Wix vs WordPress: Top 9 Differences You Should Be Aware Of

Wix is an all-in-one website builder that’s perfect for beginners and non-coders, whereas WordPress is a self-hosted open-source content management system. This means that with WordPress you build your site totally from scratch, while with Wix everything comes built-in and ready for you to start building.

WordPress is more powerful than Wix, but requires more technological knowhow to use – knowing how to code is particularly helpful if you want full flexibility. In contrast, Wix makes everything as easy as possible – it even has design assistance that can build a personalized site for you!

Wix lets you build a professional looking website quickly and easily, providing pre-designed templates, built-in security, and in-house features. On the other hand, WordPress is ideal for creating complex sites, and gives you full flexibility and control. You’ll need to find hosting, install plugins, run updates, and more.

When it comes to ease of use, the learning curve for WordPress is definitely steeper. A lot of people choose WordPress for its flexibility, but with this flexibility comes complexity.

If you have some coding knowledge, WordPress makes the world your oyster. You can edit just about anything, but you will need advanced technical knowledge to make adjustments.

Alternatively, you can always hire a skilled developer, but that can prove fairly pricey.

While there are limits to Wix, it is designed and built specifically so it’s easy for non-developers to use. You can learn how to use Wix a lot quicker.

Wix is a What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get (WYSIWYG) website builder, so you can drag and drop paragraphs, pictures, slideshows, shopping cart buttons, and more anywhere on your web pages. You can also resize anything in a few simple clicks.

To show you just how easy it is to build a website with Wix, we put this video together:

As for WordPress, the downside is that whatever content you insert into the editor, you won’t see what it looks like “live” until you preview or publish the page.

This is by no means a major issue, but you will have to continuously click back-and-forth between edit and preview modes, just to see how it’s all coming together.

WordPress adds extra steps on another category, too: hosting and domain names. You’ll need to buy each separately for WordPress, but both are packaged into Wix plans, saving Wix users the time and effort that WordPress users will need to invest into finding the best hosting service and purchasing a custom domain name.

Design and customization are things that WordPress prides itself on. There’s practically no limit to how much you can customize your site… but as you now know, it’s not overly simple to do.

Provided you’re comfortable with coding, WordPress allows you to make wholesale changes to its themes, and really put your own stamp on your site.

WordPress has a selection of free templates, or ‘themes’, you can work off – but if you’re serious about your site’s aesthetic, you’ll want to purchase one of its premium options.

While you can buy WordPress themes from a variety of sources, we’d recommend sticking to ones made by the platform itself. This is to avoid paying for a dodgy theme some amateur designer has knocked together.

WordPress premium themes cost between $25 and $299. They’re by no means cheap, but are the best option if you want a slick design that’s protected against bugs and updates.

Wix lets you pick from a massive range of over 500 templates. All these templates are categorized by industry and come pre-populated with example content, to give you an idea of what your final site may look like.

Another nifty thing is that each template will have built-in features which are relevant to the industry it’s categorized under. This can save you time and effort trying to find something like a subscription form for your magazine site, for example.

You can access the code of a Wix template, but it’s not recommended unless you’re technically advanced. You should be able to customize everything you need simply by using the drag-and-drop editor.

If you aren’t bothered about design and customization, or simply don’t have the time, you can always use Wix ADI. This is a design assisted tool that will create your website for you, simply by asking you a few questions about your site’s purpose and your design preferences. To learn more about Wix ADI, read our review here.

Plugins and apps both do the same thing: they let Wix and WordPress users add extra functionality beyond the basics to their website. 

Common add-ons include functions – like adding Facebook or Twitter feeds to a website – or the reverse, like adding a Store section to a Facebook page. Other apps and plugins might help a website owner track their SEO or offer a contact form to let their audience email them with ease.

WordPress is an open-source platform. This means that its codes are open to everybody to use and modify. Any programmer or coder can use WordPress to create their own themes or plugins for others to purchase or download for free.

This is one of the main reasons why the WordPress community has expanded to more than 75 million websites (with most recent stats saying it now powers around 30% of all websites on the internet).  As more people and businesses build websites, WordPress is expected to continue growing.

There are over 55,000+ WordPress plugins, which have been downloaded more than 1.2 billion times, giving you an idea of how extensive the WordPress community really is.

The fact that WordPress is so large is also a potential problem, though. As you can imagine, anyone with a little bit of coding knowledge can build a theme or plugin for WordPress – which carries its own set of risks.

The quality of these tools could be excellent, or they could be junk.

So from this perspective, while WordPress gives you tons of flexibility with tools, a lot of them are mediocre. This is not to say there aren’t any good WordPress plugins available – in fact, there are lots – but you will need to sift through a lot of them to see which ones stand up.

Wix is not an open-source platform. This means that only its private development team can produce website building tools. As a result, Wix’s tools are fully integrated into the website builder, and have a much lower chance of being “buggy”.

Wix is also expanding its Apps Market, so you can add a lot more functions to a Wix website. These Apps are fully integrated, so you don’t have to worry about installation – see our full Wix App Market review here.

If you experience technical issues with Wix’s tools, Wix will fix it for you.

The major difference to cover here when deciding on WordPress or Wix is that Wix has ecommerce built-in. You’ll have to sign up to one of Wix’s dedicated ecommerce plans, but from there, everything you need to sell online is ready and waiting for you.

With WordPress, you’ll need to install an ecommerce plugin in order to sell online. WooCommerce is the most popular option: it’s free to install, but there are some additional costs involved, such as transaction fees. Other plugins in the category include BigCommerce and Shopify, as well as specific ecommerce plugins like the subscription-focused MemberPress or the digital download plugin Easy Digital Downloads.

Wix’s ecommerce features are relatively advanced, but don’t compare to pure ecommerce platforms like Shopify. Wix eCommerce is really for people who want a website that’s capable of selling the odd product here and there. It’s not recommended for full-blown online stores.

The WooCommerce plugin is far more advanced. That said, it’s another cost you need to keep track of, and will again require some technical knowledge to set up. WordPress with WooCommerce is better if you need a website just to sell online, although you may find it easier to use an ecommerce platform if that’s your goal.

Some websites work like brochures: they host nothing but a handful of unchanging webpages, from the ‘About’ page to a ‘Contact Us’ page. But a blog is different. Any website that regularly features new installments in a series of posts comes with its own features.

Both Wix and WordPress offer comprehensive support for a blog. Here’s what that looks like for each service.

Wix offers most basic blogging features: it supports articles, includes categories and tagging, and has an archive of free media like images, videos, and GIFs.

A “Wix Blog” app lets you add contributing authors and lets you blog directly from a mobile device.

However, Wix doesn’t include a great commenting functionality: you’ll likely need to use Facebook comments, which don’t look as clean and might even attract spammers. In contrast, WordPress comes with a native commenting section available only to people with WordPress accounts.

WordPress, which has its roots in blogging, offers almost all the same blogging features as Wix, and adds a few more – including the option to feature a single image across the top of a blog post, and the ability to backdate a post or put it in a private mode that makes it invisible to your readers.

But WordPress is missing one big perk that Wix offers: it doesn’t have a free library of media ready to drop into a post. Instead, WordPress bloggers will need to locate their own free and copyright-free images online at sites like Pexels or Pixabay.

Before we dig into which platform is better in this area, let’s take a step back and understand what SEO actually is.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of making changes to your site to improve its chances of ranking highly in search engine results pages.

There are many tweaks you can make to improve your website’s SEO, and all of these are factored into search engines, like Google and Bing, when they create ranking algorithms.

Still with us? Great!

WordPress and Wix actually have something in common when it comes to SEO – both rely on apps or plugins.

On WordPress, you need to install a plugin call Yoast. Yoast is the number one SEO plugin for WordPress, and is used by over 5 million websites. It offers both free and premium services, although the free option is very limited.

Yoast premium costs $69 to use for one WordPress website, and comes backed with great SEO features like:

• Editing metadata – Changing the text that appears on search result pages.
• Internal linking suggestions – Guidance on the best pages to link to on your website when creating a new web page.
• Redirects – Automatically sending someone to a new URL when you change the slug on an existing page.

Wix also has a bunch of dedicated SEO apps, the most popular of which is Site Booster. Site Booster is free if you’re signed up to Wix’s Unlimited plan or higher, but will cost Free and Combo plan users $3.44/month.

Site Booster also has tons of cool SEO features, such as embedding your company address in search results, targeting keywords, and performance tracking. You can read more about Wix’s full SEO capabilities in our dedicated Wix SEO review.

From a maintenance perspective, WordPress is always updating itself to improve security and fix bugs. When this happens (a few times a year), you’ll also need to update your WordPress website.

If you’re using the pricier but more comprehensive managed WordPress hosting option, your host will carry out any needed updates. In addition, most larger, more reputable theme and plugin developers will update their products for you, but that’s not always the case.

If the theme and plugins you use are not updated by the WordPress developer, you may risk these tools conflicting, and potentially hurting, the performance of your website.

For this reason, we’d recommend thoroughly vetting the WordPress themes and plugins you use. After all, you don’t want to be caught out.

With Wix, all updates are carried out by its technical team, and automatically deployed to your site – you don’t have to lift a finger (and you probably won’t even know the updates took place). This is a real benefit, especially if you are not technically savvy.

Wix is also constantly creating new templates and apps for you to use. The apps can be added to an existing website at any time, but it’s important to know you can’t switch your website’s templates without having to design the whole thing from scratch again.

WordPress has an enormous community of users and an overwhelming amount of tutorials to help you. Again, there’s plenty of great information out there, but separating the good from the bad isn’t always simple.

One option is to hire a skilled WordPress developer to help you set up, configure, or modify your website – but this can quickly get expensive.

If you’re comfortable learning on your own, WordPress’ online guides can walk you through common problems. The searchable guides are split to topics from “Getting Started” to “Security,” making the right article a little easier to find.

Community forums are also available for anyone using WordPress to discuss their troubles with more experienced WordPress users. But the WordPress user base is simply too large for the service to have a valuable dedicated support team.

Wix has a dedicated support team to help its users troubleshoot. It’s also created a lot of help articles and videos, and forums to support you in building your website.  Wix also offers email and scheduled phone support as well.

Wix’s support team will save you precious time – since everything used in its website builder is built by Wix itself, the chances of your website running into serious issues will be minimal.

The amount of money you want to invest in your website is an important consideration, and this can vary wildly, depending on if you use Wix or WordPress.

Wix offers seven premium pricing plans and one free plan. As you move up the packages, you get access to more features.

If you sign up to an annual plan, you can save between 17% and 24% per year, depending on which package you select:

For the Combo, Unlimited, Pro, eCommerce, and VIP plans, Wix gives you a one-year free domain name (valued at $10 – $12) and $300 in advertisement vouchers (Google Adwords and Facebook Ads). So if you use the vouchers, you can make your annual fee back very quickly.

With WordPress, you’ll need to get your own hosting service. You’ll also likely need to purchase a theme, since WordPress doesn’t come with attractive free templates.

A pre-made WordPress theme costs around $25 – $299, depending on how reputable the theme developer is (general rule of thumb: the higher the price, the more reliable it is).

If you want to add more functionality to your WordPress site (such as fancy slideshows, widgets, etc), you can install some free or paid plugins, which may cost around $15 – $70 per plugin. Again, this will depend on the reputation of the developer.

Plus, you’ll need to purchase your own custom domain name when using WordPress, which costs about $10 – $12 per year. You can search and buy a domain from well-known domain registrars such as Domain.com.

This means the initial investment for a WordPress website could range from $140 to $200, or higher, depending on how many paid plugins you pick up.

This doesn’t factor in the cost of hiring a WordPress developer if you want to make customizations to your site.