What’s Wix?
Wix is a platform that lets you design websites with numerous designs and templates. It comes with a free package that is an all in one hosting service. Wix is very user friendly and is a good starting platform for those who don’t need many technical features. Wix comes with many themes for your site but you are restricted in how you can alter those themes.
What’s WordPress?
WordPress is another platform that lets you build and design websites for free. You can design more complex sites on this platform and because of this, major companies use WordPress for their sites such as Sony. WordPress can offer many free and paid for themes which come with their own powerful plugins. Some of the themes that have complex features will come with their own support.
What’s the difference?
WordPress has more of a technical approach to the design and the way of how to run the site when Wix is less technical but it’s more restrictive in terms of design. Wix includes hosting and tech support in their packages, meaning that you can’t change who hosts your site. WordPress is more open source which means you can create your own space and you can control who hosts it and who supports your site in terms of any technical issues. If you have a site with Wix and you decided you wanted to more it elsewhere, you won’t be able to download all of your pages and move them to another provider. This is because all sites that are created with Wix, stay on the Wix servers, making it difficult to export your site data. Since WordPress is a self-hosting platform, this make it a lot easier to move your data to another hosting provider if you become unhappy with it for any reason.
WordPress also has many features including using extensions, themes and plugins. It also comes with a very user friendly building feature called the block editor which makes it easier for those who may be new to building sites.
What about SEO?
In terms of SEO and how each different platform shows your sites on search engines, Wix does well compared to other small website builders but with the free plan, you aren’t able to create a custom URL which in this case, can make it harder to appear higher up on the search engine results page. With WordPress, you can customise the URL for all pages on your site, this helps your sites SEO and the ranking factors for your site as those keywords help your site to be higher on the results page.