For those that are not in the know, choosing a platform to build your first website on is hard! But don’t worry, we are here to make the decision an easy one. Both Wix and WordPress are good website builders, however, the differences between Wix and WordPress is fairly significant, so it is important that you choose the right platform before investing time and money on developing your website.
Ease of Use
Most beginners don’t want to spend too much time learning new skills. Both Wix and WordPress allow you to create websites without learning to code. Wix offers a fairly simple drag and drop interface where you can select any element on your site and start editing it.
Whilst WordPress does not have a similar drag and drop interface integrated into the platform, there are a variety of themes and page builders that you can use to the same effect. Many of the plugins are available for free, or can be downloaded at a reasonable cost. These plugins give users more scope for customisation by comparison to the Wix editor.
SEO – Google does not like Wix!
When you build your website on Wix it will not rank well, making it harder for people to find your business. This will affect how much traffic you can potentially get because your site will not be search engine optimized. In 2017, that’s an expensive mistake. Also, you can’t verify Wix sites in Google Webmaster, which matters considerably.
WordPress does not have these issues. WordPress sites are easily crawled by Google, able to be submitted to Google Webmaster, and WordPress has a large library of third party plugins you can install on your website to further help optimise your SEO.
Page Load Times
Wix websites load slower than those built on HTML (like WordPress) and this will lose people who do want to read about you. Why? We have very little patience and having to wait 10 seconds to see a website is something we’re not used to. We will just click off. Slow loading sites will turn visitors off, and first impressions on the web can be everything. It can keep someone from visiting your site again.
Ongoing Costs
To add insult to injury, Wix websites are not cheap. WordPress (.org) software itself is free. What you pay for is server space for hosting, which holds the content of your site. Our IT partner, VS Micro Data, offers reasonably priced hosting options for WordPress Websites. You typically have all the space you can need to host your website, and can even create custom emails matching your websites domain name. Meanwhile, Wix sites are starting at $4.08 a month and that’s the most basic plan.
Ultimately, at Wise Up Marketing we are on Team WordPress. We find the platform provides a superior service to that of Wix, allowing us to create professional websites that are completely customizable. If you are thinking about building your first business website, or have a website built in Wix and are thinking about migrating it over to WordPress, contact us for assistance.
Alicia