Wordpress vs Wix - Which one you should choose to create Website (Do they both offer web hosting and web builder?)
What is Web Hosting?
When you rent a home, you’re paying for a piece of real estate to live in. Usually you fill this home with your own furniture and memorabilia, making it feel like your own.
Web hosting follows the same principle, except you’re paying for a home in what is called a “server,” where the data, content, and the information of your website will live. In order for you to claim this piece of real estate on the internet, you must pay to have it hosted. The bigger the piece you want, or the bigger your website, the more you’re going to have to pay.
But, at the most fundamental level, web hosting offers a plot for people to build websites on. When it comes to the debate of “web hosting vs website builder,” a website builder would be useless if not for hosting services — how can you build if you don’t have land, or a server, to build on?
What is a Website Builder?
If you’ve ever wondered, “What is a website builder?” you can think of it this way: it’s a tool that allows beginners and experts alike to build a website, without needing to know code. The pre-coded platforms work by providing a large variety of website templates and themes to choose from, which can then be customized and tailored to your needs. These tools are built to be user-friendly and often come with tutorials and technical support seeing as they’re designed to complement the DIY (do it yourself) method.
Since website builders exist on servers that users can access anywhere they have internet, they are in a certain sense also hosting your website. The sites are hosted on these servers regardless of whether or not a website is finished or launched. By returning to the real estate metaphor, think of website builder hosting like owning some acreage and slowly building atop the land. Once the home is complete and you’re done building, it’ll still be “hosted” on that land.
Now that we understand Key Difference between this two, Wix comes with all in one but for WP you need to choose web hosting provider. WP itself recommends the following ones:
Wix vs WordPress: Pricing
The range of pricing options for these two solutions differs greatly. Here is a break down of what building a website with Wix and with WordPress will cost you…
Wix Pricing
Wix is a freemium website builder. That means that it offers both free and premium packages for users who build a website on this platform. Let’s take a look at these packages to see what Wix will cost you…
- Free – The free version of Wix gives you full access to the Wix templates, ADI, Wix Editor, and a selection of apps. However, there are a number of downsides to the free plan, including having to use a sub-domain, Wix ads on your website, and limited bandwidth and storage.
- Connect Domain ($4 a month, billed annually) – This plan is similar to the free plan, except that it allows you to connect your own domain with your website.
- Combo ($8 a month billed annually) – Connect your own domain name or get a free domain for a year, receive $75 ad vouchers, and ensure your site is Wix ad-free.
- Unlimited ($12 a month billed annually) – A great option for freelancers and entrepreneurs, this plan gifts the Site Booster and Form Builder apps, worth $100+.
- VIP ($24 a month billed annually) – With this plan you gain access to VIP support and priority response, as well as 10 email campaigns and 50,000 emails a month.
Wix also provides a number of eCommerce plans for those looking to run their own online store. Here is a rundown of the eCommerce packages…
- Business Basic ($18 a month billed annually) – This plan will allow you to take online payments on your site and is 100% commission free.
- Business Unlimited ($22 a month billed annually) – As well as commision free online payments, this plan provides up to 20 email campaigns and 100,000 emails a month.
- Business VIP ($30 a month billed annually) – The daddy of eCommerce plans, Business VIP incorporates the numerous features from Business Unlimited, as well as VIP support, priority response, and 50GB of storage.
The Wix prices shown above reflect annual billing. If you choose to pay monthly, the prices increase slightly. Wix also offers a 14-day money back guarantee, so if you decide Wix isn’t for you, you can quickly get a refund
WordPress Pricing
As we have mentioned, the WordPress software is totally free to use and always will be. That said, running a website using WordPress isn’t free, as you will still need to pay for hosting and a domain. (Prices for hosting and domain names are covered next in the next section, but it is worth noting that for these you will need to pay a monthly and annual fee respectively).
As for other products, services, and tools, there are thousands of free and premium options. However, potential cost points can include…
- Themes
- Plugins
- Images/Videos
- On-Going Maintenance
- Web Design Agency/Content Writer/Social Media Manager Fees
Wix Domain Names
Wix provides a free subdomain to anyone who chooses to create a website on its platform. A Wix subdomain looks something like this ‘mysitename’.wix.com. Although this is fine for a small project or personal blog, if you want a professional website, you need to use a proper domain name.
Wix provides a couple of options for purchasing a domain name…
- Purchase a Domain Name via Wix – When you sign up for a premium plan with Wix, you are credited with a year’s free domain. However, after that you will be charged a yearly fee to keep your domain name, which will cost a minimum of $14.95.
- Connect a Third Party Domain Name to Your Wix Site – A cheaper long-term option is to purchase a domain name from a third party registrar. NameCheap is a popular option, but there are a number of alternatives which also provide a good service. (Note: If you want to connect your Wix site with a third party domain you will need to upgrade to a premium Wix plan).
There is also the option of transferring your third-party domain to Wix. The benefit of this is that you can then manage your online presence from just one place.
WordPress Domain Names
With WordPress, you have two main choices when it comes registering a domain name for your website. The first option is to purchase a domain name through a stand-alone registrar, like NameCheap.
The second option is to select a hosting provider that includes a free domain as part of the hosting package. Let’s have a look at a few of hosts that provide this service.
- Bluehost – A budget hosting provider, BlueHost offers shared hosting, including a free SSL certificate and domain name, from $2.95 a month.
- Liquidweb – Pricey alternative for Bluehost starting at $19 a month but with better customer support and dedicated web hosting.
If you are struggling to come up with a good domain name for your website, try using a domain name generator to help point you in the right direction.
SEO
How is Wix’s SEO?
The best thing about Wix is that it is one of the easiest drag-and-drop website builders out there.
You don’t need any technical background or coding experience. Just have a basic design idea in mind, have your content ready and drag-and drop the elements into place.
Literally, you can have a beautiful website up and running in a few minutes.
Off-page SEO
When it comes to off-page SEO, Wix has what they call the Wix SEO Wiz (in short for wizard). It is a step-by-step planning wizard to help you come up with SEO strategies for your Wix site.
It helps you choose keywords to write about and it hooks you up with Google Analytics and Google Search Console.
Some more SEO functionality is built in to the Wix dashboard under the ‘Get Found on Google’ option.
That’s about it.
On-page SEO
In terms of on-page SEO, Wix is fine. It covers most of the basics: it allows you to set meta titles, meta descriptions, headings, and custom URLs.
You can also customize image alt texts, create 301 redirects, and integrate social media sharing options.
Other good SEO features include SSL encryption (search engines rank sites with encryption higher), the ability to ‘hide’ certain pages from search engines, and integration with both Google Analytics and Search Console.
Search engines favor sites that are optimized for mobile. So naturally, Wix’s drag-and drop feature lets you edit to make your mobile layout look great.
Wix also has SEO apps – paid and free – that can be integrated through the Wix App Market. They also have another service called the ‘Site Booster’ that helps get your business listed in local directories and on search engines like Google, Yelp, Bing, and Yahoo.
However, there are some technical SEO features that Wix lacks:
The link structure that Wix.com uses is weird. In every single Wix.com site URL, you will notice a # or “hashbang” which is being served through javascript, and in turn is not readable by search engines. This makes Wix sites very difficult for Google to crawl (read: won’t rank highly). This is a huge negative.
Another big downside to Wix is the inability to add custom code or edit current ones. While Wix has the HTML Code element, it can be quite limiting for more advanced users. Let’s say, you or a developer do an SEO site audit and find that there are some elements that need hard coding.
Finally, Wix sites load slower than their WordPress counterparts — making them suboptimal in that regard from an SEO perspective.
How is WordPress’ SEO?
WordPress is the most popular content management system today. Content Management System (CMS) = a website with the ability to publish content (blog posts).
Approximately 70 million sites are build with WordPress.
WordPress started out as a blogging platform; however, people saw its potential and began creating more and more plug-ins, add-ons, and themes.
Today, WordPress is not just used for blogging. It can also be used for e-commerce, business websites, web applications – basically almost anything web-based.
But still, at its core is that ability to publish content and have it properly index for Google search.
Off-page SEO
When it comes to off-page SEO, WordPress has plugins that help you create, optimize, and propagate content. For example, these are plugins like Yoast that, aside from checking grammar, keyword density, and post tags, even recommend an SEO-friendly writing style!
Moreover, social media, Google Analytics, and Google Search Engine can also be integrated to your WordPress site through plugins.
On-page SEO
WordPress has lots to offer in terms of on-page SEO.
Aside from giving you the usual ability to modify meta titles, headings, and tags, there are SO MANY plugins that can be used for page acceleration, image optimizations, and caching. These greatly improve your page loading times (search engines give more priority to sites that load faster), which can help your site rank higher.
WordPress offers plugins that continuously check your site for broken links (search engines ‘penalize’ sites with broken links); and plugins that automatically create internal links once you type set keywords.
These make is super easy to monitor your site for anything that might reduce your SEO traction.
There are also WordPress plugins that can organize your URLs, making your pages more search engine-friendly and also keep track of 404 errors and automatically create 301 redirects.
Apps and Plugins
WordPress is an open-source platform. This means that its codes are open to everybody to use and modify. Any programmer or coder can use WordPress to create their own themes or plugins for others to purchase or download for free.
This is one of the main reasons why the WordPress community has expanded to more than 75 million websites (with most recent stats saying it now powers around 30% of all websites on the internet). As more people and businesses build websites, WordPress is expected to continue growing.
There are over 55,000+ WordPress plugins, which have been downloaded more than 1.2 billion times, giving you an idea of how extensive the WordPress community really is.
Wix is not an open-source platform. This means that only its private development team can produce website building tools. As a result, Wix’s tools are fully integrated into the website builder, and have a much lower chance of being “buggy”.
Wix is also expanding its Apps Market, so you can add a lot more functions to a Wix website. These Apps are fully integrated, so you don’t have to worry about installation.
Themes
Wix offers 500+ themes— a good amount for a website builder, but no where near Wordpress which has over 11,000+ themes.Like plugins, Wordpress has a wider selection, but you'll occasionally run into compatibility issues that will require you to debug with code. Wix has a smaller selection but you'll never run find a theme that requires to mess with code to be compatible with Wix features.
Customer Support
Wix includes phone, chat and email customer support in all of their packages— and in the more expensive plans you can get VIP Support which lets you skip the line.Because Wordpress is free and open source, they don't include customer support— though oftentimes if you pay for a theme or plugin, the creators will include support as part of the cost (support is limited to their theme or plugin of course).
Final Thoughts/Verdict
There is reason why you are getting Wix ads left and right, everywhere. Because their marketing staff is pushing their brand name far to outscore Wordpress which is powering biggest number of whole world websites anyway and they does not need any more advertisement because they have huge reputation already.
Wix advantage being easy drag and drop platform with completely free website (but you will get wix logo on the top of your website and their ads too).
While WordPress being the most used platform in the world, creating free website with them is like having empty shell with limited possibilities (Without web hosting). But if you are planing to have some serious business WP is better destination with better SEO, because Google ranks WP sites higher in their search than Wix.
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