When it comes to building a website, two popular platforms that often come to mind are Wix and WordPress. Wix and WordPress are content management systems (CMS) that allow you to create and manage your website.
In this comprehensive review, we will try to answer the question the big question, Wix or WordPress, across various aspects, including pricing, ease of use, customization options, SEO capabilities, and more, to help you make an informed decision on which platform is better suited for your needs.
What is Wix?
Wix is a cloud-based website builder that offers an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, enabling you to create a visually stunning website without any coding knowledge. With Wix, you can choose from a wide range of templates and easily customize your site using its user-friendly editor. Wix also provides hosting, domain registration, and a variety of features to enhance your website’s functionality.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a popular open-source CMS that powers over 40% of all websites on the internet. It provides a flexible and scalable platform for building websites of any size and complexity. WordPress offers both a hosted solution (WordPress.com) and a self-hosted solution (WordPress.org), giving you the freedom to choose the best option for your needs. WordPress offers a vast library of themes and plugins, allowing for extensive customization and functionality enhancements.
Wix or WordPress – The Details
Wix Pricing
Wix offers various pricing plans, including:
(NOTE: None of the below options include ecommerce functionality)
Combo
For Personal Use
$16 / month
What you get:
✅ Custom Domain
✅ Free Domain for 1 year
✅ No Wix branding
✅ Free SSL
✅ 2 GB Storage
✅ 30 mins Video hours
✅ 24/7 Customer care
What you don’t get:
❌ No Google Ads budget
❌ No Visitor Analytics app
❌ Social media logo files
❌ No Site Booster app
❌ No Events Calendar app
Unlimited
Entrepreneurs & Freelancers
$22 / month
What you get:
✅ Custom Domain
✅ Free Domain for 1 year
✅ No Wix branding
✅ Free SSL
✅ 5 GB Storage
✅ 1 Hour Video hours
✅ Google Ads budget
✅ Visitor Analytics app
✅ 24/7 Customer care
What you don’t get:
❌ No Events Calendar app
❌ Social media logo files
❌ No Video hours
Pro
Complete Online Branding
$27 / month
What you get:
✅ Custom Domain
✅ Free Domain for 1 year
✅ No Wix branding
✅ Free SSL
✅ 50 GB Storage
✅ 2 Hours Video hours
✅ Google Ads budget
✅ Visitor Analytics app
Events Calendar app
Professional logo
Social media logo files
✅ 24/7 Customer care
What you don’t get:
❌ 50 GB less storage than VIP
❌ 3 hours less Video hours
VIP
First Priority Support
$45 / month
What you get:
✅ Custom Domain
✅ Free Domain for 1 year
✅ No Wix branding
✅ Free SSL
✅ 100 GB Storage
✅ 5 Hours Video hours
✅ Google Ads budget
✅ Visitor Analytics app
Events Calendar app
Professional logo
Social media logo files
✅ Priority customer care
These plans are ideal for informational business sites or for blogging sites. If you’re hoping to sell anything on your Wix website, you’ll require ecommerce functionality. If you’re looking for a highly managed ecommerce platform, it’s worth considering Shopify, read more in our article Shopify vs WordPress. The prices for their ecommerce packages are as follows:
Business Basic
Accept Online Payments
$27 / month
What you get:
✅ Accept payments
✅ Plans and recurring payments
✅ Customer accounts
✅ Custom domain
✅ Free domain for 1 year
✅ No Wix branding
✅ 50GB Storage space
✅ 5 Video hours
✅ Google Ads budget
✅ 24/7 customer care
✅ Up to 50,000 products
✅ Abandoned cart recovery
✅ Sell on social channels
What you don’t get:
❌ Customized reports
❌ Subscriptions
❌ Multiple currencies
❌ Automated sales tax
❌ Advanced shipping
❌ Sell on marketplaces
❌ Dropshipping by Modalyst
❌ Product reviews by KudoBuzz
❌ Loyalty program by Smile.io
Business Unlimited
Grow Your Business
$32 / month
What you get:
✅ Accept payments
✅ Plans and recurring payments
✅ Customer accounts
✅ Custom domain
✅ Free domain for 1 year
✅ No Wix branding
✅ 100GB Storage space
✅ 10 Video hours
✅ Google Ads budget
✅ 24/7 customer care
✅ Up to 50,000 products
✅ Abandoned cart recovery
✅ Sell on social channels
✅ Subscriptions
✅ Multiple currencies
✅ Automated sales tax (100 transactions per month)
✅ Advanced shipping
✅ Sell on marketplaces
✅ Dropshipping by Modalyst (250 Products)
✅ Product reviews by KudoBuzz (1,000 Reviews)
What you don’t get:
❌ Customized reports
❌ Loyalty program by Smile.io
Business VIP
Get the Full Suite
$59 / month
What you get:
✅ Accept payments
✅ Plans and recurring payments
✅ Customer accounts
✅ Custom domain
✅ Free domain for 1 year
✅ No Wix branding
✅ Unlimited Storage space
✅ Unlimited Video hours
✅ Google Ads budget
✅ Priority customer care
✅ Up to 50,000 products
✅ Abandoned cart recovery
✅ Sell on social channels
✅ Subscriptions
✅ Multiple currencies
✅ Automated sales tax (500 transactions per month)
✅ Advanced shipping
✅ Sell on marketplaces
✅ Dropshipping by Modalyst (Unlimited Products)
✅ Product reviews by KudoBuzz (3,000 Reviews)
✅ Customized reports
✅ Loyalty program by Smile.io
WordPress Pricing
The WordPress software itself is open-source and free, but you will need to purchase web hosting and a domain name, as a minimum.
Pricing WordPress is therefore very difficult because it depends massively on what you want to make. For example, say you just want to build a small informational business site with a homepage, about us and a contact page with a contact form you could do that for less than $10 a month, easily, with the breakdown being:
1. Bluehost WordPress Hosting (Shared hosting): $2.75 per month (Includes a free domain for the first year and one-click install for WordPress!) (See Bluehost’s Plans
2. A page builder like Elementor
3. Optional – Elementor Pro has a massive library of out of the box templates for your site, you just need to add your content)
You can read more about the Best WordPress hosting here.
It’s also worth noting that WordPress comes equipped with free ecommerce plugin you can install, called Woocommerce. It allows you to add an unlimited number of products as well as track orders and customer details, all from the WordPress dashboard.
Finally it’s also worth noting that you get a free WordPress website. However, it comes with ads and you don’t get your own full domain, you can read more about it here.
Summary
Generally, WordPress is a lot cheaper but you’re kind of on your own with it (we know, this site is built with it!). With Wix though, the extra price tag does come with constant support from their team and you can rest assured any issues you encounter will be quickly solved.
Ease of Use – Wix
Wix’s drag-and-drop editor makes it extremely user-friendly, even for beginners. The interface is intuitive and straightforward, allowing you to create and modify your website’s design with ease.
Wix offers a wide range of pre-designed templates, making it simple to get started quickly. However, the simplicity of the editor can also limit advanced customization options for more experienced users.
Ease of Use – WordPress
WordPress: WordPress has a steeper learning curve compared to Wix, primarily because it offers more advanced customization options and flexibility. While the initial setup can be slightly more complex, once familiarized with the interface, WordPress provides unparalleled control and customization capabilities.
With a vast selection of themes and plugins, WordPress allows you to create a highly tailored website with limitless possibilities.
Customization Options – Wix
Wix offers a visually appealing and extensive collection of templates that cover various industries and styles. The drag-and-drop editor allows you to easily modify layouts, fonts, colors, and images. While Wix provides a certain level of customization, the options may be limited compared to WordPress. Additionally, modifying the underlying HTML and CSS is not possible in Wix.
Customization Options – WordPress
With thousands of free and premium themes and plugins, WordPress offers unmatched customization possibilities. You can fully customize your website’s appearance, functionality, and layout.
The ability to edit the underlying code makes WordPress ideal for those who require advanced customization or have specific design requirements.
SEO Capabilities – Wix
Wix provides basic SEO (Search-engine optimization) features, including customizable page titles, meta descriptions, and URL structures. It also offers an SEO wizard to guide you in optimizing your website.
While Wix has made improvements in its SEO capabilities over time, it may still fall short in terms of advanced SEO functionalities, such as schema markup and advanced XML sitemaps.
SEO Capabilities – WordPress
WordPress is renowned for its strong SEO foundation. With plugins like Rankmath SEO, Yoast SEO and others, you can optimize your websites for search engines effectively.
WordPress offers advanced SEO features, including schema markup, XML sitemaps, canonical URLs, and more. The flexibility of WordPress also allows you to implement advanced SEO techniques and integrate with popular SEO tools as well as analytics tools such as Google Analytics and the Google search console.
It’s worth noting that much of what will make your WordPress site good for SEO will be reliant on many factors including:
- Your WordPress theme (We recommend Hello Elementor or Astra)
- Your websites page speed (Hosting, caching, image optimization etc play a part here)
- How mobile-friendly your site is (making sure to optimize your site for mobile viewing)
- How good your on page SEO is (headings, images, keyword usage etc, read our 10 Best SEO practices for WordPress)
- Your general User-experience (how quickly users can move about your site and the quality of your content)
Conclusion
Both Wix and WordPress have their strengths and weaknesses, making them suitable for different types of users. Wix excels in its user-friendly interface, ease of use, and all-in-one solution, making it a great choice for beginners and users who prefer simplicity.
On the other hand, WordPress is now very easy to set up plus it offers unparalleled customization options, scalability, and SEO capabilities, making it a preferred choice for experienced users, developers, and those seeking advanced functionalities.
If you’re willing to put in the time, WordPress is easily learnable, it just takes a bit of effort. Once you’ve built your WordPress site, you should find using WordPress fairly straightforward, especially with the huge number of WordPress tutorials online. If you don’t want to spend the time and simply just want an Online presence fast, then Wix will take a lot of headache out of the process for you.
