11 Feb
Last Updated on
That’s an old but still an ongoing debate between Wix vs WordPress. I recently joined a couple of Facebook groups related to blogging as a business and how to start a blog. I’ve came through a lot of questions from blogging beginners and it was really interesting to go through those queries and answering them. But there was a common query being asked multiple times about the best platform for a blog. I’ve listed a couple of questions here:
Best blogging platform for beginners, WordPress or Wix?
Which is better, WordPress or Wix?
Is Wix better than WordPress?
and so on…
My own blog is self hosted on WordPress and honestly, I haven’t tried Wix before. Therefore, I kept quiet and didn’t answer to any question about the best blogging platform. Because all of that needs justification and deep analysis of that platform. Every popular blogging host has its pros and cons and the fact is if I am using WordPress, that doesn’t mean I blindly recommend it to every one.
No way!
Instead I’ll prove why WordPress is still the best.
Previously I’ve recommended best web hosting for WordPress and a list of the recommended hosts for small business hosting. It involved a lot of time and deep search of the features & costs to conclude the results. So let’s explore the myths you should probably know about Wix vs WordPress.
Which is the best platform to host a blog?
Let’s check out!
1. A Non-Techie Difference between WordPress vs Wix
Before we discuss an overview, I hope you are familiar with the difference between self hosted WordPress and wordpress.com. I have mentioned above as an important alert because it is very important concept to clarify. [You can read the difference in WordPress Beginner’s Guide].
What is WordPress?
Do you know about 35% of the websites over internet are powered by WordPress? Yes, that’s true and not only that, there are many popular blogs that use WordPress for their sites. It is considered as the No. 1 best blogging platform in the World. Ask any professional blogger and he’ll recommend you to use WordPress. I personally love WordPress and have used it for blogging. It’s highly customizable, pretty simple to create a blog and have 55K plugins. It is really easy to install WordPress plugin real quick with WP dashboard.
WordPress is free and an open source software that supports modern drag and drop builders. Millions of people use Elementor, and Divi to build their blogs. Most of the hosts offer 1-click WordPress install which is too easy and does not need any technical background.
However it can take a couple of days to build a perfectly looking blog using WordPress for a beginner. It includes theme installation, how to select the right plugins and using drag and drop builder to build landing pages.
So if you aim to become a professional blogger and want to create best blog websites , go with WordPress
What is Wix?
Now a days, whenever I get on Youtube, there is an ad of Wix to create a website or make a logo. You might have watched the ads too and their great marketing strategies are making people falling in love with Wix. People look for ease and their drag & drop and ready to use features are boosting Wix’s popularity among non-techie bloggers, it’s among best top 10 blogging platforms.
Wix has hundreds of templates and you can sign up for free to create a blog. Wix is an ideal blogging platform for beauty, fasion and travel blogs. No steeper learning curve is needed to build a website with Wix, even Moms can use Wix to launch a blog. It’s a best blogging platform for poetry.
You can completely change the layout of your website as Wix is highly flexible and versatile blogging platform. Building a website is pretty faster on Wix as compared to WordPress. Wix is managed by the technical experts, everything is pre-installed, just sign up and launch your site with drag and drop capabilities.
2. Installation
First of all. let’s discuss the installation procedure between WP & Wix.
WordPress
Most of the times when you sign up on your favorite host, WordPress is pre-installed with the hosting package. However, most of the times, it’s not and you have to do it manually from the available software stack. Once you install WordPress, after that you need to install the theme of your choice and the recommended plugins. So it’s a bit time consuming procedure and you’ll have to put some efforts before launching the blog.
Wix
As I mentioned earlier, Wix’s technical staff handles everything for you. Just sign up on Wix using email, Facebook or Google, pick up a suitable template from hundreds of beautiful templates, customize accordingly and you are ready to launch your site. No plugins, no software packages or anything else needs to be installed. So we have to accept that Wix is pretty easy to build a site, choose the template and you are ready to go.
WordPress
Wix
Wix is the winner!
3. Site Speeds
Your website loading speed matters a lot. Search engines prefer those sites that load super fast. So if you want to rank your site, you must focus on it’s speed.
WordPress
Fortunately the blogs launched using WP load pretty faster and that’s the beauty of WordPress. There are many free cache plugins, cloudflare support and CDN that make WordPress sites load faster.
Wix
It has lost the batter here, Wix sites are slower than WP and sometimes it’s editor is also very slow. Apart from that, I’ve seen many Wix blogs with huge background high quality images that take time to load. That overall effects the site’s performance and optimization.
WordPress
Wix
Choose the best plugins to improve your site speed from hundreds of free plugins in WP.
WordPress is the winner!
4. Themes and Designs
Both blogging platforms have themes and designs directories to create user and mobile friendly websites. But let’s check who’s the winner?
WordPress
There are not hundreds but thousands of free themes available for WordPress. I am not talking about paid versions, there are many sites that offer highly responsive themes for free. Just google out “wordpress free themes” and you’ll see the results. Also my recommended hosting giant Bluehost gives away free themes for your blog. So you are not bound anyway and can install and use any free WP theme. Also there are no limitations and you can install any plugin with a free WP theme.
Wix
There are around 500 templates on Wix site to choose the design template for your site. Furthermore, there are certain limitations in the free plan to get more templates, you will need an upgrade. More importantly, you can not change your template after the site goes live. For a new template, create a new site and that disappoints a lot.
WordPress
Wix
WordPress wins here!
5. Ecommerce
There are many facts to consider before launching an online store. These include inventory management, payment gateway integrations, cart & checkout pages and local & global shipping. Let’s see who’s the best?
WordPress
To be very honest, there is no match for Woocommerce when we talk about building an online store. Woocommerce is a complete Ecommerce solution with everything available and easily installed on WordPress. It has more than 5 million active installations. The story does not end here, Woocommerce occupies 28% of the world’s global E-commerce market. Without a doubt, Woocommerce is free for life, install it and customize it in your own way. However, you need a little bit technical knowledge to build an online store using WordPress.
Wix
Ecommerce on Wix is not as big as we have it in WordPress. There are limited payment gateways and most of the extended features come with a price tag. Also for setting up a store, you might have to buy some 3rd party apps which will eventually increase your budget. But building an online store is much more easier than compared to WordPress.
So my final verdict would be WordPress for tech guys and Wix for absolute beginners, hence their points are same.
WordPress
Wix
WordPress for professionals and Wix for newbies!
6. SEO
Every blogger and site owner is concerned about the site optimization. It’s the only way to get organic traffic and luckily both WordPress and Wix have built in powerful tools for SEO. If we talk about Meta tags, canonical URLs, 301 redirects, XML sitemaps and instant Google indexing, both platforms equally support highly optimized SEO tools.
Related:
WordPress has the best SEO plugins like Yoast, Rank Math and All in One SEO whereas Wix has a complete SEO guide with built in SEO. These tools walk you through each step for site optimization.
Finally it depends on your efforts to improve SEO and it’s not certainly about Wix vs WordPress, both platforms have it all.
WordPress
Wix
So Wix vs WordPress, who wins?
Actually it’s a tie!
7. Pricing
In this comparison, I’ve been talking about self hosted WordPress which is an open source platform. Every open source software is free to use however, you need a hosting platform to run it. Let’s talk about the costs of using both blogging platforms.
WordPress
There are many best web hosting companies that offer best web hosting for WordPress at an affordable price. Since it’s a self hosted platform, you’ll eventually need to buy a domain name and a hosting plan. However, if you want to play around with WordPress, you can build a great blog using WordPress.com.
Professional bloggers put some initial investment to launch a blog. I recommend Bluehost as the best hosting platform for WordPress and it has an official recommendation of wordpress.org. Additionally, Bluehost gives away a free domain name and an SSL certificate.
So the cost break down of WordPress hosting will be around $71.40 for first year for Plus plan.
Wix
Though Wix offers free web hosting with bandwidth and storage limits. If you have a plan to go beyond in your blogging journey, you have to buy a premium plan. Wix also gives away a free domain name for the first year.
For best blog website, their unlimited plan covers up most of the requirements. But if we compare the costs with Bluehost hosting, the price gets doubled.
The unlimited plan will cost you $150 for the first year.
Business and Ecommerce plans are much more expensive than that.
So we can get a cheaper hosting package with WordPress as compared to Wix.
WordPress is the winner!
8. Final Verdict, WordPress vs Wix, who's the winner?
Obviously it’s WordPress.
If you have a high aim to create a money making blog, go with WordPress. I personally love WordPress and I proudly say it’s the best blogging platform for beginners. I first used it back in 2012 and since that time, a lot of improvements and features were introduced in it. After my little research over social media platforms and other reviews, people have different choices. Some look just for ease, design and flexibility and other people see from a long perspective. That’s why you will find mixed reviews over internet.
WordPress is super powerful, covers 35% of the websites on internet whereas Wix is only 1.3%, still don’t believe me? Watch yourself.
Finally I would say if you want to learn something new and be a part of the largest community, choose WordPress. It’s not that hard to get started with WordPress, you can see the WordPress Beginner’s Guide for some basics. Choose a free theme and recommended plugins, install those plugins, use Elementor as a drag & drop builder and start building your blog pages.
Share in your network!
18 Comments
Marjie Mare
Thank you for sharing this. I need to revamp my blog and will use all great ideas like those you shared.
Faisal Rehman
You are welcome, glad to hear that 🙂
Nadia Malik
I totally agree with you on this. WordPress is great with its drag and drop feature and I have designed couple of my personal websites and have never had problems with it. The comparison that you did in this post is great for someone who is beginning with the process of website building.
Faisal Rehman
Thank you so much for your kind words.
Ashley
Love this! When I was first starting as a blogger, this was such a huge debate. Personally, I prefer WIX just because it’s a little easier to navigate. WordPress has so many components and I feel like it deals more with coding, which I’m not great with at all!
Faisal Rehman
Yeah as I said Wix wins when we talk about Ease of Use
Ruth
WordPress is most definitely superior especially if you want to start making an income from your blog one day. Such a great and informative post which I’m sure will help people make the right decisions depending on their needs and goals 🙂
Faisal Rehman
Yeah you can see the last sceenshot of w3techs, WordPress is dominant
Heather Ritchie
Thanks for this amazing post! I wish I’d had it when I started my blogging journey. I was lucky that the bloggers I followed all said hands down use WordPress. It was a steep learning curve in the beginning because I’m so tech-challenged but now I work in it easily and it provides amazing results and more control over your website.
Faisal Rehman
It took me 2 to 3 weeks to setup my theme and plugins, I did all myself, so I learnt much about WP
Elizabeth Elkassih
Great job for this wonderful content. Very easy to follow and comprehend.
Faisal Rehman
Thank you, please share in your network 🙂
Kimberlie
This is the most comprehensive analysis I have seen comparing Wix and WordPress. In the past, it has felt like people blindly pushed WordPress due to their own agenda, but you painstakingly addressed all the factors that are important to bloggers and for that, I’m appreciative.
Faisal Rehman
Thank you, 35% of the internet is using WordPress, that is enough to prove WordPress is great.
Joe Dayvie
Very nice article. I think you were fair across the board but it is obvious WordPress reigns supreme 🙂 Granted I use it myself, but still. Your article is well thought out and honest.
Faisal Rehman
Honestly, I check professional and top blogs what CMS they are using and at the end, I find WP.
Brooke
I have been seeing a ton of ads for Wix. Glad that you put this post together. I am happy with WordPress and staying with it.
Faisal Rehman
yeah WP is for professionals like you 🙂