Wix vs WordPress – Which one is better? (Pros and Cons)

Building a website has become very essential nowadays, especially for marketers and bloggers. It gives you the desired online presence and connects with the audience. You can even start selling through an e-commerce website. Is not that amazing?

But the next question arises, “ how can I build a website which suits my pocket and requirement both?” The solution is definitely a website builder- a company that will develop a stunning website for you. Nowadays, WordPress is a very popular and trusted website builder. You might have also heard about Wix- another brand in website building.

Many of you are curious to know which one is better- WordPress or Wix. Because both of these are trending nowadays. You can make the perfect choice by comparing the features of these two companies. So, let us do a quick comparison on the basis of the following criteria:

1. Price
2. Easy or difficult to manage
3. Scope for website designing
4. Plugins and apps
5. Ideal for blogging or not?
6. Ideal for e-commerce or not?
7. Data portability

Let us see which one is better?

Pricing: WordPress vs Wix

The baseline for choosing the best website builder will definitely be the pricing. Both WordPress and Wix provide a range of plans depending upon the features you demand. The plans you will select should be cost-effective too!

Wix:  For the beginners, Wix offers a basic plan which is totally free of cost. Go for it if you want to get a basic taste of website building. But there are plenty of limitations to this free package.

First of all, you will not get a custom domain name. Rather the domain name will read like this – username.wix.com/sitename. Secondly, the top and bottom sections of your site will be covered with Wix advertisements. These two things will make your website seem quite unprofessional.

Again you will not have access to special apps and features of Wix like Google Analytics, Ecommerce add-ons and favicons. You need to subscribe to a monthly or yearly plan in order to get all the facilities. An unlimited plan comes with a pricing of $12.50/month. While the plan for opening an e-commerce solution is worth $16.50/month. You will be paying extra money every time you buy an extra app from the Wix market.

WordPress: Unlike Wix, WordPress is an open platform, with free resources for everybody. The only fee you will pay for is domain name and hosting. There are lots of different hosting providers out there. A budget-friendly option is Bluehost where you will get hosting service plus a customized domain name for $2.75/month only.

Want to upgrade from the basic hosting? Subscribe to WP Engine. It fetches you managed to host at $29/month. Next comes the cost of extra features or plugins. In WordPress, you will get tons of free plugins. But still, you can purchase premium themes and plugins to give a spectacular look to your website.

Results- Clearly, WordPress has a more variety of plans than Wix because it consists of many independent hosting providers.  WordPress has many free plugins as well, unlike the costly apps of Wix.

Easy or difficult to manage?

The whole idea of seeking a website builder is that you don’t have to code and load your website. Customizing the site should be easy for you.

Wix: Very easy to use. It has a drag and drop system to edit the website design. You can select any element on the page and start editing or reorganizing it. You can easily add new designs, multimedia, or textual content to the webpages. Anyone without complex coding knowledge can handle the website.

WordPress: Drag and drop feature is not available on WordPress. Instead, it allows the user to add new content through a visual editor. There is a separate theme customizer to change the theme settings. You can also use specific themes to improve the look of your website. But one has to learn the basics before jumping into web designing.

Results: Wix is more easier to handle because it does not require any extra knowledge, unlike WordPress. But WordPress offers better themes and plugins than Wix like BeaverBuilder, Divi. So, choose accordingly.

Scope for website designing

It is an important factor as it makes a lasting first impression. Your website must seem catchy and professional to appeal to the audience.

Wix: Here you will get a variety of 500+ templates for your website. They are niche-specific like a business, food, personal, arts, music, blogging etc. These templates are developed in HTML5 and are fully customizable. The big disappointment is that once you select a template, you can’t replace it. You are bound to keep it with small layout modifications.

WordPress: It has in store a myriad of both free and paid templates. The paid themes have better features and quality support. You can purchase them from theme shops like Themify, Studiopress, CSSIgnitor. Whereas free templates can be searched at the directory of WordPress.org. Like Wix, you have the freedom to customize the selected template. Various plugins are too available to change the look. Or if possible you can hire a web designer to make a completely customized theme on WordPress. Unlike Wix, you can change the existing theme to a different one.

Results: WordPress is best because it is preloaded with free themes and has paid templates as well. Customizing and changing themes is easier with WordPress.

Plugins and apps

These are the tools to add new features to your website. In WordPress, we call these plugins. While in Wix, they have been termed as apps.

Wix: A collection of 200+ apps allows you to transform your website for a better customer experience. For example, you can add a gallery, comment section, social media buttons, contact forms, email lists etc. Some of these apps are free of cost and the rest can be purchased.

WordPress:  It offers a huge collection with more than 55,000 free plugins and paid features. Every required feature like Google Analytics, email marketing, members list has a distinct plugin.

Results: Here WordPress clearly wins the game due to its unmatchable plugin library.

Which one is ideal for blogging?

Wix: Blogging demands certain features like categories, tags, videos and image sections, archives etc. Wix fulfills all of them. But the prime thing it lacks is a comment section. The text editor for blogs is mediocre and lacks several formatting settings.

WordPress: It originated as a blogging platform and transformed into a website builder. That is why you will get all the tools for blogging here. Like a Gutenberg block editor, comment section, advanced features like backdated posts, featured images etc. You can even manipulate some plugins to improve the quality of your blogs.

Results: Of course, WordPress is the best choice for blogging as it offers all the advanced tools.

Which suits e-commerce best?

Wix: Without a paid plan, you can’t sell your products. Even if you get a premium plan, the payment methods are limited – only accepts Pay Pal and Authorize.net. The third-party apps available are costlier.

WordPress: It has WooCommerce which has already built 42% of the world’s total e-commerce sites. Special plugins are too available to make selling a hassle-free process.

Results: For online marketing, switch to WordPress because there are WooCommerce and a variety of payment methods. Wix has a limited number of choices.

Data portability

Let us suppose that you are not satisfied with your current hosting provider then what will you do? You will need to transfer all the previous data to your new host.

Wix: Wix doesn’t allow you to export your data to any other host. You can only transfer the blogs not the other multimedia. You will have to download all the content one by one and transfer them manually.

WordPress: With a single click, you can export the entire site. You can backup your entire database, download all the files easily. That too in XML format.

Results: In terms of data transfer, WordPress provides better facilities than Wix.

conclusion

So, this was our list of comparisons between the two top platforms. What we saw that WordPress outranks Wix in so many categories. Now it is in your hand to weigh the pros and cons. So, get going and choose the best platform for your website!