The short answer, because you came here for one. If your site is a brochure with a contact form, nobody in the business wants to think about hosting or updates, and the person who edits it is the same person answering the phone, Wix is a defensible choice. If the site has to carry a real content operation, feed a CRM, generate pages at scale, or survive you changing agency, build it on WordPress.
Who owns what, in practice
On WordPress you own the files and the database. Pull a copy over SFTP, dump the database, and stand the same site up on a different host by the end of the afternoon. Your host is a supplier you can fire. The software is free; you pay for hosting, licences and somebody to keep it running.
On Wix you own your content and, if you can transfer it out, your domain. You do not own the site. There is no export that produces a working site somewhere else. Wix gives you a CSV of contacts, a CSV of store products and a file of blog posts. It does not give you your pages, layout or forms in anything another platform can read.
That is not a scandal, it is the deal: portability traded away for never having to patch anything. Plenty of businesses should take it. Just take it knowingly rather than discovering it in year three.
What actually happens when you want to leave
Leaving WordPress is a migration. You move files and a database, repoint DNS, re-check the URLs and you are done. The URLs can stay identical, which means the search history stays intact.
Leaving Wix is a rebuild. Every page gets remade by hand, and then you have a redirect problem, because Wix imposes a URL prefix on its structured content types: one for blog posts, another for store products, another for bookable services. You can rename those prefixes, not remove them. So the old address of every post carries a segment your new site has no reason to use.
The fix is mechanical, and it has to be done properly:
- Crawl the live site with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb and export every indexable URL before you touch anything.
- Pull twelve months of pages from Google Search Console so you know which of those URLs earn clicks.
- Map old to new one to one. A redirect to the homepage is a deleted page with extra steps.
- Put the 301s on the new server. Once the domain leaves Wix the old URLs stop existing, and you cannot set a redirect on a platform you have left.
Budget for it when you price the move, not after. It is a day or two on a small site and the thing a cheap migration skips.
What it really costs by year three
Compare the running cost over three years, not the build price. Bands, because the number moves with what you actually need:
| Line | Wix | WordPress |
|---|---|---|
| Platform / hosting | Roughly $17–$60 a month by tier, billed annually | $10–$30 shared, $25–$120 managed, per month |
| Add-ons | Apps from free to $20–$50 each per month | Theme or builder licence $50–$100 a year; plugins $0–$600 a year |
| Domain | $15–$25 a year after the first | $15–$25 a year |
| Keeping it working | Included | Nothing yourself, $50–$300 a month if not |
| Initial build | $500–$3,000 templated | $2,000–$8,000 templated, $8,000–$30,000+ custom |
What moves those numbers: page count, e-commerce or bookings, how many third-party systems have to talk to each other, and whether copy and photography are in scope. Our own web design and development work starts from $200 as a minimum and moves on exactly those variables; the pricing page sets out the bands.
Do the arithmetic yourself. A Wix Business tier at $35 a month plus two apps at $15 is $65 a month, about $2,340 over three years. Managed WordPress hosting at $40 a month with a $250 a year licence stack and no retainer is about $2,190. Close enough that cost rarely decides it.
The line that decides it is the fourth one. If nobody in your business will apply a plugin update, and you will not pay anyone to, WordPress becomes the more expensive option the first time an unpatched form plugin gets exploited or a builder update breaks a layout nobody notices for a fortnight.
Who is going to edit it on a Tuesday
Ask this before anything about SEO. A site nobody dares change goes stale, and a stale site loses to a mediocre one that gets updated.
The Wix editor is genuinely easier for a non-technical owner. You drag a thing, it goes where you dropped it. Changing a phone number, swapping a photo or adding a page is within reach of anyone who can use a word processor.
WordPress splits in two. The block editor is fine for text, posts and simple pages, and it handles multiple authors with real roles and permissions, which Wix does less comfortably. Page builders are where it goes wrong: a site assembled from deeply nested Elementor or Divi sections is one an owner will open, panic at, and close.
So if you go WordPress, the brief should say the client must be able to edit every piece of copy, every image and every phone number without touching a layout control. That means locked templates and defined content fields, not a blank canvas. It is a briefing decision rather than a platform one.
SEO: what matters, and the myths that waste your time
- "Wix cannot rank." True around 2015, when Wix used a crawling model Google handled badly and you could not edit a title tag. Not for years now. You get title tags, meta descriptions, canonicals, an editable robots.txt, a redirect manager, structured data and a sitemap.
- "Google prefers WordPress." It does not know or care what built the page. It fetches HTML.
- "You need Yoast to rank." An SEO plugin writes tags into the head. It decides nothing. The green light is a checklist, not a ranking factor.
Speed has a ceiling on Wix
Wix ships its own JavaScript with every page and you cannot remove it. A well-built Wix site performs acceptably; it will not reach the top of the field. On WordPress you control the stack, so the ceiling is higher — but the average WordPress site running a builder and thirty plugins is slower than the average Wix one. The platform sets the ceiling, discipline sets the result. Run what you have through a speed test before blaming the platform.
Scale and structure
If you need a hundred and fifty location or service pages driven from a content model, custom schema at template level, or reusable structured content — fleet vehicles, case types, practitioners — WordPress with custom post types is the right tool and it is not close. Wix has dynamic pages backed by collections; they work for a few dozen, then you feel the edges. This bites hardest in home services and multi-branch operations, where the whole local SEO plan rests on a page per service per area.
Tracking and custom code
Custom code injection on Wix sits behind the paid tiers, so check the plan before promising anyone Google Tag Manager, offline conversion imports or a call tracking script. On WordPress it is a header include. Most analytics and reporting jobs start by fixing exactly this.
AI search cuts the other way
Most AI crawlers do not execute JavaScript. Wix serves server-rendered HTML, so it is fine. A fashionable headless WordPress build that renders client-side can be invisible to them while looking perfect in a browser. If being cited in AI answers matters to you, read the raw HTML before you buy an architecture.
When Wix is genuinely the right answer
- One to five people, a site under about fifteen pages, no integrations beyond a form and a booking link.
- Nobody technical in the business, no retainer, and no appetite for one.
- You are testing an offer and do not yet know whether it needs a website or just a Google Business Profile.
- Growth comes from proximity, reviews and paid search rather than content. A trade running one van gets more from review generation than from a bespoke CMS.
- The budget is small enough that maintenance would eat the build. A $1,200 Wix site with the rest going into ads beats a $6,000 WordPress site with nothing left to promote it.
We build on Wix on purpose for those businesses — see Wix development — rather than selling a platform the client will not use. In between sit Squarespace and Webflow: more control than Wix, still hosted, at the cost of needing somebody who knows them.
When it should be WordPress
- You publish regularly, with more than one author and real editorial roles.
- You need pages generated from structured data rather than built by hand.
- Something has to integrate: a CRM, a quoting engine, a membership area, a booking system with its own rules.
- You want the option of changing supplier without a rebuild. That reason is usually left unsaid, and it is legitimate.
- You are selling real volume online — though for a pure product catalogue, Shopify is often the better answer than either, which is worth settling in an e-commerce scoping call rather than after the invoice.
How to decide in ten minutes
- Name who edits the site. If the honest answer is "nobody", the platform matters less than the retainer.
- Count the pages you will have in three years, not today. Under twenty, either works. Over a hundred, WordPress.
- List every system that must exchange data with the site. Zero or one, either works. Two or more, WordPress.
- Decide whether you would accept rebuilding rather than migrating if you outgrow the platform. If yes, Wix is a rational bet.
If it is still a coin toss, it does not matter much. Pick the editor the owner likes and get on with the marketing, which is where the difference gets made.
If you want a second opinion on what you have, including whether it needs replacing at all, tell us what you are running. We build on WordPress and on Wix, which is the only reason this comparison is worth reading.
