Introduction:
– Wix
Wix is primarily a customizable website builder with a variety of templates to choose from – these templates are simple, but while this makes setup easier, it can make customizing harder so you may not end up with exactly the type of page or look you prefer.
Wix provides an extremely user-friendly experience. It helps you to design a website very easily, using free customizable templates. Or you can get a website designed by using the Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) technology. Wix is a fully hosted solution, which means that if you create a website with Wix, all hosting, security, and maintenance is taken care of for you.
Other Features Include…
- Free and Premium Wix Package
- Fully Responsive Templates for All Industries and Niches
- SEO, Marketing, and Analytics Tools
- Extensive Free and Premium Apps
- 24/7 Wix Support
– WordPress
WordPress started as a blogging platform, but quickly developed from this single purpose and became a versatile program for creating websites. This is possible thanks to numerous plug-ins that can add any kind of functionality to your site. There are social plugins, commenting systems, SEO packs, safety plugins and much more.
WordPress is free open-source software that will give you total control over the design and customization of your website. The WordPress community also spans the globe, providing thousands of WordPress themes, plugins, products, and services for all industries.
Other Features Include…
- Free to Use Software
- Ownership of Your Website (WordPress is self-hosted, so your site is 100% yours).
- Numerous Customization Options and Tools
- A Wide Assortment of Free and Premium Products
- Extensive Support from a Global Community
Easy of Use
Many of us know about the benefits of using WordPress, which is why so many users use WordPress to build their website. However, Wix also offers a variety of features that are highly desired among website owners as well. Wix offers its services as a full-website builder that anyone can use. Using various website templates Wix offers, users can drag and drop function to create a website in minutes without any coding. Wix is a hosted platform, its developers have got control over all the available tools and applications, so users can’t import outside tools from other sources. Once a new site owner chooses a template, they’re stuck with it. Website templates can’t be quickly changed as a site’s identity evolves, but the Wix interface is user-friendly, made with beginners in mind, and it offers round the clock support for troubleshooting and answering questions.
With WordPress, many more functions are left up to the user. Self-hosted WordPress sites come with an administrative dashboard that provides access to the tools needed to install a theme, make basic customizations, compose a page or post, and add any plugins needed for added features. With WordPress, you can create totally unique websites, that match exactly with the need of your business and your target audience.
Flexibility
WordPress is an open-source CMS, it allows you to access its code and make your own themes and plugins depending upon your requirements. This allows you to have access to a number of tools in the hand of WordPress users to create and customize the website.
Wix only allows themes and plugins created by their developer’s team and integrated within their website builder. Even with the growing number of resources available with Wix, it can not be compared with the vast quantity of uniquely helpful tools constantly being developed by the massive WordPress community.
Security
When it comes to security in terms of your website and your data, Wix & WordPress have got different approaches. Wix takes security entirely out of your hand apart from choosing basic stuff like choosing a password and using two-factor authentication and handles all the security aspects on their own.
WordPress, however, places the brunt of securing your website on your shoulders. You need to stay on top of core updates, check for various errors, choose the right host, and handle pretty much everything else yourself. You can also harden the security by using different methods like securing a WordPress site with .htaccess. There are plenty of dedicated plugins like WordFence etc are available which you can use to safeguard your website.
Setup and Maintenance Cost
The cost of setting up and running a website depends on a wide range of factors, and that can change considerably over time as a site evolves. Because it’s a hosting platform, as well as a site builder, Wix makes it easy for users to calculate costs with a tiered series of monthly plans that also include a domain name and varying levels of storage, access to add-on apps and more. There is also a completely free starter plan, but it has limited features and requires users to accept advertising on their site. As a site grows and changes, users, can scale up to a higher pricing plan that offers the features they need.
WordPress is free to download and install – and it is possible to set up an entire site nearly for free with a basic hosting package and free themes and plugins from the official WordPress directories. But depending on the features and functions a particular website needs, the actual cost of setting up and running a WordPress site can be highly variable depending upon your requirements. Those costs include buying and registering a domain name and can also include purchasing any premium themes and plugins needed to get the right look and functionality for the site, or hiring a developer to work with the site’s core code.
Themes
WordPress has themes that are free. These amount to more than 3,000. All themes can be customized according to your requirements. Wix also offers free themes, but they look quite similar to one another. Wix’s templates (as they name them) amount to more than 500. It’s important to note that, once chosen, a template cannot be replaced by another one, in the Wix platform.
In WordPress, you can create and edit menus and menu locations. You can have multiple menus in different areas of the website. For Wix-based websites, there’s only one menu option. Hence, you cannot rely on Wix settings for building highly-complex websites.
Wix is very popular for its drag-and-drop functionality. By simple drag-and-drop, you can move sections into the web pages, and rearrange them as you want. You should know that WordPress has its own drag-and-drop editors, too. So you can edit sections in any web page using drag-and-drop functionality, as well. It’s not a feature exclusive for Wix.
Plugins
WordPress is much more powerful and flexible. Once you’ve learned how to use WordPress, it offers more opportunities to create the website the way you want it to look. WordPress has tens of thousands of plugins to customize the website exactly the way you want.
There are plugins for translating content, SEO optimization, dynamic text, security, and many, many more. WordPress has over 50,000 plugins. Wix has just a few hundred web apps. This difference in numbers can have real implications.
If you want to build a pop-up for your website to capture emails and leads. At the moment, the Wix App store has only a handful of such apps, some of which aren’t even maintained anymore. What do you do if none of these pop-ups offer a particular functionality that you desperately need, such as targeted traffic coming from a particular AdWords or Facebook campaign? Not much, because you don’t have control over the website.
With WordPress however, you will have tens or hundreds of pop-up plugins. Statistically speaking, it’s almost guaranteed you can find at least one plugin that does what you want.
eCommerce Functionality
If you want to create an online store with Wix, then you will need to opt for one of the Business eCommerce plans. Wix provides over 100 storefront templates to help you design a professional and beautiful shop. These templates can all be customized in the Wix Editor, enabling you to create a store that reflects your brand.
Wix also provides a powerful management system, enabling you to manage and sell products on your site. Some of the features include…
- Product Management and Inventory Tracking
- Secure Shopping Cart and Checkout
- Multiple Payment Solutions (including PayPal, credit cards, and more)
- Global Tax and Shipping Management
- Coupons and Discounts
- Wix does not charge any commission on all sales, so you aren’t giving away your profits.
WooCommerce is a free plugin that enables you to turn your WordPress website into a fully functioning shop and allows you to manage all your inventory from your WordPress dashboard. Some of the core features of WooCommerce helps you to…
- Sell Anything (from physical products to digital items, subscriptions and more).
- Works Seamlessly with Countless WordPress Themes
- Create Beautiful Galleries, Product Pages, Landing Pages and More
- Built-in Payment Processing from Leading Providers (PayPal, Stripe, and more).
- Inventory, Order, and Shipping Management
Although the core WooCommerce software is free to install and use, to enhance your website WooCommerce provides a range of free and premium extensions that offers the extra functionality that your store may require.
SEO
Due to the massive importance of being found online by your target audience, WordPress is one of the best choices for growing your business online.
It includes all of the SEO functionality and tweaks you need to earn those coveted top spots in the search engine results pages. If your website has poor SEO functionality you’ll be invisible to Google and will be running one quiet website and business. Let’s see the functionality which is available within WordPress and missing from Wix in terms of SEO.
- Content silo creation
- The ability to group related content together for keyword-based relevance and content.
- Canonical links
- The ability to specify which piece of content is preferred and point other pages to it, preventing duplicate content penalties in search engines.
- Breadcrumbs
- A content trail of links along the top of your pages, helping guide the visitor’s user experience and google with this path of info.
- Set focus keyword
- The ability to select the keyword which you are trying to rank for online and to ensure your content is as good as possible for this keyword.
- On-page optimization scoring
- Related to the set focus keyword above, this checks your content against your focus keyword and scores it with a list of improvements for a better piece of content – and rank on Google.
- Link anchor text
- The ability to customize your text within your links making them more relevant to your keywords and content, instead of using “click here”.
- Featured image for social
- The ability to include an image that gets shared out on various social media platforms when you share out your content from your website to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram etc.
- Facebook Open Graph
- Better integration with Facebook for pulling content from your website to social when you share out your articles.
- Twitter Open Graph
- Integration with Twitter for pulling images and other relevant content from your article into your social share on Twitter.
- RSS Feeds
- Have your visitors subscribe to your content feed on your website, they are automatically notified whenever you publish new content.
- Template Switching
- Sick of that old design, but love your content you’ve created over the years? No problem. Switch it up with a new template and wrap your site in a new skin while keeping content intact.
- Custom CSS
- It allows you to make tweaks to the look and layout of your existing theme or template. Hate the way the call to action buttons look? Change them!
- XML Sitemaps
- A sitemap of your website that Google wants to read to index your site. Generate one and send it off to Google via Webmaster tools.
- Robots.txt files
- Don’t want a whole list of tags and private documents appearing online? With a robots.txt file, you can specify what is indexed by Google and Bing and what is ignored and kept hidden.
- Schema and structured data
- Better options and functionality to get your content indexed and ranked by Google. Indexing based on events, organization, people, places, products and more.
So, as the list specifies, for a business that is serious about online growth, WordPress is great. Hiring an online professional will be a huge return on your investment in traffic, lead generation and revenue for your business – all generated by your website.
Conclusion
If you’re ready to really build a website – to really customize and grow one, then the decision is easy—use WordPress. WordPress is not difficult with the right theme and the amount of information out in the world to help is infinite. By the time you’re done building your website, you’ll feel like an expert web developer.
Wix is better if you have no interest in doing a deep dive. You want something simple and easy-to-use that gets the job done.
Wix is an easy to use, all-in-one website builder designed to help anyone create a stunning website. Meanwhile, WordPress is a powerful, flexible platform that gives you ultimate control over your site, from design to security. Wix is best for beginners, while WordPress is more technically challenging.
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