Wix vs. WordPress

The fact of Wix moving away from their ADI web-building tool in favour of Editor, in my opinion, makes a huge mess of everything. I feel a lot of the ease and automation of designing my website has gone to such an extent that I now "recommend" Wix only for professional developers. Worse is that I have to redesign a big part of my website as items are now linked to each other in a different way than used to be the case. In my opinion, A big ZERO for Wix, who clearly should do their homework again.

If your business relies heavily on content creation, and particularly on blog posts, then WordPress is really the best option you have. But if you don't have a blog, you only need static pages, or you want to build an eCommerce site, then you might want to explore other alternatives.

Incentivized

• Easy to create and duplicate website, and web pages for similar products, services and campaigns, so you do not have to start from scratch
• Find features such as video, image and button, and templates to customise your website's feel and look. For example, recently, I was able to add a countdown timer for the sale of tickets to our online conference.
• Creating website Anchors - making it easy for you to take a visitor to a particular part of a page so that they do not need to scroll through the entire webpage making it more user-friendly.
• The SEO part of Wix makes it easy for you to set up meta data, create fully functional social media shares that are on brand and looks professional in the Google search engine..

Incentivized

• WordPress is incredibly easy to set up and get running with little to no technical knowledge. Most web hosts will do it for you, since it's so easy.
• With thousands of themes available for free and for low cost, WordPress can accommodate any design you can imagine.
• The community behind WordPress is generous, and there are loads of educational opportunities both online and in person to learn and connect with other users.

Incentivized

• One place where Wix falls short of other CMS's is with insights and analytics. On other platforms, I can instantly see how many page views I received, what time the pages were viewed, location, etc. But seeing this information on Wix requires a Google Analytics integration that is not automatically included when you make an account. You have to first go to Google Analytics to make an account, then come back to Wix to activate the integration, it's a little time-consuming for a feature that most CMS's come with instantly.

Incentivized

• WordPress breaks often so you need to have someone who understands how to troubleshoot, which can take time and money.
• Some plugins are easier to customize than others, for example, some don't require any coding knowledge while others do. This can limit your project if you are not a coder.
• WordPress can be easily hacked, so you also need someone who can ensure your sites are secure.

Incentivized

We will definitely renew Wix. The ability to completely control our website has been invaluable to us. We will maintain this service as long as we are an incorporated organization, we've tried several other software options and this has been the best solution by far for all of our needs.

Incentivized

My rating is based on the knowledge I have of the community that WordPress has had built around it for years now. It's as solid as it comes when you talk about community involvement and expansion. There's no other CMS out there that can match-up with it, hands down.

Great customization, but a pain to backtrack. They recently added the ability to set fonts etc as headings, title, body etc, but if you did not begin your build with these presets you are screwed if you ever try to change font/ colors/layout etc.

Incentivized

It's a sophisticated but easy to use piece of software. Many of the content addition pieces are familiar from other pieces of software so there isn't a huge learning curve. And for new areas, there is a lot of info on WordPress.org as well as other WordPress help sites.

I never had an outage issue per say. I would say it was very reliable of a website building platform and as a marketing source there was never any issues connecting it to the server. I don’t recall there being any editing tools or hosting issues. Nothing went down when using it.

Incentivized

Anyone can visit WordPress.org and download a fully functional copy of WordPress free of charge. Additionally, WordPress is offered to users as open-source software, which means that anyone can customize the code to create new applications and make these available to other WordPress users.

Not complex at all. It teaches you how to use their platform in a dynamic way. Each tutorial offers an explanation that can be reviewed later on. The connection speed of a web page has been smooth so far, with no major problems regarding this subject. Overall, Wix can manage 10+ pages with great connection speed.

Incentivized

Mostly, any performance issues have to do with using too many plugins and these can sometimes slow down the overall performance of your site. It is very tempting to start adding lots of plugins to your WordPress site, however, as there are thousands of great plugins to choose from and so many of them help you do amazing things on your site. If you begin to notice performance issues with your WordPress site (e.g. pages being slow to load), there are ways to optimize the performance of your site, but this requires learning the process. WordPress users can learn how to optimize their WordPress sites by downloading the WPTrainMe WordPress training plugin (WPTrainMe.com) and going through the detailed step-by-step WordPress optimization tutorials.

As stated before I didn’t use the support as I did not have the feature and did not often enough need the help. I was able to figure it out mostly on my own by exploring the site. I’ve found exploring and playing on it told me how to do most things.

Incentivized

WordPress itself only has community service so your experience will depend on where you turn. Online, through forums and community boards, support is rudimentary but effective. You can easily turn to your local community and find exceptional individuals who know and use WordPress regularly for more advanced, inexpensive, support. I'm rating this less than 10 because of the lack of any formal support provided by a company.

Varies by the person providing training. High marks as it's incredibly easy to find experienced individuals in your community to provide training on any aspect of WordPress from content marketing, SEO, plugin development, theme design, etc. Less than 10 though as the training is community based and expectations for a session you find may fall short.

It is very easy to find online resources to learn how to do just about anything with WordPress.

Like I said I was a beginner so it was fun to navigate and teach myself how to implement the features when building and maintaining my site. It was a fairly easy place to host my domain, and creat something simple.

Incentivized

WordPress is not a great solution if you have: 1) A larger site with performance / availability requirements. 2) Multiple types of content you want to share - each with its own underlying data structure. 3) Multiple sites you need to manage. For very small sites where these needs are not paramount, WordPress is a decent solution

Wix is a great starting platform for anyone looking to create a website. It definitely holds its own against any other all in one website creation platform. The one thing I would say is if your main focus is solely on eCommerce you may be better off using something like Squarespace which is specifically designed for that market.

Incentivized

We have considered and operated within Shopify and Squarespace. Both serve their purpose for niche clients, but we do recommend WordPress as being the superior option. We find that WordPress is easier to use and offers maximum scalability while the others are more challenging to design, code, configure and launch.

Incentivized

I give this rating to Wix because it's a great content creator. It has a great platform and also offers great customer service. If you encounter any technical issues, with Wix you will find a solution. For premium members or domain holders, this is the same as for Trial members or non-domain holders.

Incentivized

WordPress is completely scalable. You can get started immediately with a very simple "out-of-the box" WordPress installation and then add whatever functionality you need as and when you need it, and continue expanding. Often we will create various WordPress sites on the same domain to handle different aspects of our strategy (e.g. one site for the sales pages, product information and/or a marketing blog, another for delivering products securely through a private membership site, and another for running an affiliate program or other application), and then ties all of these sites together using a common theme and links on each of the site's menus. Additionally, WordPress offers a multisite function that allows organizations and institutions to manage networks of sites managed by separate individual site owners, but centrally administered by the parent organization. You can also expand WordPress into a social networking or community site, forums, etc. The same scalability applies to web design. You can start with a simple design and then scale things up to display sites with amazing visual features, including animations and video effects, sliding images and animated product image galleries, elements that appear and fade from visitor browsers, etc. The scaling possibilities of WordPress are truly endless.

• The data-driven, dynamic pages will eliminate an entire part of our event launch process. Multiplied across 60 events, over several years, that will save us a ton of time but also vastly increase the quality of our presentation.
• The data-driven pages will also give us the ability to archive past events and radio shows in an easily searchable manner. This will be helpful for us when it comes to booking new events as well. (It has been no small feat for me to figure out the code to get this all working, though!)
• This new site will reflect our brand and organization vastly better than our old site. It will make our organization appear much more professional and legitimate.

Incentivized

• WordPress helps us reduce website management costs because we can oversee updates in-house.
• WordPress is easy to use, reducing the amount of time we spend on website management.
• The ease of use enables us to offer website management for clients, helping us grow our capabilities/business.