In this article, we're going to look at Wix website builder and WordPress. These website creation tools are popular with creatives, businesses, and ecommerce shops around the world. We'll be taking a look at both, to understand the similarities and differences between these two site creation tools to create a beautiful, functional website.

Understanding the Fundamental Difference: Wix vs WordPress

In order for us to compare Wix vs WordPress website builders, we need to throw light on the website builders and CMS. For starters, Wix is a website builder, whereas WordPress is a CMS (content management system).

While CMS and website builders have similarities, they are not the same. A CMS manages the web content (blog posts), and it allows you to add a theme as well. A website builder, on the other hand, focuses more on the tools to help you build a website. Think of a website builder as a frontend visual website building interface.

Wix vs WordPress: Overview

WordPress Overview

WordPress is not just another content management system (CMS). It is one of the best and most popular open-source cms out there. Please pay attention to the word “open source”, meaning you can create a WordPress site for free. As of 2021, WordPress powers more than 10 million websites, with a market share of over 64% for CMS-based websites. 

Did you know that WordPress started as a blogging platform in 2003? With time, this platform evolved into an awesome CMS boasting thousands of themes, plugins, and widgets.

Wix Overview

Wix is a website builder, not a CMS. As of 2021, Wix has over 200 million users across 190 nations. Wix was designed for users with no experience in coding or web development/design.

Wix vs WordPress: Ease of Use

I put ease of use as one of the first aspects for comparing a WordPress website and a Wix site, as both these tools were designed to help the average user create beautiful websites. So, between WordPress and Wix, which is easier for a beginner with no coding experience?

Wix offers powerful, but easy-to-use tools to help you build a website. It comes with a simple drag and drop interface offering a WYSIWYG editing functionality.

The Wix editor allows you to drag and drop elements anywhere on the website. This is a feature that beginners love. You don't need to know coding in order to use the Wix editor.

The first thing you will notice about WordPress is the WordPress block editor. With the block editor, you can edit your web pages with a live preview. With WordPress, you can add blocks to create text, headings, galleries, images, and more to create a beautiful WordPress site.

The WordPress editor offers thousands of fully-customizable website templates (themes). You can use a WordPress live theme customizer to fully customize the themes.

You can access hundreds of drag and drop page builder plugins to create an advanced WordPress site without writing code.

Page builders such as Elementor and Divi help you build a professional WordPress site.

With both WordPress and Wix, you can build beautiful websites without writing code. When creating a WordPress site, you might find it a bit challenging to learn the ins and outs.

Hence, with the Wix vs WordPress ease of use, Wix is easier for most beginners.

Wix vs WordPress: Features

Wix vs WordPress: Design and Layout

A website’s design is the first thing a user notices. Have a fully functional website with poor design, and users will leave your site in no time. Your website’s design and overall layout are important for conversions. Let’s see how Wix and WordPress compare in terms of design and layout.

There are thousands of free and paid themes to create a WordPress site. The biggest difference between free and paid themes is the availability of customer support. With free themes, you have limited support. Paid themes give you access to premium support when working on a WordPress site.

Wix vs WordPress: Themes

WordPress themes

A WordPress theme defines the overall appearance of your website.

A WordPress theme offers unique built-in customization. And if you are not happy with the built-in options, you can choose from one of the thousands of styled WordPress plugins to fully customize both free WordPress themes and premium WordPress themes.

You can go to the WordPess.org directory to download a free WordPress theme. If you are looking for a paid WordPress theme, you might have to use theme stores such as Astra or Themify. What I also love about WordPress is that you can replace the existing theme with a new one anytime you want.

Wix Templates

You can find over 900 templates in Wix. And all these templates are fully responsive. Wix website templates are diverse in the sense you can find templates across business categories such as hobbies, eCommerce, professional and more.

A downside of Wix is that you cannot change the chosen template. You can modify and customize the Wix template, but you cannot change the template. 

Talking about the number of themes and design layouts in our Wix vs WordPress comparison, WordPress has the upper hand. Also, WordPress allows you to switch themes and customize them as much as you like.

Wix vs WordPress: Plugins and Apps

Adding more features to your website becomes easy when you have a wide range of plugins and apps. With Wix, plugins are called apps, and as you might already know, WordPress calls them plugins.

WordPress Plugin Directory has over 55,000 plugins- free and paid. The sheer number and type of plugins in the WordPress ecosystem are amazing. You can find a plugin for almost any functionality in WordPress.

There are over 200 apps on Wix. You can add galleries, social media buttons, email marketing, contact forms, and several other features using Wix Apps. A large number of Wix apps are free. However, the paid ones are available at a monthly cost.

WordPress has many more plugins than Wix. Wix does not even come close in this regard.

Wix vs WordPress: Blogging 

Blogging is a key component of running an online business. 

Content creators use blogs to reach out to their audience and connect with them through different forms of content.

Imagine looking for a recipe, and not being able to find a blog with the instructions.

Both WordPress and Wix have put a lot of emphasis on blogging as part of their architecture.

As mentioned earlier, WordPress began as a blogging platform. It offers all the blogging features to create an awesome blog. WordPress offers the Gutenberg block editor to create awesome layouts for your blog posts. And if that is not enough, you can use WordPress plugins to add more features.

With Wix, you can easily add a blog to your website. You can easily add photos, videos, archives, categories, and tags using Wix. A big difference between WordPress and Wix is that it is easier to manage comments on WordPress than on Wix. 

Wix does not offer features such as creative private posts, for example.

It also lacks several features like backdating posts, creating private posts, and more.

Overall, WordPress is a much more powerful blogging platform than Wix. With Wix, you can create a basic blog. But it would not match the advanced blog features available on WordPress.

Hence, in our Wix vs WordPress blogging features, WordPress is the winner.

Wix vs WordPress: Ecommerce

If you are selling something online, you want a powerful ecommerce website.

With WordPress, you can use the WooCommerce plugin to create an online store.

FYI, WooCommerce is the most popular ecommerce platform today.

With WooCommerce, you can sell physical goods, digital goods, events, services, and subscriptions.

If you want to sell digital subscriptions on WordPress, you can use the MemberPress plugin. You can easily sell membership plans and online courses using this plugin.

WordPress Ecommerce plugins come with their own dedicated themes and add-on plugins.

Wix ecommerce is only available with their paid plans. In other words, you cannot run an ecommerce store on Wix using their free plan.

Wix Stores connect with a large number of payment gateways, such as PayPal, Stripe, Square, Klarna, and several more.

And you can always go with Wix Payments. The downside to that is that you will end up paying close to a 3% processing fee.

I believe that WordPress offers more features to create an ecommerce store (thanks to WooCommerce plugin).

Talking about Wix vs WordPress ecommerce features, WordPress is better and more robust.

WordPress vs Wix: Pricing

When choosing a website builder or CMS, factoring in the cost is perhaps an important thing to do.

WordPress is available for free. It is open source.

In order to use WordPress, you would need your own domain and a web host.

WordPress is just the CMS, not the domain or host.

You can choose from dozens of WordPress hosting providers out there. We like Cloudways for most situations:

Please also note that the cost of building a WP website also depends on the theme you choose. Adding a premium theme will add to the overall cost.

Alternatively, you can choose from one of the thousands of free WP themes and plugins.

If you add the paid version of an ecommerce plugin, you will also have access to full support.

The basic website builder on Wix is available for free. 

And yeah, it does have major limitations.

For starters, the free version comes with Wix branded ads on the website. Also, you cannot use your own domain name with Wix. What I also don’t like about Wix free plan is that it does not offer add-ons such as Google Analytics or ecommerce.

You can upgrade to one of Wix’s premium plans to have more features and add-ons. Also, the premium plans give you access to more storage and bandwidth. Wix premium plans are available in monthly and annual versions.

The Wix Unlimited plan starts at $12.50 per month.

For more features such as ecommerce, you would have to upgrade to a Wix Business & Ecommerce plan, which starts at $17 per month.

Even the premium Wix plans do not offer apps. You will have to pay for an app using the Wix app market.

Wix vs WordPress: Data Export

In today’s world, it is important to have a website (and system) that allows you to port your content. You don't want to be stuck with a platform that limits data portability.

WordPress is an awesome content management system. Hence, it is easy to export content using WP. The one-click exporter in WP allows you to download your content in XML format.

There are several plugins available to take WordPress backups. Some of these plugins also automatically take backups of your entire website.

Unlike WordPress, Wix does not offer a lot of flexibility and freedom to move content. With Wix, you can only export your blog posts in XML format. You cannot download other content such as images, videos, and pages with ease. You will have to manually download all these content types. Wix states that all Wix websites are hosted on Wix’s servers, and cannot be exported.

Therefore, in terms of Wix vs WordPress data export, WP wins.

Wix vs WordPress: Pros & Cons

WordPress is a powerful content management system. You can easily organize content on WP. I find WordPress to be user-friendly and easy to use. With over 50k plugins, you cannot be short of options on WordPress. These plugins allow you to customize and improve your WP website.

For marketers, WordPress SEO features are awesome to optimize their website for search engines. WordPress offers a wide array of SEO features.

WordPress themes are responsive (most of them). And most importantly, WordPress themes are also available for free (unless you want advanced premium WordPress themes).

It can sometimes be difficult to install WP updates. Often, some updates can change the look and feel of the site. Therefore, it is advisable to take a backup before updating your site on WordPress. Another downside of WP is that being open source, it attracts a lot of security issues. Of course, you have great premium (and free) security plugins available, but you still need to keep an eye on any security-related issues.

More plugins mean more resource consumption, which translates into slower site speed. Then there are plugins to optimize speed, but that means another plugin addition. 

Wix offers an intuitive interface. Its premium plans don't have lengthy contracts, so you don't feel stuck using a plan. On the flip side, the Wix starter plan doesn’t remove ads from your site. Also, Wix does not offer an unlimited plan. I also don't like the SEO features available on Wix as compared to WordPress SEO features.

Conclusion: Wix vs WordPress

WordPress and Wix both have excellent features for creating a website. If you want advanced features and more flexibility, WordPress is a better choice. WordPress SEO features are unrivaled compared to Wix's. Wix is great for those who don't want to go through a steep learning curve.