Building your own website in Wix vs hiring a WordPress developer

Posted on 23 January 2021

With services like Wix making builidng websites easier the amount of interest in these types of services has grown massively over the years. Just how good is Wix? Can it beat WordPress for the typical small business? Would we ever build a website using Wix?

Keep reading to find out more!

A bit of history on Wix

Wix is an isreali software company that was founded in 2006. As of 2018 it’s reported that the company is worth 16 billion USD. If you don’t know they offer a cloud based service where anybody can build a website with a drag and drop builder. Before you get too excited there are some major drawbacks of using Wix.

A bit of history on WordPress

WordPress is a free and open-source content management system written in WordPress with MySQL as it’s backend database. It was first released in 2003 and has seen 39 main releases since then! (up to date as of Dec 2020) Although WordPress is built in such a way that the customisation is so broad and pretty much every business could use WordPress for their website – there are a few scenarios where you perhaps shouldn’t.

Proprietary vs Open Source

This is  probably one of the biggest worries when we hear a business is about to use Wix. When you build a site with Wix, you are tied into Wix. When you pay a WordPress developer or build your own WordPress website – if the host fails you (The company where that’s keeping your site online), it couldn’t be any easier to move elsewhere. With Wix… well… you’re stuck.

You could argue a big company like Wix would likely have everything together with regards to hosting but we’ve seen 3+ second wait times on sites to even begin loading content. A recent example of this is a website that converted over to WordPress. The site went from an 8 second load time to a 1.5 second load time. In fairness we were able to strip back some unnecessary scripts but the size of the page wasn’t much smaller and this was using our basic hosting with no caching or CDN delivering content any faster than the bare minimum we provide.

You might not mind a long loading site but search engines certainly do. Why have a website if you’re not anywhere near page 1?

1/- to WordPress

User Friendliness

Being all about anyone being able to build a website. Wix wins this hands down. However it can be a painful process. The WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get) is slow. Some features will cost you extra per month too with no free options available, meaning you have to pay for these extras (WordPress has 1000s of free plugins…)

1/1

Pricing

This one is tricky. At best you won’t pay anything for  a Wix site (you’ll get a Wix banner and a very limited experience though…). Again with WordPress, if you can build a website yourself using a premade theme or (as we do) develop your own bespoke theme – again you won’t pay anything.

As your need for more features grow you’ll find you can get a range of prices from WordPress developers (typically as a one off cost) however with Wix, you’ll be expected to pay an additional amount… every single month.

You’ll also have no option but to leave if you want to retain these Wix features and they put their prices up. With WordPress you can just use another developer.

2/1 to WordPress

Support

You can see the Feedback on Wix and their support here – https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/www.wix.com

With regards to WordPress it depends on either the developer you’re using or if you’re bulding yourself what the massive WordPress community has to say on Google. Support is everywhere and most questions get answered quickly.

3/1 to WordPress

Verdict

Despite appearing more affordable (In most real world cases it doesn’t appear to be over a given period of time) Wix has got nothing on the power of WordPress and it’s ever growing community. It’s abilitiy to up ongoing prices without little room for customers to grab their data and leave is… concerning. The usability for anyone makes it appealing to most new businesses starting out but if you have a slow website that doesn’t rank and get any clicks… should you even have a website at all? Afterall your website is supposed to represent your brand in the best possible way!

Looking for a WordPress developer? Get in touch today!

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