million!
It’s an open source (anyone who can write code can help build it) content management system.
You can choose from a huge number of themes, which are effectively layout templates for WordPress sites, and plugins which are small apps that add extra features to your website.
A content management system or CMS is a software that facilitates creating, editing, organizing, and publishing content. WordPress is a Content Management System, that allows you to create and publish your content on the web.
WP Beginner
Wix
We have the challenger Wix, the all-in-one website builder. Wix will take you step by step through the whole process of creating a website from start to finish without having to leave the site.
It comes with a huge array of templates suitable to your business niche including restaurants, hotels, musicians and photographers to name a few.
Building pages and writing blog posts is dead easy with the Wix drag and drop editor.
Wix or WordPress? Let’s get stuck in
Enough of the niceties, let’s get down to the nitty gritty. Here I’m going to talk about the main factors I look for when choosing a website platform.
I’m going to be looking at cost, how easy they are to set up, how easy it is to create pages and blog posts, and their unique features.
Ay oh, let’s go!
Cost
So the first thing I’d like to look at when I’m talking about whether to choose Wix or WordPress is cost.
Ok so as much as we’d all like to pretend that we want to choose what’s best for our business, cost has a significant impact on what we choose. It’s not selling out, it’s choosing the best option for us and our business at the time.
So here I’m going to go through the costs of both platforms.
WordPress
Where WordPress is concerned there are 2 costs that we need to look at to get the full picture of how much you’ll likely need to pay out. Domain name and hosting.
Domain name
Your domain name is the bit after https://www. For example the domain name for this site is kimscotland.com
You can buy a domain name for as little as £1.50 and then the annual renewal price is around £12-£15.
Hosting
You can pay for hosting either monthly or annually, depending on your preference.
My favoured host is Lyrical Host who are a UK based hosting company specifically for women. They offer managed hosting which means they help out with some updates and they have a help desk run by WordPress developers so you can always be sure you’re getting the best help and advice when you need it. Plans start at £13.99 per month and I highly recommend them.
BlueHost are another popular WordPress host who, at the time of writing, are offering new customers their basic hosting package for $2.95 a month (usually $7.99) including a free domain name.
So as you can see WordPress can be a very low cost solution. What I will say is that you get what you pay for when it comes to hosting as far as customer service and website is performance. So always buy the best hosting package you can afford.
Wix
When we’re talking about Wix, there are the same two costs to factor as with a WordPress site, domain name and hosting.
Domain name
You don’t HAVE to buy your own domain for a Wix site but, if you don’t the URL to your website will be username.wixsite.com/sitename, which doesn’t look very professional and won’t be great for SEO either.
So if you do decide that Wix is right for your business I highly recommend that you buy your own domain name. Be sure to check whether or not your Wix package comes with a free domain name before you buy one.
Hosting
You can only get Wix hosting from Wix themselves and they have 3 business plans ranging from the most basic which is £13 a month or their most advanced which is £22 a month.
When you compare Wix’s most basic plan at £13 to Lyrical Host’s £13.99 there’s not much to choose on cost however, with WordPress there aren’t different levels of functionality or features. The price you pay includes everything however, with Wix there are different tiers which increase in cost.
Set up
WordPress
I know that for a lot of people, WordPress can look a bit complicated. You need to decide whether to use wordpress.com (where your site is hosted by WordPress) or wordpress.org (which is what I’m talking about in this post) where you need to buy hosting, then install WordPress on it.
This is a great step by step tutorial on how to start a WordPress website from scratch. It covers some blog specific topics, but overall is a great introduction.
Wix
To set up a Wix website you create a Wix account and choose a layout template to personalise. So it’s here that you choose your colours, fonts and tweak the layout if you want.
You then choose your name and check to see if the matching domain name is available (if you want one).
The Wix basic plan doesn’t come with a custom domain so you might need to upgrade your plan here.
You’ll then get a notification from Wix to connect your domain to your new website.
A quick play around made it [Wix] look super easy (which it really is) so I went for it…
Wix is SUPER easy to use, and I had my blog up and running and looking amazing in just a few hours (if I do say so myself!)
Alice Letters to my Daughter
Creating pages and blog posts
WordPress
Then you start writing posts and creating pages in something that, let’s face it, looks like Windows 95.
That is until very recently when WordPress released their new visual editor. I have to say that I’m in love with Gutenberg (I can hear my long time readers groaning at the back there). Yes it’s had teething problems, but I promise that once you get the hang of it you will enjoy using it as much as I do.
Wix
Creating posts and pages is quite straightforward on Wix, you just click the Create a Post button, then you’re away. Free to drag and drop your elements on screen.
You’ll find a whole host of tutorials on managing blog posts and pages here.
Features
Wix
Online payments
You can take online payments as standard with any Wix business package, something you need a plugin to do in WordPress.
Desktop and mobile view editors
When I came across this, my first thought is that this could actually be quite handy. Often if I want to check how my sites look on different screen sizes I either use a mobile of tablet to manually check, or I change the size of the window.
App Market
Wix look to be trying to follow the WordPress plugin model by adding apps to their app market.
From what I can see they work in a similar way to WordPress plugins but the amount of choice is much less than for WordPress.
At the time of writing, Wix have 260 apps available on their app market compared to over 50,000 of the WordPress plugins that are available.
WordPress
Drag and drop images straight into he visual editor
If you don’t feel like going to the effort of adding images to your WordPress website via the media library, because you know that adds extra clicks, you can just drag and drop from your desktop. How cool is that?
Embed blocks in the visual editor
This is the thing that got me raving about Gutenberg, the new WordPress visual editor. Literally, all you need to add a piece of content from social media or YouTube is the link.
The block will then add the preview and controls (e.g. play/pause/stop for a YouTube video). What this means is that you don’t have to waste precious space on your host uploading videos, when you can just upload them to YouTube and embed the YouTube video in your post with just a link. Rather than messing about with code, which is what you needed to do with the classic editor.
Plugins
Plugins are little apps that you install on your WordPress website that add extra features to it. It could could be something behind the scenes like a bit of extra security, buttons to share your posts and pages to social media or something as big as adding an actual shop to your website.
For me – this is one of the key draws to using WordPress. They’re what allows every WordPress blog or website to be unique, despite starting from the same base.
I want to take a moment to say that pretty much anything Wix allows you to do, it’s very likely that someone has written a plugin to do the same in WordPress.
Online payments – take your pick of Stripe, PayPal or anything else you can think of.
Integrated email campaigns and subscribers – you’ll find plugins to connect your site with the main email service providers including MailChimp, Mailerlite and ConvertKit.
Wix or WordPress – which should you use?
For me, WordPress comes out on top in pretty much every category.
Because it’s open source, anyone can create new plugins and themes, meaning that there are themes and plugins to suit everyone, no matter what your business does.
Since WordPress released the visual editor, I think it’s made it a more attractive choice for beginners. There’s no more of that Windows 98-esque user interface. It’s well and truly dragged WordPress into the 21st century.
Don’t get me wrong, if all you want to do is create a hobby blog, then Wix is probably your best option. There’s much less of a learning curve involved as a whole, and getting it set up is a breeze especially with the way it takes you through the whole process step by step.
But as far as the question Wix or WordPress goes, WordPress is king, and I think it’s going to take some beating for it to give up the crown.
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Hello Blog Genie, I love your website! I’m a beginner blogger but I’m still weighing the pros and cons. I currently have a fulltime job and I’m limited to time, I’m considering Wix because it costs less than Word Press. While WP has many bells and whistles, not all of them are the greatest. I’m not a Wix supporter nor a WP supporter. When I see WIX you can compare it to Apple (iOS), everything is vetted, harder to hack and it’s very solid in operation, although limited to apps and limited to modifications. When I look can compare it to WP it’s like Android (Windows which is a different operating system, but you get my drift), way more apps and way more customizable options. (I haven’t completed my website, it’s still under the testing phase, and I will also be trying Word Press as well)
I think in my case time and money for the beginner would be WIX. In the long run when you are making money with your blog, WP. I’ve heard horror stories about transferring data to Word Press and vice versa. Plan: Do my editing on a word document and then copy and paste it to my blog, so I will always have a backup.
Depending on which Wix plan you choose, WordPress can actually be cheaper. All you need to buy to get started with WordPress is your domain name which is around £5, and you can get hosting from as little as £5.99 a month – and you won’t have to put up with ads on your site at all.