Wix vs WordPress: which should you choose for a small business site?

I build Wix sites for a living, so you’d expect me to say “Wix, obviously”. I won’t. Both platforms run millions of perfectly good websites, and there are projects where I’d point you to WordPress without a second thought. The right answer depends less on features and more on who will look after the site once it’s live.

Here’s how I’d think it through.

The real difference: who maintains it#

This is the part most comparison articles bury.

Wix is a hosted platform. Wix runs the servers, the security, the updates and the backups. You log in, edit, publish. If something breaks on their side, they fix it. The trade-off is that you play by their rules: you can’t install any server software you like, and you can’t move the site to another host.

WordPress is software you run yourself (here I mean self-hosted WordPress from wordpress.org, which is what people usually mean). You choose a host, install it, and pick a theme and plugins. You can change almost anything. The trade-off is that someone has to keep WordPress, the theme and every plugin updated, watch for security problems, and make sure backups actually work.

Neither of those is a flaw. They’re different deals. If you have a developer on hand or enjoy that kind of thing, WordPress’s freedom is worth a lot. If you want to run a business and forget the website exists until you need to change something, the hosted model is worth a lot too.

Cost#

People compare the Wix plan price with “WordPress is free” and stop there. That isn’t a fair comparison.

With WordPress, the software is free but you still pay for:

• hosting, which ranges from very cheap to quite expensive depending on speed and support;
• a premium theme or page builder, if you use one;
• premium plugins (forms, SEO, backups, security, booking), many of which are yearly subscriptions;
• someone’s time for updates and fixes, whether that’s yours or a developer’s.

With Wix, hosting, security and updates are included in the plan. Some features, like a store or bookings, need a higher plan, and some apps from the Wix App Market have their own fees.

For a typical small business site, the yearly totals often end up closer than people expect. The bigger difference is time, not money.

Flexibility and custom features#

WordPress wins on raw flexibility. It’s open source, with a huge plugin library and full access to the code and database. If you need something very unusual, there’s a good chance someone has built a plugin for it, or a developer can build it.

Wix is more flexible than its reputation suggests, though. With Velo, Wix’s developer platform, you can write JavaScript on the page and on the backend, use a built-in database, call outside APIs, receive webhooks and run scheduled jobs. Most custom features small businesses ask me for, like member dashboards, custom search, booking logic or syncing data with other tools, are very doable on Wix. I’ve written about many of them, starting with Wix dynamic pages.

Where Wix genuinely can’t follow: installing your own server software, using a database other than its own as the main one, or moving the site to your own hosting. If any of those is a hard requirement, choose WordPress (or a fully custom build).

SEO#

Both can rank well. Google doesn’t rank platforms, it ranks pages. What matters is the content, the site structure, speed, and getting the basics right: titles, descriptions, headings, internal links, a sitemap.

• Wix has these built in and turned on by default: sitemaps, editable meta tags, clean URLs, redirects and structured data. There’s less to set up, and less to get wrong.
• WordPress gets there with a plugin like Yoast or Rank Math, and gives you more control at the edges.

Wix had a poor SEO reputation a decade ago, and it stuck. It hasn’t been fair for years. If you’re on Wix, my Wix SEO checklist covers what actually needs doing.

Speed#

Both can be fast and both can be slow. A WordPress site on cheap hosting with a heavy theme and twenty plugins will be slow. A Wix site with huge images, autoplay video and five animation effects per section will be slow too.

On Wix you don’t control the server, so speed is mostly about what you put on the page. On WordPress you control everything, which means more ways to make it fast and more ways to make it slow. I wrote a whole post on why Wix sites are slow and how to fix it.

Which one I’d pick for you#

Choose Wix if:

• you want to edit text and photos yourself, without fear of breaking something;
• nobody on your team wants to think about hosting, updates or security;
• your site is a business site: services, portfolio, bookings, a small shop, a members area;
• you want custom features but not a custom server.

Choose WordPress if:

• you have a developer or agency who will maintain it long term;
• you need a specific plugin or integration that only exists for WordPress;
• you need to host the site yourself, or must be able to move it between hosts;
• the site is mainly a large publication with complex editorial workflows.

And if you’re already on one of them and it’s working, don’t switch just because of an article like this one. Moving platforms costs time and carries SEO risk. If you do decide to come to Wix, read how to move your website to Wix without losing Google rankings first.

If you’ve decided on Wix and want it built properly, I do Wix website design.