Hey buddy! Yes you, the one reading this blog. Are you looking for a website builder for building a great website to shift your business online? Are you wondering which one is better for making a website to sell your products, an educational website, blogs, or any other kind of website? You are at the right place, my friend. In this blog, we’ll take a deep dive and see which is a better website builder, WordPress or Wix, without any technical jargon.
The year is 2021 and millions of businesses have shifted online. Not every business is capable of paying a huge amount of money to coders or have the deep technical knowledge to build their website by coding on their own, but even the simplest site will require time, money, and knowledge to steer in the right direction. That’s where website-building platforms like WordPress and Wix come into play. You might have heard about both of them because of their popularity. But both platforms have significant differences and advantages over each other, making it difficult to choose one. Hopefully, this deep dive will help you see which one is the better choice to build a website, without much technical jargon.
Differences on the basis of various aspects
Let’s put both the platforms head to head on the basis of various aspects to see which stands where:
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Ease of use
Wix happens to be one of the easiest website builders you’ll come across. You’ll have hundreds of templates to choose from including blogs, online stores, portfolios, and many more. It’s super easy to jump in and start editing as it provides you with a drag and drops editor. You get enough flexibility to move around, edit things, and add elements of your choice.
WordPress turns out to be a much more flexible content management system letting you build virtually any kind of website with thousands of themes to choose from. But this flexibility comes at a price. There’s a need for some technical knowledge to be able to set up a site and add all the extensions and plugins, bringing the website to life.
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SEO
Are you also wondering which one is more likely to get you found on search engines? Let’s find out their SEO capabilities:
Wix does a pretty good job of SEO. It offers a decent amount of options for optimizing your site, including the ability to edit your website’s page title, URL, and image alt-texts. On the other hand,
WordPress offers even more. The software itself comes with a few SEO features out of the box, you also have access to a ton of powerful plugins such as Yoast SEO and Google Analyticator, which you can add to really amplify your SEO efforts.
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Blogging
Wix will let you add a blog to your site, but it’s kind of limited. You don’t get a whole lot of control over the layout of your posts, aside from being able to add images, videos, and dividers. Sure, it’s easy to use, but it’s better to have more options for both editing and posting.
WordPress, on the other hand, has a long-held reputation as being ‘the tool’ for blogging. Its blog feature is powerful, with the ability to add tags, categories, and RSS + plugins for comments, related posts, polls and so much more. The sky’s the limit if you’re creating a blog with WordPress.
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Additional functions
Wix’s app market has over 250 apps to help you enhance your site. Whether it’s about adding a booking system for appointments, live chat for customer support, or let visitors buy tickets to events. Wix will get it covered. Although it works decently for adding more functionality,
WordPress outshines even in this department. WordPress has thousands of plugins to help you add pretty much any kind of feature to your website. It needs a bit of technical knowledge and you’re ready to go for making your website a lot more functional with these plugins.
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Hosting
This is an aspect to pay attention to as many of us fall for it.
Wix being a website builder provides you with its own hosting and DNS management. There’s no need to set up a web host as Wix manages your DNS and hosts your website all the time.
Sounds great? well, here’s the shot
Although Wix provides you with hosting itself due to this you can never move your website off of Wix and shift to a new web host. It limits the scalability of your website.
WordPress, on the other hand, doesn’t provide hosting either manage your DNS. You have to opt for a web hosting service. they’ll host your website as well as manage your DNS. It may seem ineffective as compared to Wix. Well, that isn’t true in reality. It acts as an advantage for you as you have control over your website and you can shift it from one web host to another. WordPress websites have no limit on scalability.
Since the software is open source, many of the features are free and you are likely to pay for those extra plugins and the hosting only.
WordPress’ advantage over Wix
There’s no doubt in WordPress being a more powerful tool than Wix because of the flexibility, customization and features it provides. WordPress has a diverse ecosystem having 55,000+ plugins and 12,000+ themes. Let’s take a look at what breakthrough features WordPress provides over Wix:
SEO-friendly designs- all WordPress theme designs are SEO-friendly and have SEO plugins to help you with your search engine optimization.
Extremely customizable- WordPress is highly customizable with the options it provides you. You can add new features and functionality on your own as WordPress has thousands of free and paid themes and plugins available. WordPress makes you capable to add plenty of unconventional features.
Flexibility- WordPress is a great choice for beginners and small businesses as the website building part is basically free until you pay for extra plugins and hosting. Since it can create any type of website, it’s great for large businesses, blogs, stores, personal sites, etc.
Scalability- WordPress is capable of making fast multi-page and large websites. It’s the ideal option for creating powerful multilingual sites, a learning management system, blogging, directories, complex databases, and FTP access. All of this makes WordPress websites easily scalable without limitations.
Design options- with Wix you are stuck with templates which platform provides. A custom theme allows you to express your brand identity in a way that a stock design can’t. WordPress makes you move up on the level and provides custom design options. WordPress is an open-source platform therefore, there’s hardly a limitation with customization of your website design.
WordPress is far superior to Wix as a web publishing platform for any kind of website, you can accomplish a lot more with WordPress over the long run.
Conclusion
Believe it or not but both WordPress and Wix stand out almost equal when it comes to different aspects like ease of use, value for money, etc. how can that help you make a decision? Well, it all comes down to what’s more important to you. Flexibility and customization? Ease of use? Unconventional features? What matters are your requirements?
If you want a website that’s easy to use and manage without the help of a developer and don’t mind relinquishing a bit of control over some areas like your blog, Wix is the right choice for you. But, if you have bigger plans for your site to scale your business and want full control and flexibility and don’t mind spending a bit more for extra features and plugins, then WordPress should be the option to go for.