Behind the glitz and glam of the website development lies a clumsy backstage where developers are struggling to make the website a blockbuster. They try various approaches, tools, and techniques to shape the website perfectly. And, Wix and WordPress – the Yin and Yang of website development – confuse website developers the most.
While the simplicity of Wix is hard to ignore, the endless customization of WordPress keeps millions hooked. Trust us! We also are in awe of the functionalities of both platforms.
But, as they say- two swords cannot sit in one sheath, we decided to help you learn where choosing WordPress over Wix makes more sense, and help agencies and developers build soaring, user-friendly, and high-performing websites for their clients.
Wix: Build Anything With Creativity
Wix is a cloud-based website builder with over 180 million registered users. It offers a highly intuitive drag-and-drop interface that allows businesses of all sizes to design a website from the ground up.
Developers who are running out of time, have limited coding knowledge, and need to scale up with quick website-building functionalities prefer using Wix as it provides a variety of built-in tools and features.
Along with website builder, Wix offers a CDN-based web hosting service. The free plan includes 500MB of cloud storage space with 500MB bandwidth. With a premium plan, you can get up to 50GB of storage.
Key Features of Wix
- Pre-designed templates: A huge collection of free and pre-build templates, categorized as Blog, Portfolio, and so on, to get started instantly
- App market: Access thousands of apps to add features and functionality to the website.
- Secure hosting: Wix hosting protects user data through security means like HTTPS, SS, hacking testing, and DDoS protection.
- Mobile optimization: Websites are automatically optimized for mobile devices, ensuring better reachability.
- Custom Domain: You can continue with your existing domain or select a domain from Wix’s TLD list.
- Professional email address: Build a website with an email linked to your domain for a more professional look.
- Built-in SEO site infrastructure: Server-side rendering, customizable URLs, fully maintained XML sitemap, and images auto-converted.
- Wix ADI: AI-based website development assistance enabling developers to create a highly optimized website after answering a few questions.
That was the quick overview of your takeaways with Wix for website development. Some of its features are best-of-bread and are worth having all the praises of the world.
However, Wix limits user functionalities in some cases. For instance:
- Agencies/developers seeking end-to-end customization might face a dead end with Wix’s limited customization features. With 900+ templates and 300+ apps, customization is limited.
- If you are someone who prefers extensive theme and plugin testing for your client, Wix will restrict you for sure. With its in-browser testing environment, you can create test sites and that’s it; no more good news. You can’t edit the domain, select the PHP version, choose the server location, and change the WordPress version. Without version rollback, developers are walking on thin ice with Wix, fearing any irreversible changes.
- Migrating your website will be a tough nut to crack once you’ve built a website with Wix as the platform’s codebase is proprietary and can’t be transferred easily. So, you’re in a bind and can’t change the hosting providers or explore other platforms.
- Because of the proprietary nature of Wix, agencies and developers have to burn midnight oil to adjust their codes or workflows whenever there is a Wix update.
- If you wish to design a large-scale e-commerce store using Wix, be ready to deal with frequent downtimes. Wix has a shared hosting ecosystem that someone limits the resource allocation to individual websites. So, your dream e-commerce store can shatter with the realities of slow-loading pages during peak hours.
In a nutshell, if you’re looking for top-notch customization, easy migration, high uptime, and extensive staging features for your clients, you need to look beyond Wix.
WordPress: Your Website; Your Way
WordPress – GOAT of website customization – is a powerful content management system (CMS) and is best known for its limitless potential for building anything you want.
This platform is empowering more than 43% of websites today and is useful for building and managing WordPress websites and blogs. With over 60,000 plugins and 30,000+ themes, WordPress opens new customization possibilities in the WordPress website development realm.
Unlike Wix, WordPress is an open-source platform and that’s the secret of its huge plugin and theme collection. It has a thriving community that continues to grow. Below is a quick overview of the key features of WordPress.
Key Features of WordPress
- Customizable Themes and Templates: Agencies can choose themes and templates of the client’s choice and customize them to meet specific needs.
- Plugins and Integrations: With thousands of plugins available, agencies can extend the functionality of client’s sites without getting overwhelmed by extensive custom coding.
- User Management and Permissions: WordPress allows users to set permissions for each user role. This way, agencies can control who will have how much access to the client’s websites and streamline the workflows.
- Content Management System (CMS): The block-based editor of WordPress allows agencies to manage the content of their client’s site without any technical expertise.
- SEO-Friendly Features: Through built-in features and plugins like Yoast SEO, WordPress helps agencies improve their clients’ site visibility and SEO ranking.
- Scalability and Flexibility: As WordPress can handle everything from small blogs to large e-commerce sites, agencies can easily provide scale solutions to their clients and expand their revenue circle.
- Regular Updates and Security: WordPress continues updating its features and offerings. These updates are automatically applied and don’t require any custom coding.
- Multilingual Capabilities: WordPress repository has a variety of plugins that enable multilingual support, allowing agencies to build sites in multiple languages and expand their global reach.
All these and many more features make WordPress a highly versatile platform for agencies aiming to streamline development, enhance functionalities, and deliver exceptional results for their clients.
However, jumping to WordPress without knowing its nuisance can be a risky endeavor.
Affair.
How to Make Most of WordPress
The breath of the WordPress repository can sound intimidating to some. However, there are ways to overcome security concerns such as plugin/theme incompatibility, secure WordPress migration, and so on.
Make Staging Sites Your Best Pal
If you wish to take advantage of WordPress’s extensive repository and tap into endless customization, you need to master the art and science of staging- a copy of a live site. Through staging, agencies can review the front and back-end components of WordPress themes and plugins before making them live on the main site.
WordPress staging through tools like InstaWP is a piece of cake. InstaWP staging sites can be built from scratch, using the pre-made templates, or using AI. These staging sites are not like the basic staging of Wix where no customization is allowed.
Must Read: What Is Staging Environment & Why You Should Have One
You can edit everything; WordPress version, PHP version, site name, domain, server location, and configurations. You can experiment with themes, plugins, and customizations, and then push changes live only after thorough testing. This rollback feature grants great peace of mind as you can easily return to previous configurations if things are going South.
The crux here is – agencies can eliminate the risk of breaking the client’s site or causing a negative user experience while ensuring the theme/plugin compatibility.
Migrate The Right Way
With Wix, migration hassles aren’t going to bother you as you’re not allowed to migrate. But, WordPress gives you this freedom and if you wish to avoid nuisances like data losses, downtime, and broken links, you need to master the WordPress migration.
To have a smooth WordPress migration experience, agencies and developers must have a basic understanding of hosting environments, DNS settings, managing file transfers, how to match the configurations, taking a backup, and many other things.
This traditional WordPress migration is time-consuming and can become a huge hurdle in an agency’s growth. This is why agencies must step out of this labyrinth and start using modern WordPress migration tools that automate migration, allowing you to save up to $6K in WordPress migration every month.
InstaWP WordPress migration tool is the need of the hour here. It allows you to:
- Choose the WordPress migration host of your choice
- Make migrated site live instantly using InstaWP Live
- Experience downtime-free migration
- Prevent data loss during WordPress migration with the help of secure transfer protocols
- Perform compatibility checks for themes and plugins
Integrate with Git
Building WordPress websites will reach new highs when agencies start using Git integration- the key to successful project handling. Git allows developers to track the code changes over time and recover the previous version of the sites without breaking the site while experiencing new features.
Through Git integration, agencies can streamline the workflow and enable teams to collaborate effectively and synchronize code between local staging and production environments. This is crucial for the performance optimization of WordPress websites.
InstaWP offers Git integration, allowing agencies/developers to streamline WordPress website development more efficiently. Through this integration, InstaWP makes version control of WordPress websites a child’s play for WordPress developers.
Wix vs. WordPress: Final Thoughts
Wix is great and is the go-to solution if you prefer an easy-to-use website builder. But, if you’re someone who needs more control over customization, version control, and migration, WordPress is likely the better choice to make.
To ease and empower WordPress website development, use InstaWP. With its WordPress-exclusive features such as staging, Git integration, and WordPress migration, it enables agencies to be more productive, result-driven, and progressive than they could ever imagine.