Creating a Wix website, completely free and super easy? If we are to believe the advertisements. We put it to the test and had a developer rebuild an existing WordPress website in Wix.
First observation: even for a young professional, Wix is a hard nut to crack. You have to figure everything out and the possibilities are limited. But more importantly, achieving real return for your business is much more difficult with a Wix website. This is mainly due to a number of strong limitations in terms of SEO.
We would like to give you the pros and cons of WordPress and Wix in terms of costs, ease of use, adaptability and promotion.
WordPress vs Wix: costs
Wix
It is possible to create a Wix website for free . However, there are a number of limitations to this. For example, the URL of your website will be:
http://youraccountname.wix.com/yourwebsitename/.
Pretty impersonal and Google is not a fan of such URLs. Moreover, you have no hosting or support and on your website you cannot remove the small banners of Wix. Those restrictions disappear, depending on the type of premium package you buy. For example, for € 96 you get a personal domain name and 3 GB of storage space.
WordPress
With WordPress, a different payment system applies. You pay for the hosting yourself and must purchase a domain name. If you have a hosting package and a domain name, you can start up your WordPress site and use themes and plugins for free. To be able to use premium themes and plugins, you will have to purchase them. A premium theme that you can fully customise starts at around €50 (one-off).
WordPress vs Wix: ease of use
Wix
You don’t need any technical skills for Wix , as long as you don’t want to make any changes to the default template you’ve chosen. You can quite easily drag and drop your content to where you want it. Note: this does not mean that you can design a Wix website completely according to your own wishes. You chose a certain Wix template and it doesn’t offer you an infinite number of design options. So you will have to make a concession from time to time.
WordPress
The learning curve is greater with WordPress, because you also have the possibility to build your website completely according to your needs and wishes. WordPress not only offers you different themes, each with its own look and feel, but when building your WordPress website in a certain theme you can also add almost unlimited plugins, buttons, text boxes, picture sliders, portfolio options, picture formats, … You have a lot of freedom in how and what you want to do, but it requires more technical knowledge and takes more time than in Wix.
WordPress vs Wix: customisability
Wix
Building a Wix website is very user-friendly and simple, but this comes with strong limitations in terms of customisation. You are very limited in your options to change the design or look of the templates. You can fill in everything as it is, but no more. Even if you want to switch to another template, you will have to start all over again.
WordPress
With WordPress, your options are much more extensive. It is possible to customise almost every aspect of a design or functionality. So you can build a website completely tailored to your corporate identity. To reap all the benefits, you will of course need some technical knowledge or you can hire a web designer.
WordPress vs Wix: marketing & SEO
Wix
The biggest drawback to Wix is its marketing capabilities. In terms of SEO, it is one of the worst platforms. Google has a lot of problems indexing the pages of Wix websites. In addition, it is difficult to execute other marketing techniques such as Facebook pixels, remarketing campaigns and email marketing campaigns with Wix. Moreover, your website is not automatically mobile responsive, which of course is very heavily penalized by Google. There is a manual editor to customize your website for tablet and smartphone visitors, but this does not work optimally and often causes visual overlap of the content blocks.
WordPress
WordPress is very strong when it comes to SEO, thanks to its good website structure (which Google obviously appreciates), easy SEO plugins (such as Yoast SEO) and handy integration of your social media channels. Google Analytics, Facebook pixels, schema mark-ups, marketing automation platforms and other marketing tools are also easily integrated. So it is no problem at all to carry out any marketing activity to make your website really findable for (potential) customers.
What is best for you?
That depends entirely on the purpose of your website. Do you want to put together a website quickly because everyone has one? Then this can be done very cheaply or even for free via Wix. Or do you want a website that you can fully customise yourself, but which above all delivers real returns (in terms of prospects and customers) thanks to its marketing possibilities? Then choose WordPress to really put your company on the map.
