Wix vs WordPress: Which Is Better For Your Website in 2024?

Wix is best for quick and easy website creation with an all-in-one solution. WordPress is more flexible and powerful in the long run, but has a steeper learning curve. WordPress is generally the better choice for more complex websites or online stores. Both platforms are viable depending on budget, technical skills, and project needs.

Struggling to decide between Wix vs WordPress? We’re here to pair you with the more suitable eCommerce solution for your business. Let’s get this show on the road!

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Wix vs WordPress: Quick Comparison

Both Wix vs WordPress are brilliant platforms, but they offer contrasting approaches to building up a website as well as different eCommerce attributes. While Wix is a website builder that is uber-easy to use and operate, WordPress is a powerful, flexible Content Management System (CMS).

About Wix

To begin with, Wix is an all-in-one, drag&drop, cloud-based web development platform that is perfect for beginners or non-coders. It allows users to create effective eCommerce websites through the use of online tools. With Wix, everything comes built-in and is ready for you to start building your own webpage. Don’t forget that we have a thorough Wix eCommerce review so you can grasp all insights about this platform!

Let’s create a Wix store, and here comes a Wix tutorial to help you set up an online store easily:

About WordPress

Whereas WordPress is a self-hosted open-source platform that allows you to create much larger websites but requires more technical knowledge. At first, it was known as a blogging platform. Then, because of its ease of use, you can create any kind of site using WordPress’s massive ecosystem of plugins and themes.

Additionally, WordPress is also a good choice for multichannel vendors all around the world. The eCommerce platform allows merchants to connect with the top global marketplaces such as Etsy, eBay, Amazon, etc., to manage multiple stores easily in one place.

This article focuses on WordPress.org – the open-source version and is what most people are referring to when mentioning “WordPress”.

Besides WordPress.org, there’s a fully-hosted version named WordPress.com. Here, you can see the differences between WordPress.com vs WordPress.org.

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#1. Ease of use: Wix and WordPress

Welcome all eCommerce merchants to the Wix vs WordPress shootout! But first, let’s take a look at this infographic for a quick comparison between Wix vs WordPress.

The first aspect that we’d love to mention in our Wix vs WordPress comparison is the user-friendliness of these two platforms.

Wix ease of use

Wix builds itself to be a full-service site builder that anyone can use, especially beginners. This platform offers users drag-and-drop features called Wix Editor to build a website in minutes without coding skills.

Everything is in one place with WIX.

If you have automation, email, social media, ads, chat, analytics, project management needs then WIX has it all. There is no true drag and drop editor like WIX on the market which makes it easier for creative people to design websites without needing to write any code.

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More than that, Wix also offers you technologies of artificial intelligence, which are called Wix ADI and Wix Editor X to help you with the very first steps for creating your online store.

WordPress ease of use

While Wix is one of the best website builder software, WordPress requires a little technical knowledge to customize your store. This platform supports store owners to check out the underlying code to customize their websites.

If you are confident in your coding skills, you will be able to create your own website from scratch to suit your business needs.

Or else, with its clear control panel, you can easily pick up the basics in no time at all, even for beginners or non-coders. On the left side, there are a variety of content areas and adjusted settings for you to manually customize your storefront.

You can find out how to set up WordPress in our WooCommerce tutorial below:

#2. Pricing: WordPress

Notably, pricing is an essential aspect that you may pay great attention to when comparing Wix vs WordPress. Let’s compare the pricing plans of Wix vs WordPress to find out which one gives you more bang for your buck.

Wix pricing

Is Wix free?

Actually, yes.

Wix adds up prices across tiered series of monthly plans, including a domain name and varying levels of storage.

There is also a totally free launch package too, but it has limited features and requires users to accept on-site ads. As a site grows and changes, users can scale up to a higher pricing plan that offers more useful features.

The price of Wix packages varies depending on the purpose of your website. You can choose to pay monthly or one year upfront. By doing this, you may save around 17-13% annually.

However, this cost doesn’t include any apps from the Wix App Market that you later choose for your website.

Especially this kind of one-stop shopping makes it attractive to new users who are looking for a cost-effective way to create a website for selling purposes. However, the challenge here is that you won’t have much space for customization and specialized functions.

For a more in-depth analysis of how much money you need to spend on Wix, please read our Wix pricing calculation here.

WordPress pricing

Is WordPress free?

Unlike Wix, downloading and installing WordPress is completely free. You’re also able to upgrade your WordPress.org website without worrying about any monthly or annual fees.

But you could end up paying for hosting, themes, and plugins. Depending on the features and functions your site needs, the actual cost can be highly variable.

The estimated cost breakdown below will give you a good idea of how much you have to pay.

Extra	Estimated Price
Domain	$12/year
WordPress hosting fee	From $3.95/month
Security	From $50, on-going or one-off charge
Developer fees	From $50/hr

Due to its open-source nature, WordPress also greatly depends on customization themes and third-party plugins.

Paid theme	From $30
Plugins	$0-$1000

Beyond that, if you want to sell online, you’ll need the assistance of an eCommerce-specific plugin for WordPress (e.g: WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, Ecwid) as well as some free and paid efficiency-enhancing features. If you’re about to sell with WordPress WooCommerce, our articles on WooCommerce review and WooCommerce pricing may capture all your concerns!

#3. Templates & Themes: WordPress

Your sales performance somehow depends on your site’s look. Store owners need a template that is not only eye-catching but also easy to use that can make your brand stand out. Moving to the next part of the Wix vs WordPress comparison, let’s dig into their online presence.

Wix Templates

Currently, Wix offers 500+ pre-made website templates, which is a large number for a website builder.

All Wix designs are ready to use and written in HTML5. By using Wix built-in tools like Wix ADI and Wix Editor X (you may learn the differences via Wix ADI vs Wix Editor), you can make certain changes to your site, layout, and items. In particular, templates are sorted into various categories such as business, eCommerce, photography, video, music, etc.

Nonetheless, Wix also limits users from customizing the size even though they have access to hundreds of well-crafted templates. Since it is a hosted platform, Wix’s developers keep control over all the tools and applications on tap.

However, you’ve got to be aware that you can’t switch to a new Wix template once your store has been up. You can still move things around and select different fonts or colors, but otherwise, you’re pretty locked in.

This highlights the importance of choosing a suitable theme for your Wix store right from the scratch. The good news is we’ve hand-selected the best Wix templates so that your decision-making process gets easier. Check it out!

WordPress Themes

On the other hand, WordPress comes with over 9,000+ themes. Like plugins, it has a wider selection but will require coding know-how if there are any incompatibility issues arise.

You can use the “Customizer” tool to make theme customization in WordPress. It is a tool that lets you click elements to take up style options or browse along. More importantly, you can install custom fonts into your WordPress site.

There are free and paid themes for users to choose from. Free themes will come with limited support but they did go through a strict review process. Therefore, you don’t need to worry too much. Besides, paid themes generally offer more features and come with premium support options. For paid themes, there are several WordPress theme shops like Themify, CSSIgniter, StudioPress, and so on.

Or else, check out the best WooCommerce themes to easily make your choice.

#4. Apps & Plugins: WordPress

The next part of our Wix vs WordPress comparison is Plugins and Apps. They are third-party extensions that you can use to add and expand your website’s function. Wix calls them apps, and in WordPress, on the other hand, they are called plugins.

Wix apps

First and foremost, Wix App Market offers 250+ powerful web apps to integrate your Wix site with leading marketing or financial tools, sell online, affiliate apps, and more.

Most apps are free or have a lite version. Others require monthly payments and vary in price. Despite a limited collection of apps, they cover the most commonly inquired features.

Notably, Wix has checked all apps for compatibility, so you can be confident they will be well integrated.

WordPress plugins

One advantage is that WordPress has a huge amount of apps and plugins that were created by the open-source community.

Up to now, WordPress has more than 59,000+ plugins, that’s way more than any website builder has.

Whether you want to create a contact form, install Google Analytics, build a membership website or sell online products, there’s a plugin for that. Long story short, if you can think of a feature, there’s probably a WordPress plugin that can build the website of your dream.

The fact is every plugin operates on a different principle, so each plugin has its own learning curve.

At the end of the day, building an eye-catching and fully functional website is about finding a good theme and plugin solutions. However, with a huge amount of plugins, you will face some issues. One of them is incompatibility which often arises over time. Plus, fixing it will require code involvement.

Therefore, to avoid this situation, you should browse WordPress’s apps and plugin reviews to get your best decision. It’s a good idea to look into the list of “featured and popular” plugins because it has a heap of interesting and useful features.

#5. Blogging features: WordPress

In order to start blogging, many store owners are searching for a suitable platform to use. It is easy and effortless to create blogs with both Wix vs WordPress. Let’s see which one is better in this round!

Wix blogging

Wix allows you to easily add a blog section to your website. It has all the basic blogging features you’ll commonly use. For instance, categories and tags, photos and videos, archives, etc. As you can see below, the interface is clean and easy to understand in no time.

Keep in mind that Wix uses a plain text editor, which is very limited in terms of formatting options. Furthermore, it also lacks several features like featured images, backdating posts, creating private posts and more.

WordPress blogging

On the contrary, WordPress can be the most powerful blogging option compared to other platforms. It first started as a blogging platform and gradually evolved into a full-blown website builder. Up to now, this platform powers nearly 38% of all websites worldwide.

WordPress has all the blogging features you need, such as tags, categories, a native commenting system, and all other advanced features. Most importantly, you can extend your blog using plugins and add any feature that you can think of. Here again, a bit of technical expertise can go a long way that will help you to power your blog.

#6. SEO: WordPress

The mastermind behind the website’s management should be on good terms with SEO strategies and all the aspects it revolves around.

Wix SEO

Wix has built-in SEO management functionality, social-media poster, and email-marketing tools that are available for users to market their website.

This platform also has a bunch of dedicated SEO apps, and the most popular one is Site Booster. Site Booster is free if you sign up to Wix’s Unlimited plan or higher. Moreover, with a Free or Combo plan, it will cost $3.44/month. With this app, you can drive more traffic to your website, get found on search engines with a higher rank.

WordPress SEO

For WordPress, you have some options out-of-the-box, but we strongly recommend you for using full SEO capability plugins. Many themes contain SEO features like schema markup, breadcrumb navigation, open graph data, and so on.

Let’s take Yoast SEO as an outstanding example, it is free and a very powerful tool. This plugin has 5+ million active installations and gets 4.9/5 stars overall. It is obvious that Yoast SEO is one of the best plugins in WordPress.

It can add XML sitemaps, canonical URLs, meta descriptions, and more. The plugin especially guides you to improve your content score and rates your post’s readability so that you can optimize your site as much as possible. Plus, Google Analyticator will help you with your Google Analytics integration.

#7. eCommerce functionality: WordPress

Originally created as a platform for blogging, WordPress lacks eCommerce functionality out of the box.

This means you’ll have to install an eCommerce-specific plugin in order to monetize a WordPress site. To make it easier to understand, this plugin will serve as a bridge that turns any WordPress site into an eCommerce store.

In this section, we will take the most popular eCommerce plugin of WordPress – WooCommerce, as an example. So please be aware that when mentioning WordPress’s eCommerce features, we are actually talking about WooCommerce.

1. Basic functionalities

Wix

Wix offers users an all-in-one package with paid plans that you don’t need to use other eCommerce apps to enhance your website. This means that if you are using the free plan, you can’t effectively function your store on Wix.

Fortunately, with a free plan, you still can use a few third-party apps that can help you sell things online. But, those apps would cost you a pretty penny even more money with their monthly fees. Not to mention, you will have limited functionality and payment options such as PayPal or Authorize.net only. You can have a look at our analysis on Wix Payments here for more information.

WordPress

We all know that WooCommerce is an open-source platform, you can add any plugins you want to build your website as you need. For example, query monitor, searchWP, WP Featherlight, and so on. WooCommerce is great for people who tend to use WordPress but also want to add eCommerce features to their site as well.

Further reading: You may read Wix vs WooCommerce to grasp an all-inclusive comparison between these two powerful eCommerce platforms.

2. Payment gateways

Wix payment gateways

Whenever possible, Wix automatically connects you to the most proper payment providers available in your region based on your preferences and location. Currently, it offers store owners 14 payment options to choose from. If you have a different payment provider that is available at your place, you are welcome to use it. Or else, there’s even Wix’s own payment gateway called Wix Payments.

Normally, there are three payment options for customers: credit card, PayPal, and offline payments like cash or money transfer. Wix doesn’t charge any additional transaction fees like other online store builders sometimes do.

In terms of shipping, it is set per country and can be defined for each region. If you are in the US, you can even have real-time shipping based on the USPS calculation. This will make the estimate of the shipping fee much easier. Integrates with fulfillment providers like Shipstation, ShipBob, and MultiOrders.

WordPress payment gateways

Basically, WordPress’s payment options are bank transfer, cheque, cash on delivery, and PayPal. You can easily add other payment methods like credit cards via add-ons, but this can result in extra costs. WooCommerce also has over 100 payment gateways to help you process and sync your payment easily, including some well-known ones: Paypal, Amazon pay, Stripe, eWay, and so on.

There is a wide range of built-in shipping options available. You can add via add-ons the shipping carriers such as UPS, FedEx, etc. Suitable plugins make it easy to sell things via dropshipping.

To illustrate, Dropshipping and Fulfillment for AliExpress and WooCommerce plugin allow you to import products from AliExpress to your store with just a click.

3. Dropshipping

Wix dropshipping

To build a thriving dropshipping business, Print on demand for Wix is the top-notch choice. This app helps you to sell goods in your store without dealing with the actual delivery and shipping.

With 90+ print provider locations, you can easily create custom products for your eCommerce store, such as T-shirts, socks, mugs, and so on. Furthermore, Printify simplifies and automates the process of sourcing and creating print-on-demand products at the best prices on the market.

Besides Printify, there are a number of dropshipping apps that are only available on Business Unlimited or higher plans.

WordPress dropshipping

We can directly use WooCommerce Dropshipping to make drop shipping easy and hassle-free. This definitely lets you sell more but work less!

WooCommerce Dropshipping is powerful store management for:

• Managing a dropshipping store;
• Notifying automatically when their products are purchased through your store;
• Importing inventory per supplier quickly;
• Assigning inventory to specific suppliers.

Here is the definitive how-to guide on creating a WooCommerce dropshipping store you may need.

#8. Security: Wix and WordPress

Wix security

Moving to the next part of our Wix vs WordPress comparison, let’s take a look at security issues. When it comes to security, Wix offers shop owners chances to protect their checkout process by HTTPS/TLS encryption.

TLS (Transport Layer Security) is the standard security technology for setting up an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. This link makes sure that all data is private and protected. TLS is the industry standard that is used by millions of web developers to insure against hackers.

In addition, Wix Stores only works with payment gateways that offer the highest level of security certification (PCI DSS Level 1)

WordPress Security

Due to its huge number of themes and plugins in WordPress’s marketplace, there is always a chance that your website will get hacked.

However, there’s also good news. The WordPress Security team has worked out a set of security plugins to help users protect their websites at all costs. Now, store owners can install SSL certificates to look after your site’s preservation.

All you need to do is to make a purchase of that license from third-party companies before installing a plugin. Almost all advanced extensions rely on plugins, and you have to switch over from its core files to enable an SSL connection.

We highly recommend that you should take care of your website yourself by updating it on a regular basis. WordPress will display a notification on your backend to remind you about the update, so don’t worry because you won’t miss it (you can follow our comprehensive guide to update WordPress here).

Furthermore, you should follow these practices in protecting your webpage:

• Use strong passwords for WordPress, hosting, and SFTP accounts as well as don’t use “admin” for your username.
• Wisely choose plugins and themes from reliable developers/sources.
• Set up a firewall in front of your site.

Then, your WordPress is totally secured and hack-free both now and in the future.

#9. Support: Wix

Wix support

Wix offers phone, email support, and community forums. You can also find tons of blogs and video tutorials that are particularly helpful for beginners. For the very technical issues, you might expect a bit of back and forth, but they will get to the right answer eventually.

WordPress support

Notwithstanding, official support is not available on WordPress. However,  it owns a huge user community and a massive number of tutorials for you. Due to its plenty of information, you need to separate good from bad.

Online guides from WordPress will take you through common matters if you are good at self-educating. The full instructions are divided into topics from “Getting Started” to “Security” which makes finding the right paper a bit simpler.

Wix or WordPress: Who Has Got the Upper Hand?

WordPress is far superior as an open-source platform for any kind of website in the long run. On the other hand, Wix helps customers to easily create websites. Actually, it all depends on what you need the site for and how tech-savvy you are when it comes to site-building.

If you have no experience in creating a website or only have a small business store, Wix is definitely the better solution. It’s much easier to use straight from the box, and you can build your site in minutes. Wix will walk you through the process from start to finish.

For someone who wants to be in control and wants to learn how a website works, WordPress is there for you. It gives you full control over your website. You can add or remove any plugins or even modify underlying code by hand in any way you want.

Or you can always pay a visit to our article on best eCommerce platforms to find out more eCommerce options!

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Wix or WordPress: Comparison – FAQs

• What is the difference between Wix and WordPress?

Wix is a website builder where all the templates, features and security measures are provided right out of the box. Meanwhile, WordPress is an open-source CMS that generally has more advanced blogging functions than a website builder.

• Should I learn Wix or WordPress?

Wix is a better bet for beginners, while WordPress is more technically challenging. We recommend you opt for Wix if you are an amateur user.

• Is Wix better than WordPress?

Wix is easier to use but less flexible while WordPress is more flexible but has a steeper learning curve. Thus, deciding between Wix vs WordPress is a question of trade-offs.

• Does Wix work with WordPress?

Yes. You can import posts from your WordPress blog to Wix. Whether your posts are on a WordPress.com or a WordPress.org site, you can transfer them in just a few clicks.

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Bottom Line

Lastly, we hope this article helped you to make a comparison between Wix vs WordPress and know their pros and cons. These differences are just fundamental to the nature of the website builder and CMS.

That is why you should think long and hard about what your website needs and apply that to make up your mind. There is no universal right or wrong decision.

In case you’re planning on performing Wix to WordPress or WordPress to Wix, LitExtension would be an ideal solution for you. LitExtension is proud to be the #1 Shopping Cart Migration Expert that helps you transfer all your valuable data to a more robust platform automatically, accurately, and securely at an affordable price. Should you have any further concerns, don’t hesitate to contact our support agents!

See you again with more eCommerce tips & tricks via LitExtension Blog when you’ve already built up your online store on either Wix or WordPress! Don’t forget that we have a dynamic Facebook eCommerce community for your to discuss everything about eCommerce!

Thank you for reading this far!