It must be said that there isn’t necessarily a lot wrong with Wix or other similar platforms if you’re looking to build a simple website for your business. Wix can be a great platform for sole-traders like personal trainers, sports teams and other businesses that don’t necessarily need a custom-built website.

WordPress Is Better Than Wix For Themes and Designs

If you’re looking to have your website built quickly and don’t mind having something that isn’t completely bespoke and custom-built, you may want to consider using themes and pre-built website templates. So, the question is really about which platform offers better pre-built templates for your website, and the answer is quite one-sided on this particular point.

With Wix, you’ll be able to get access to more than 500 different pre-built templates for your website. You would still be able to edit and make the template your own by replacing some of the content. These templates are available for a wide range of different industry sectors, including business services, e-commerce, arts and crafts and more. You won’t be able to switch templates on the fly, though, so make sure that you choose the one you want.

WordPress comes out on top in this particular aspect because it has a massive database that contains thousands of different WordPress themes. Some of these are free, and some cost money to use. The sheer level of choice that you have available to you instantly puts it on top of Wix in this instance. WordPress users can also easily customise their templates and switch between different ones on the same website to test how they look without having to keep creating new websites.

WordPress Has a Lot More Available Plugins To Use

A plugin is essentially a third-party extension installed on your website to add more features and functionality. For example, if you wanted to check the SEO on your website, you would get a plugin like Yoast to connect to your website and provide you with actionable SEO insights for each page on your site. So, let’s compare which platform has the better plugin offering for your business website.

With Wix, they have an app marketplace that is viewed inside the website builder. The majority of these apps are free or run on freemium style subscriptions, and there is a lot that deals with contact forms, social media and other digital marketing tools. In total, there are 200+ available plugins for users to choose from. This collection is fairly limited compared to other options on the market, but they tend to cover the most desirable website applications for businesses.

WordPress is a completely different animal when it comes to its available plugins. In total, WordPress has over 55,000 different free plugins on its own native plugin directory, that’s not to mention the countless other plugins that can be found elsewhere, although, for most of these, you will have to part with a bit of money.

It goes without saying that if you need to add a lot of different features and custom building to your site, then you’re going to want to go with WordPress since the sheer number of plugins available ensures that there’s something for nearly everything that you can think of online, ranging from marketing, website performance and many more.

WordPress Provides a More Powerful E-commerce Site Solution

The ability to sell one’s products and services online is one of the biggest reasons businesses decide to get a new website. This is why web developers and website building platforms must include a service that allows people to build e-commerce into their website. So, the question is, which platform is better for adding e-commerce to websites, Wix or WordPress?

Wix allows you to implement e-commerce onto your website within their paid subscription plans. Unfortunately, this means that people on free plans with Wix won’t add e-commerce functionality to their site. Furthermore, the actual payment options are quite limited in scope. Some apps on the Wix marketplace can be used to sell things through your website, although you’re just going to be paying more money to do this. Even then, the payment options and opportunities can still be very limited compared to other platforms. 

WordPress offers one of the most complete and advanced options for e-commerce on the web. This is further justified because 42% of the world’s e-commerce stores are built using WordPress. There must be a reason so many people trust it, right? Not only does WordPress allow you to build an e-commerce store, but there are also hundreds of plugins available that can help you to sell a wide manner of different things such as services, products, subscriptions and more. These are some of the reasons why WordPress absolutely knocks Wix out of the park as an e-commerce store option.

WordPress is Better Than Wix For Your Website’s SEO

If we look purely at the numbers, it becomes rapidly apparent that WordPress is a lot better as an option for website SEO than Wix. An experiment run by Ahrefs that analysed 3.2 Million Wix websites and 3.2 Million WordPress websites yielded some fascinating results when trying to compare the power of the two platform’s offerings. They found that the average domain rating for a WordPress website was 4.96, whereas, for Wix, it was 1.68. This represents a massive difference, and a further explanation of the background statistics reveals why.

Firstly, we should note that Wix websites are notoriously simple, and the SEO tools contained within the Wix Website Builder are also incredibly simplistic. This has resulted in a dataset that is incredibly skewed in favour of WordPress. The study found that 46.1% of WordPress websites experience organic traffic, whereas only 1.4% of Wix websites end up getting any organic traffic. Equally damning was the finding that of the Wix websites that were surveyed, only 0.06% received more than 100 monthly organic website visits. For WordPress, the figure sat at 8.26%.

Going deeper into why Wix is not ideal for SEO. It should be noted that Wix can be a great tool for the SEO basics. Unfortunately, when it comes to your rank on Google and pushing yourself into view of the public, the margins for error are very fine, and most successful SEO strategies rely on some of the craft’s finer elements to actually succeed. The elements which Wix cannot provide.

WordPress Is Better Than Wix For Blogging

When it comes to the world of blogging, there was never going to be any way that Wix could beat out WordPress, barring a catastrophe happening to WordPress or Wix releasing a massive update dedicated solely to their blogging platform. The Wix blogging platform isn’t necessarily bad…it’s just constrained compared to the one provided by WordPress, and some key features are missing that should be there, realistically.

Firstly, Wix allows its users to easily add a blog section to their website with a button click. Once you have your blog set up, you will be able to easily customise it with different post categories and tags while adding images and videos to your blog. Despite these features, the comments section on Wix articles is linked to Facebook, which is not ideal as the comments are not portable. Furthermore, the actual ability to edit and format your text using the Wix blog feature is so basic that it might as well be a cardboard cut-out across each website.

WordPress initially started as a blogging platform, so it’s no surprise that they remember their roots and still have one of the web’s premier blogging tools. It’s currently been estimated that WordPress powers 33% of websites on the web. It has a much more customisable blog interface using the Gutenburg Block Editor and actually hosts native comments, two of the things that really let Wix down for its blogging. You can also connect a wide variety of plugins to your blog for additional functionality.

What is Wix Good For?

It may seem like we’ve been tearing Wix to shreds in this article, and we want to make it clear that we don’t want to make it seem like Wix is a terrible platform. That would be far from the truth. Wix is actually a great platform for business owners and individuals who need a website for their project but don’t want to spend money on a web designer and doesn’t want to go through the additional effort required to use WordPress.

There aren’t many website builders out there that are as simple and quick to pick up on as Wix in terms of ease-of-use. There is a database of different website elements to choose from, and users can drag and drop these onto their website as they require. You can go a step further if you don’t want to create the whole thing from scratch or a Wix template and use the Wix Artificial Design Intelligence. This AI program will take your input about what you want for your website, and it will then build your Wix website based on your needs.

It’s just that for people that need something a bit technical with their website or want to hire a web developer, WordPress is just a much better platform to use due to the functionality and availability of more customisable settings. Furthermore, the wide range of available plugins also helps WordPress have a lot of utility as a web development platform. 

Conclusion

In conclusion, it can be seen that are many reasons why WordPress is likely to be better for your website than Wix. This is first because even if you don’t necessarily have the time to create your own design for your website from scratch, there’s a massive number of both free and paid WordPress themes applied to your website. Secondly, WordPress has a massive quantity of available plugins that can be used to help you customise your website more effectively, whereas Wix doesn’t have a comparable volume.

WordPress also provides a much more effective e-commerce platform when combined with the aforementioned plugins. Wix really begins to lag when it comes to the available payment options and other features that really should be in any e-commerce platform. We also concluded that WordPress provides much more advanced SEO features than Wix does, which puts it ahead for anything SEO-related.

WordPress started itself as a blogging site, which is why it’s very understandable that WordPress has much more advanced and fit for purpose blogging tools than Wix does. It’s much more open to customisation and allows for some great designing using their own block editor.

Finally, it was highlighted that Wix is not actually a bad platform. It does the basics really quite well. It’s only when something more advanced needs to be done to the website that Wix starts to show its limitations. So, for one-person businesses and personal hobby websites and things like student portfolios, it definitely takes the cake. Despite this, WordPress remains the best overall platform for designing your website.

 

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