Having been a WordPress expert for the last decade, designing innumerable websites, having lots of real-life experience and now fully trained and amply knowledgeable with our Wix partnership, I would say YES Wix can not only compete with but also exceed the WordPress platform. More importantly, beyond competing, there are many features and areas that Wix excels in compared to WordPress. The more important reasons are that Wix has superior security, is maintenance free, requires no updates, and it contains integrated ecommerce, marketing and business services. In contrast, WordPress’ security is more easily compromised, requires constant maintenance, needs regular updates, ecommerce must be manually added and marketing and business services must be joined in by a third party.
Secure Hosting
Beyond a lower operating cost, Wix offers better security than WordPress’ open source platform with no additional need for locked files, malware scanner and removal systems. WordPress needs constant updates from third party plugins. Additionally, WordPress core and themes are annoyingly time consuming and costly because they add extra labour and costs for updates, fixes and breaks. These components also cause slower load speeds and usually require professional maintenance contracts. Unlike Wix, which is truly maintenance free, WordPress requires additional costly backups and restore systems. Conversely, Wix hosting has the latest security built in, is maintenance free, requires no updates and thus has lower operating costs.
Website Design
Most WordPress designs start with a platform install, 1000’s of third party responsive themes, many third party plugins and is usually layered with a drag and drop editor using Elementor or Divi. For those who are more advanced, WordPress is known for customized coding outside of the theme. For those reasons, the WordPress setup and design process for building a website takes a lot of time due to the complexities of the platform. In contrast, the Wix system is standard with over 900 mobile friendly and responsive themes, easy drag and drop editing and available custom coding with Velo. Additionally, Wix Editor X responsive is more advanced than WordPress with custom sizing for mobile, tablet, laptop and desktops.
Integrations and Apps
WordPress is just a website platform, so all integrations from SEO, ecommerce, booking, marketing etc must be a third party plugin. While this offers lots of flexibility with integration or APIs, it all means potential conflicts, breaks and fixes, updates and maintenance requiring time and labour costs. Conversely, the Wix all-in-one platform has all the ecommerce, marketing and business services built in with no maintenance. This way, Wix provides full convenience with seamless updates to save time and money. Should you need more than what's offered, there are approved third party apps for those who want to expand their features or services.
Access and Support
WordPress started as a content management system compared to custom coded websites. At that time, this type of platform allowed users to make simple changes, but that is not where WordPress is today. As WordPress evolved, so did the complexity. WordPress was no longer user friendly and the user needed experts to make changes and keep up maintenance of their website. Wix on the other hand, allows simple user access for editing, marketing (social media posting, email marketing, blogging, Facebook ads etc.) business tools (invoicing, CRM, store management, payments etc.). With the added feature of a Wix mobile app to access marketing and communications on the go, Wix even offers custom mobile app design for those whose customers require one. Additionally, Wix has no need for content management or marketing. However, most agencies offer both DIY and support.
Load Times
Load times may not mean a lot to you. However, the world target browser Google bases their ranking on load speeds, mobile friendliness and platforms. Additionally, many technical changes in back end coding affect search results and load times. To make sure they are giving their websites the best for Google ranking, Wix even has a dashboard tool to test, analyze and optimize all website’s speed. To demonstrate, here’s a recent chart showing WordPress and Wix from recent 2020 results from Google.
In Conclusion
Having worked with both platforms over the years, I would highly recommend having an agency that offers the Wix platform. Building your website and marketing on the Wix Editor or Editor X to give you, our clients better security, faster load times, integrated marketing, built-in business services and lower operating costs for small businesses of all sizes is why our Agency, after over 10 Years with WordPress, has switched to the Wix all in one platform. I've just scratched the surface, but if your are considering a new or revised website, feel free to reach out to learn more.