WordPress vs. Wix: Which Easy Web Presence is Best?

So, you’ve decided you need a web presence, and you’re just starting out. The first big question to ask is “What do you need the site for?” Are you creating a store to sell your wares online, or do you just need a site to display a portfolio of your work? Wix and WordPress are two great platforms to design your site, but they’re very different, especially if you want to participate in eCommerce.

Price

The cost of building, maintaining, and hosting your website is extremely important. WordPress is a software that is available to anyone free of charge, but you must have your own domain to host it on, or use a WordPress subdomain. While there are several WordPress hosting providers, many of them charge monthly fees to host your website. WordPress offers premium plans starting at $2.99 that go up to $24.92 for business plans. These come with custom domain names, customer support, and more storage space. They also remove the WordPress ads from your site.

The basic website builder in Wix is absolutely free, and you don’t have to purchase your own domain. However, if you choose to go this route, you’ll have Wix advertisements on the top and bottom of your site, and your site address will have “Wix” in the URL. Wix offers premium plans that allow you to have your own URL. They also come with more storage and bandwidth, and analysis tools to determine how your site is doing. The pricing for Wix starts at $5 per month and goes up to $25 for a VIP plan.

Ease of Use

Both sites are pretty friendly for beginners, which is important. Building a website doesn’t have to be an imposing chore. WordPress comes with a visual editor that gives you easy, straightforward boxes to write your content in. The properties that make up your website’s look can be edited using a toolbar on the side. To get the full benefits, you probably want to take some time to familiarize yourself with all the options. But it’s still a lot easier than going off and trying to learn a programming language to build a site from scratch. (And odds are, it’ll give you a nicer-looking site.)

Wix is extremely easy to use for beginners because it offers a drag and drop interface. Using the drag and drop feature, you can select any element on your site and move it to another area to make your page look exactly the way you want. WordPress might not be hard, but beginners are likely to find this even easier.

Customer Support

Since WordPress is so popular, it can be easy figuring out how to solve issues with your website. There are plenty of forums online and help blogs where WordPress users help each other solve problems. They even have an official support forum. However, you cannot receive customer support from them unless you subscribe to WordPress’s paid service. Wix is similar, but they have a fairly comprehensive official help center with instructional videos and articles. Any user can browse the help center to solve issues like page structure, editorial basics, choosing a template, and much more.

Plug-ins and Apps

Adding plug-ins and apps allows you to customize your site even more. You can add a wide variety of features like a gallery, comments, email list, and others. Wix has hundreds of apps that have a free or lite version, while others require monthly payments.

WordPress, due to its popularity, has thousands of apps that you can integrate with your site. On the WordPress.org site alone, there are over 50,000 plugins that you can include. While there are many paid plugins, many others apps are free and easy to integrate.

eCommerce

If you plan to use your website as a store, you may want to know how eCommerce works for each platform. WordPress has several apps that assist users in creating a store to sell their stuff online. However, Wix only offers an eCommerce option with their paid plans, meaning you cannot own a store through the free version of the platform. Even when you do pay, Wix Stores only accepts payments through PayPal and Authorize.net, which can be limiting. Of the two, WordPress is probably a stronger option for potential shopkeepers.