Wix vs WordPress 2019 – What is better for blogging, business and SEO?

WordPress is an open source platform, so everyone can contribute to it or modify the code.

Developers can build upon it by developing thems and plugins.

This is the reason why WordPress is this giant colossus with its’ big community behind. WordPress is already powering one fourth of all websites on the internet and this number is expected to grow.

At the time I’m making this review, we got a whopping 54,373 plugins available for free in the plugin directory of WordPress. It’s safe to say, that’s a big community.

But with such a big community there also come some drawbacks with it.

Since the community is so big and everyone can contribute to it, there is no way for WordPress to test every plugin or theme that is out there available for download.

So there are tons of really bad coded plugins out there, some also might cause security risks.

I myself know people that shy away from WordPress because they heard that WordPress websites get hacked over and over again, until I tell them what the real reasons are WordPress sites get hacked (hint: it’s not WordPress).

Too many people download activate these plugins plugins riddled with vulnerabilities, or neglect to update their WordPress site or the plugins and that of course causes the problem.

If you put in effort to use as little plugins as possible or only go with paid plugins from marketplaces like codecanyon where you can see that the developers put constant effort in updating the plugins and also make sure that your WordPress site is well mentainenced (and that’s literally checking in once a month to see if there are any updates) you should be good to go.

But now let’s talk about Wix. Wix is not an open source platform as WordPress is, so their code is not available to the public, which in turn leads to no influx of bad coded plugins and extensions, like it’s the case with WordPress.

So everything you will see on the Wix app marketplace can be used without concern, because the development team of Wix checks for compatibility and these plugins come with ongoing support.

So if you encounter any issues with a Wix app from their app store message the support and they will get the issue resolved for you. If you use WordPress on the other hand you might run into issues and there is no support available to help you or it takes ages for the support to get the issues resolved (usually that is not the case with paid plugins).

And last but not least the the available plugins and extensions of functionality of the WordPress plugin directory vs the Wix app marketplace.

While Wix continuously adds more apps and features to their marketplace they can in no way compete with WordPress. Wixs’ app marketplace covers a lot but the availability and flexibility you have with WordPress and it’s plugins is insane. Literally. I can’t think of anything you can’t do with WordPress, except you want to create a customer interface for bank transfers for a bank or a website like Amazon or so, well then both WordPress and Wix might not be the best idea.

In terms of ease of use and possibilities to edit and make changes to the website without being a developer both website platforms are beginner friendly while it might take you more time to understand WordPress than it would take you with Wix.

To make layout changes in WordPress it would take you actually way more time to acquire the knowledge and skills, because you would need to know HTML and CSS and how everything in WordPress is interconnected.

You can use visual editor plugins and themes though to circumvent such issues but more on that later.

That is definitely not the case with Wix. Wix was designed for a complete beginner and non-developers. To fully comprehend everything you can do with Wix it will take you a lot less time and effort than it would take you with WordPress.

Wix uses an WYSIWYG Editor (that’s short for What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get). With a WYSIWYG Editor you can drag and drop elements such as paragraphs, headlines, images, entire sections, buttons, etc. directly to the spot where you want it to be. If you change something or drag something from left to right that is how your website will look – so there is no chance of not getting the result that you want to see.

With WordPress you don’t have something similar out of the box (but again you can use visual editors that do literally the same – my favorite visual builder is Divi).

In WordPress your editor looks like this:

You won’t see how your website looks until you hit publish or update the page you are working on. If you are not using a visual editor with WordPress and are not skilled enough with HTML and CSS you will have a pretty hard time doing the adjustments yourself.

WordPress has no dedicated support, however you can get support from your webhosting company sometimes but since WordPress has such a huge community you will probably have all your answers answered if you type the issues that you’re having into Google and click on the WordPress forums. If you have more development related questions you can also check out stackoverflow, that’s where I get most of my answers from.

If for some reason the problem you are facing has not been answered before, simply ask a question in the community forum and you should get an answer fairly quickly.

If you have the right budget though you can always hire a developer on Fiverr or Upwork but be aware that cost you quite a bit. A few code changes here and there and you might get a $100 bill from them.

Wix on the other hand has a dedicated support that will help you whenever you are finding yourself having troubles with the platform. They also created a ton of articles and videos in addition to their forum to help you out whenever you’re having issues plus they also offer you email and phone support.

In a nutshell: When you are having issues you will probably find the answers with both WordPress and Wix however it might take you quite some time to dig through forum posts or YouTube tutorial videos to find what you’re looking for while a simple issue might be resolved with a quick and easy support request if you were using Wix.

Here comes the problem I was talking about earlier. While WordPress updates its’ platform a couple of times every year to fix bugs, improve website security and add features you need to be aware of it and update the website yourself (unless you are using auto-updaters).

2 bad scenarios:

• If you don’t update WordPress, your WordPress theme and your plugins on a regular basis you run into the risk of being a victim of a hacker.
• If you update WordPress you run into the risk of your plugins / themes not being compatible anymore (if you use a lot of plugins from all kinds of sources that don’t get updated and cross checked with other plugin / theme developers).

You can circumvent these 2 issues by using paid themes and plugins from codecanyon or my personal favorite Divi by elegantthemes. Divi has so many users, the team behind it makes sure it’s compatible with other plugins and other plugin developers make sure their plugin is compatible with other themes that get used by a lot of people.

So if you follow my advice you should be good here otherwise you might run into compatibility issues and that might cause display errors or a decrease in performance or worse: both.

Wix gets updated as well but unlike WordPress you don’t have to do it on your own. The tech team carries out the updates and will automatically deployed on your Wix website. You won’t have to do anything and you won’t even know that an update happened unless you read their development log or they make a big announcement that there are coming new features to the platform.

That is pretty awesome because you don’t have to put a single second of thought into maintenance work and updating your website.

So if you don’t have an issue with updating your website yourself or paying someone to do it, WordPress is alright. If you can’t spare 10 minutes per month on checking updates or simply don’t want to – by all means – use Wix. Their websites are set and forget but if you want to continuously add to your website and make it better you will be spending time on it anyways, so WordPress shall be good as well.

If you have a ton of money to spend then go ahead and skip this part but if you don’t then listen carefully. So you have to be aware that with Wix there are several different pricing plans.

There are 4 website plans (which means to option to sell stuff with their own ecommerce functionality) and 3 ecommerce pricing plans (so you can sell stuff).

Let’s talk about the website plans:

Their cheapest plan is the Combo plan and starts at $11 per month. THis includes a custom domain and no Wix branding.

By adding $3 more to the monthly bill you can get the Unlimited plan which includes $300 ad vouchers and a form builder as well as a site booster app.

The Pro plan at $19 per month is in my opinion a bit useless. The additional features don’t really offset the additional cost even though they say they come with $300 ad vouchers (on a side note you can get them from the ad networks Google and Bing anyways).

If you want to Wix to stand by your side every time you have an issue you might want to sign up for the VIP plan, because that way you get priority support. Be aware though it will cost you $29 per month.

If you only want to have a website without any ecommerce functions I’d say you shoud get the Unlimited plan that way you get the biggest bang for the buck.

If you want to sell stuff on your website you should check out the ecommerce plans that Wix is offering you.

The cheapest plan there is the Business Basic coming in at $20 per month while Business Unlimited costs you $25 per month and Business VIP at a whopping $35 per month.

The only plans I would choose right here is the Business Basic at $20 that way you also get the ad vouchers worth $300 or the Business VIP plan if you are in dare need of super fast support.

The Business Unlimited plan is rather useless here and to be completely honest I would just stick with the Business Basic because spending $180 more per year just does not seem worth it in my opinion.

So the actual cost of running a Wix site ranges anywhere from $132 to $420 per year.

Now let’s look at WordPress…

WordPress itself, the open source software, is free. The only cost you carry is the domain ranging anywhere from $10 to $30 per year and webhosting that’s usually between $10 to $30 per month but is paid 12 months in advance in general.

Now if we would do the simple math and use Bluehost for webhosting as I did in my WordPress website tutorial it would cost you $65 the first year (including domain).

But in general plan in at least $90 per year to run a website with WordPress.

Now this is the rough cost of running a WordPress website without any additional plugins nor a custom theme and you can do that, it’s totally fine but don’t expect anything too fancy (don’t get me wrong you can create stunning websites with free WordPress themes and plugins but it will take you a lot longer).

Let’s add in at least a premium theme. They usually range from $25 to $60 on Codecanyon or if you would take my top recommended theme Divi, that would be $249 for a lifetime purchase or $89 per year.

As you can see the costs can shoot up quite a bit if you want some extra stuff.

On some other comparisons people factored in costs of a developer but I think this is BS. If you need a developer to do something then it will be probably some sort of functionality you can’t have with Wix anyways so I think that’s really not smart to add that in, because you can do way more stuff with WordPress and its’ plugins and that pretty easily without being a developer or code-savvy.

Wix vs WordPress SEO

Now a very important aspect when choosing on which platform you are building your website on is SEO – Search Engine Optimization. While Wix gives you SEO options, WordPress is running laps around Wix when it comes down to SEO.

I am not going to bash on Wix since I think it’s an awesome platform to build your website on and some clients of mine use Wix and it’s great – I however build all my websites with WordPress since I need more advanced SEO capabilities and have more control over the website architecture, URL structures and template setup.

If you plan on learning more about SEO and doing SEO yourself or hiring someone to do it for you, it’s a wise choice to stick with WordPress here.

Wix vs WordPress: The FAQs