Your website’s design is a crucial element of its success. It should be eye-catching and user-friendly to help you build up your business.
WordPress has a steep learning curve but provides plenty of resources and tools to make it easier. The platform also allows you to use apps and plugins to expand your site’s functionality.
Ease of Use
Both Wix and WordPress are user-friendly platforms for building websites. Both offer drag-and-drop-based interfaces to create and edit web pages and content. While WordPress has a slightly higher learning curve, it still allows users to manage their site without having to learn HTML and CSS code. Both platforms allow for the creation of eCommerce sites, and both have a number of plugins that can be used to enhance site functionality. However, Wix may be the winner when it comes to ease of use because of its built-in drag and drop system.
Another advantage of WordPress is that it offers a variety of themes to choose from, and many of them are free. These templates can be customized to match your business’s branding, and can also be easily edited through the WordPress dashboard. However, it’s important to note that not all WordPress themes are created equal. Some can be quite complicated and require a bit of technical expertise to modify.
Both WordPress and Wix provide a robust range of SEO features, including optimizing page URLs, inserting header code meta tags, adding structured data markup and creating 301 redirects. Wix also provides a free SSL certificate for your website, which is essential to ensure your visitors’ privacy and security. However, if you are looking for advanced functionality, such as conditional logic and hidden fields in your data capture forms, you’ll need to look at WordPress-based solutions.
Customization
Themes are what give your website its visual flair and catch the attention of a potential visitor. With WordPress, you can use different themes to create a look and feel that reflects your brand or business. WordPress also provides a wide variety of plugins that can add functionality to your site. These include social media apps, photo galleries, event calendars, services and more. WordPress also allows you to easily integrate with your preferred analytics tool, which gives you a clear picture of how visitors are interacting with your website.
However, WordPress has a more complex back-end than Wix and has a more significant learning curve. It uses a block-based editor called Gutenberg that has multiple blocks for each type of content, including text, photos and videos. You can easily move and rearrange these blocks to create a layout you like. You can also customize the theme colors, fonts and other elements to match your brand.
In addition, WordPress has an app marketplace that has hundreds of free and paid applications. The apps can be used for ecommerce, marketing, bookings and more. However, many of these apps have issues that can compromise your site security. This is why it is important to research and choose the right ones carefully. Also, you must be aware that the cost of using a WordPress website will increase over time as you expand your features and grow your audience.
Security
WordPress has a bit of a learning curve and requires more technical expertise than Wix but once you’ve got your head around it, building websites is pretty easy. WordPress has a lot of functionality out of the box and you can add even more features with plugins.
Both platforms offer a very intuitive drag and drop system that makes building sites very easy. However, Wix wins out on ease of use with their DnD system being built-in; it’s the key system that their entire platform is based upon. This is very much a point of differentiation and they advertise this a lot in their marketing.
Wix also offers an integrated ecommerce solution that makes it easy for first-time sellers to get up and running. However, if you want to sell more than just products, you’ll need to look at a third-party solution such as Ecwid, Shopify or WooCommerce.
As a hosted platform, WordPress is a little more hands-off in terms of security but that doesn’t mean it can’t be compromised. You still need to be careful, keep your software up to date and only use plugins that have been reviewed for security by the WordPress community. There are also a number of third-party security solutions such as Wordfence that you can install on your WordPress site to further protect it from attacks.
SEO
WordPress is an open-source platform that requires a hosting provider and some coding knowledge to install. It has a steeper learning curve, but offers more flexibility and functionality than Wix does. It also has more options for SEO, including plugins for grammar checking and keyword research. For example, it recently added a built-in integration with Semrush, which allows you to do 10 pieces of keyword research per day for free within the WordPress dashboard.
While WordPress can be intimidating for new users, it is moving toward more user-friendly design. The latest version of WordPress, Gutenberg, features a block editor that makes it easier to create and edit pages and posts. The platform also provides a variety of templates for businesses, blogs, restaurants and food sites.
Wix also has a wide range of apps that allow you to add functionality to your site, such as forums, product review tools and event calendars. It also has a built-in email marketing tool that lets you capture contact data from your website visitors and automatically adds them to a mailing list.
Another key feature of WordPress is its media library, which makes it easy to store and access files like images, audio and video. This is a major benefit for businesses that need to display large amounts of media content. However, it’s worth noting that most other hosted website builders offer better media libraries than Wix.