Wix and WordPress are both quite well known in the small business website-building field. Wix offers many drag and drop tools for you to build your website, but lacks true customizability.
WordPress is known for its powerful yet complicated CMS. WordPress is more customizable with many different themes and you can have more access to your code and your databases depending on if you use wordpress.org or wordpress.com. Custom Development gives you the most customizability, where you can create whatever your heart desires.
Small business Benefits of wix
Wix offers you a drag and drop builder, which is great for people who do not know how to code, but it is not great for people that want more custom designs, animations and an overall more professional feel to their site. You can do some basic functions with wix such as adding spacing, adding words, adding images, and videos and links.
However, you can’t really add true spacing, you can’t round off images. You can’t make your own custom backgrounds , you can’t make words hover over video, or optimize your page for speed using a cdn, lazy loading images, or preloading script tags. However as a time saver this is great for a small business. So your selection would depend on your current needs.
If you end up adding a facebook pixel your site will slow down in speed to the point where it might not ever load on a mobile device. So it’s good for the small startup, or the part time ceo. It’s not really what someone who wants to really make their place in the market would use.. There are some exceptions however.
If you have a huge social media following and are just passing all the traffic to the site from your social media. You could probably get away with just using a wix site for an ecommerce store.
However, if you are like most people.. You’re still building your brand, and your small business website needs to be able to help your brand succeed by providing an amazing design, great on & off page seo, which isn’t really something you can do on wix. You can go for a good or a decent design. However you will never have the best design.
Benefits of wordpress for your small business
What does WordPress offer? Well wordpress is a lot like wix in a couple of ways. It’s mainly made for people who can’t code and prefer to use a drag and drop function and was originally built for bloggers.
It does have more customizability options, many more and plugins and is a much older service. So it has much more support. You can also find millions of themes for wordpress that you can customize with code or in some cases by simply dragging and dropping. Building websites with wordpress also has a much steeper learning curve, whereas with wix you can be up in running in a couple minutes. WordPress has a really large mix of uses. Some people like to use it to make directory sites, forums and blog pages.
Others use it to build their service business and hire a developer to build their custom site with code, so they can later do all the blogging themselves and keep the integrity of the design as well as make minor changes to their website without having to learn how to use a p tag, and h tag, an image tag or anything html,css,js or php. Which is actually ideal for most business owners.
The differences
Now one thing that is uniquely different about the two is that it is actually much harder for most people to design their own website with wix. Many wix sites designed by non professionals look horrendous and an ugly site can be brand damaging. Also understand that it’s not just wordpress that might need some professional design and development help, but this also happens with wix as well.
You see, there are many different web design trends that designers and developers like us actually use everyday to make our websites stand out and catch the users attention. However, with both wix and wordpress however, our development and design skills can be somewhat limited by such software.
We are less limited by wordpress of course, mostly we’re just limited to working with buggy plugins, any bugs in wordpress or it’s datatable and of course any bugs within the theme itself.
If one is used. WordPress starts off at $0 and raises in price depending where you host your website. We recommend bluehost’s 3$ plan if your website is just starting out. WordPress currently gives you a $100 ad credit as well.
Small business Custom Design and Development
Custom Design and Development offers you the most possibilities when it comes to your website design and functionality. Custom web development offers you many thing wix or wordpress don’t offer, however, with cusom web development you to sacrafice a bit of the control that wix and wordpress offers in 2022 to it’s non coding userbase. However, custom development is also the fastest way for a developer to build your website. However, with a custom design and development coded from scratch.
Unfortunately, you will not be able to add much to the site or change much unless you are able to code yourself.
That being said wordpress and wix websites often have slower load times, as you are limited to their website builder. However, there are some solutions, where the developer can just create a dashboard for your blogs to be posted , or you can link a medium page. However, if you write your blog articles off of your site, you are building the authority of the other site and in most cases, you want to avoid doing that.
If all your traffic comes from social media however, this could be a great strategy. Additionally, normally with custom code, you actually end up paying less in hosting.
Recap: wix, wordpress or custom development
Many times web hosts charge you for doing a bunch of things a developer can do in minutes.. Like ssl, setting up wordpress, transferring your website, setting up emails, setting up email auto responders, setting up robot.txt, setting up fb pixel, setting up google analytics, building your website and more. Many hosts like godaddy, bluehost, wordpress.com and wix will actually charge you for basic things like ssl tickets, uploading files, site migration, forwarding your website and other things that are super easy to do from a developer standpoint.
If you want to learn more about Word Press check out our WordPress guides:
- WordPress pros and cons 2. WordPress web design |Domain registration 3. 50 most common WordPress issues and how to fix them. 4. IS BLUEHOST NECESSARY FOR WORDPRESS? 5.WordPress Monster insights guide 6. WordPress Facebook Group 7.how to install a 3D library into WordPress 8.50 ways wordpress can help you to grow your business in 2023 9. WordPress Website design 10. WordPress website design services 11.50 most useful wordpress plugins in 2023 12. WordPress integrations 13.Best WordPress Templates
