5 major differences in 2022

A quick search in any search engine will make Wix stand out as one of the best website builders in 2022. And you’ve probably heard of WordPress and how it is one of the most popular platforms for building a website.

When you’re just starting out, making the right choice to build a website can be a daunting task. There are many options available and it’s not always clear which of them might be ideal for you.

In this post, I’ll give you a detailed comparison between Wix and WordPress in terms of ease of use, customization, and cost to help you make an informed decision.

Wix vs WordPress

Let’s start with a brief introduction to both Wix and WordPress.

As you may already know, Wix is ​​a free website builder that you can use to create a website. There are a few simple steps you can take to create websites using Wix. You start by selecting a template and then making the appropriate customizations.

You can create different types of websites with Wix such as a simple blog or eCommerce store, you can even create an event booking website, among other things.

WordPress, on the other hand, is a well-known CMS that also allows you to create and publish all types of websites. As a beginner, it is important to know that WordPress comes in two versions. The hosted version available on WordPress.com helps you a lot and is similar to other SaaS website builders. In this tutorial, we will compare Wix to the self-hosted WordPress.org version, which is a free open source project.

Just like Wix, you can use WordPress to create a simple blog, eCommerce site, or event planning and management portal.

Installation and ease of use

Wix, like many other website building services, tries to make the website building process as easy as possible for its customers. This means that the whole process will be very beginner friendly and you can use its drag and drop generator to get started.

There are many things you need to take care of before you can even begin the website creation process. Wix will take care of many aspects of hosting a website for you in one place. This can save you a lot of headaches during the initial setup.

When using WordPress, you will need to figure out a lot of these things yourself. You will need to be at least somewhat familiar with the basics of hosting and web development in general.

This means that for absolute beginners, using Wix to create a website will certainly result in a simpler and faster setup process. WordPress on the other hand will require relatively more effort in the process.

Designs and layouts available

Wix offers over 500 unique and customizable website templates to choose from when designing your website. You can use some pre-built templates or start with blank templates. The templates are divided into a variety of categories such as Business, Health and Wellness, Travel and Tourism, Fashion and Style, Photography, Design and Music, among others.

WordPress also offers a large variety of free themes (currently over 5000) for you to install and customize. However, not all of them look as refined as those offered by Wix except for a few popular themes. You get a lot more options with WordPress, but the quality of the free themes is slightly better with Wix.

Fortunately, WordPress is an open community and everyone is free to contribute to the project. As a result, many designers and companies have created quality paid themes for WordPress. The primary market for premium WordPress themes is ThemeForest.

When it comes to the availability of templates for initial website design, I’ll say it’s a link between Wix and WordPress. However, you will need to use WordPress if you want complete flexibility for customizing a design.

SEO and analytics

Usually, when people create a website, their goal is to reach as many users as possible. There are many factors that ultimately contribute to deciding how much traffic your website would get, but SEO is important here.

Both Wix and WordPress offer a wide range of tools at your disposal to optimize your website for higher search engine rankings. Both will allow you to add a custom URL structure, meta tags, structured data, robots.txt files, XML sitemaps, and much more.

You will also be able to use content delivery networks and caching solutions, as well as image optimizations for faster and more efficient delivery of content to your visitors.

Another very important thing for the growth of a company is analysis. You must collect and analyze data on the behavior of the different people who visit your website. This will help you understand how to organize the content of the different pages of your website for maximum revenue or any other goal you want to achieve.

Both Wix and WordPress will allow you to perform detailed user data analysis. You can get insights based on a variety of metrics like sales, bookings, traffic, subscriptions etc.

An important distinction here is that all of the SEO and analytics tools are already built into Wix, but you will need to install multiple separate plugins to do all of this in WordPress.

Overall, I would consider SEO and analytics reporting a draw with a slight edge to Wix because it natively supports all features.

Personalization and extensibility

Businesses usually want their websites to be unique and easy to use or navigate to improve sales, etc. All businesses have their own unique needs and the target audience they want to serve. This means that while using pre-built templates is a good way to get started on a website, you will need some customization options to suit a specific set of customers.

Wix offers you a fair amount of customization options. To get started quickly, you can use the built-in templates and customize them further. However, Wix also allows you to start from scratch and build your website with the drag and drop generator. More advanced users who can tinker with the code can integrate advanced functionality into the website with Velo.

WordPress is a completely open platform, so you can customize any aspect of the website you want. You can choose from thousands of themes to install and customize. It’s up to you to make small changes to the original theme or create a child theme that you can then modify further. You can also start from scratch and create a theme from scratch. This gives you absolute control over the look and feel of every single element of your website. The markup, CSS, and JavaScript will be exactly what you want it to be.

This ability of WordPress to meet all of your customization needs gives it an edge over Wix.

WordPress also has a thriving ecosystem where you can access thousands of plugins created by different developers to extend the functionality of your website. Let’s say the functionality you want is not provided by any available plug-in. If so, you can go ahead and implement it yourself.

WordPress is definitely better than Wix if you are looking for customization and extensibility.

Cost

Let’s talk about money now. Which of these two platforms will cost you more to run a website?

It is not possible to give you a correct cost estimate without knowing exactly what functionality you want on your website. However, we can get a rough idea of ​​the starting costs. Wix has a pricing table on their website where they list the monthly costs of a plan that are billed annually. I would like to remind you that the cost and features of the plan vary according to the regions from which the website is accessed.

WordPress alone costs you nothing to use. You can install a copy of WordPress on your local development server and start using it today. However, you will have to pay for hosting and domain registration. Hosting can cost you anywhere from $ 60 per year to several hundred dollars depending on traffic, etc. Domain costs usually start at $ 10 and keep going up. However, these are the costs you will have to pay regardless of which service you use.

This basically means that WordPress is a more affordable solution if you’re not looking to do something overly complex and plan to use free themes and plugins.

Should you be using Wix or WordPress?

Different website building platforms cater to different target audiences. There is no single platform that is ideal for everyone.

When it comes to choosing between Wix and WordPress, you need to ask yourself a couple of questions before deciding which one to use. The table below summarizes everything we’ve discussed so far in the post to help you make your decision.

People who want to get started on a website as quickly as possible and don’t want to worry about technicalities should definitely opt for Wix. Plus, thanks to its ease of use, Wix will also provide better support in case you find yourself stuck somewhere.

Anyone who wants complete control over different aspects of their website should opt for WordPress. WordPress will also generally be cheaper to use. However, keep in mind that upfront costs aren’t the only thing that matters when building a website.