So you need a website for your upcoming campaign to point to, maybe you have an existing website that just isn’t cutting it or maybe you are starting from scratch. You’ve probably heard good things about the website builder Wix. So have we, but we’ve also built countless sites for people whose Wix sites weren’t able to meet their needs. Let’s have a look at Wix and compare their offering to our Theme & Custom Website products built in WordPress.
DESIGN
Wix offers an easy to use page builder with a number of built in features like pre-configured themes and layouts, galleries, and social media integration. This little builder can do a lot but it can’t do everything (not without some serious hacking). It can get you up and running quickly using internal resources and pre-built themes but there are lots of things that you won’t be able to achieve in Wix. Custom animations, conditional styling and many other options are not available to you out of the box in Wix without purchasing add-ons or doing lots of custom coding.
GMD’s WordPress Theme & Custom websites use the highly customizable divi theme platform to turn your content into a dynamic, easily updatable website that will be able to grow with your business. Divi is an industry-standard page builder that offers lots of built-in customization, animations, conditional formatting, and repeatable elements that can be displayed on multiple pages. In addition, you get to harness the expertise of our in-house design team so that your business can really shine in the marketplace.
Conclusion: While Wix can be a quick option to get a site up and running, WordPress offers far more flexibility when it comes to customizing your site to meet your business needs. Also, if you are simply looking to have a site to point your latest campaign to, you might want to consider a landing page instead. We have a great article here that explains why you want to use a landing page instead of a website when creating campaign-specific web assets.
FUNCTIONALITY
Wix offers a very simple and easy to use interface however this comes with limitations. With Wix, you are limited to the design elements that have been pre-made for their system. This means that sometimes the functionality you are looking for is simply not available to you in Wix. This limits Wix’s ability to scale with your business. While a simple website might meet your needs today, in a few months you may require additional features that are not available causing you to start from scratch with a new website. In addition, Wix offers little in the way of data portability. This means that once it’s in Wix it’s hard to get that data out of Wix in any usable way.
WordPress is an industry leader when it comes to custom functionality. Its open-source system means that there are thousands of developers working all the time to add new features to WordPress core, the Divi theme and to WordPress plugins which will allow you to do pretty much anything with the WordPress system. For example with WordPress and a few plugins, you can turn your website into a CRM, an e-commerce portal or even a social network if you are planning on giving Mark Zuckerberg a run for his money.
In addition, a few of the features that we use in WordPress all the time are not available on the Wix platform. These are Custom Post Types/Taxonomies, and Advanced Custom Fields. These tools allow us to create reusable content that can be repurposed throughout your site while allowing you (or us) to edit the pertinent information in one place.
The best way to illustrate this is with an example. The most common use of Custom Post Types & Custom Fields is in the team area of your site. Let’s say we have a team of 10 people at your business and each belongs to different departments within the company. Each has a phone number and email address where they can be contacted along with a bio and their credentials. In this example, we want to display those team members on a team page by the department. By using a Custom Post Type called “Team” and by assigning a custom taxonomy for “department”. We can then use the tools built into the theme to display that info on the team page so that each department’s members are grouped together. By creating a custom field for credentials we can then display each Team member’s credentials on their Team cards that are displayed on that page. Okay great, we have team members broken into departments, I can do that in Wix you say. Well, the next part would be very tricky if not impossible to achieve in Wix. Let’s say we want to create a leadership page that talks about how great the leadership of your company is where we display the board members and executives Team cards. To do that we now just need to create a block for each of the leading departments, e.g., board members and executives on our Leadership page. By doing so we can now pull in all of the existing info from the already existing Team member profiles on our Leadership page. This means that if there are any changes to the Team members all you have to do is edit that Team members’ info in the backend of WordPress in one location and that info magically flows out to the Team page and the Leadership page without making any additional changes. This is just one example of how Custom Post Types and Custom Fields allow us to re-use data across your site. We can also use it dynamically display related documents on sales-focused pages, or on related blog posts, create custom taxonomies for advanced filtering of product galleries or to create multiple blogs that serve different purposes. Or with a little help from a User privileges plugin, we could even use this method to create internal news feeds that are only viewable to your staff members.
By storing the data in this way when it comes time to redesign your website, moving this info to a new platform or a new WordPress site is as simple as exporting the content from WordPress and then re-importing it into your new site. This allows you to focus on creating dynamic content on your site without the worry that all your hard work will be lost when you eventually make changes to your website.
The example above is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to custom functionality that is possible within WordPress. The examples are seemingly endless and simply rely on yours and our designers’ creativity to create the best experience for your end-users.
Conclusion: Wix’s lack of functionality makes it difficult to scale as your business grows or your needs change. In addition, its lack of data portability limits your options when your site needs to be redesigned or rebuilt.
PRICING
The main advantage that people see in Wix is its lower entry cost. With a savvy staff member, you can build a site in a short period of time. You simply have to pay the Wix hosting fee each month to keep your site up and running. These costs range from $10 USD to $29 USD a month depending on your needs.
With WordPress, your initial costs to get up and running are higher as you will need us (or someone else) to build your site out for you. While this may be seen as a disadvantage we feel that the process we have worked out for building sites in WordPress is highly efficient and draws on the extensive UX/UI experience of our design team to ensure that the site you are building suits all of yours and your users’ needs. For more info on this process and how it benefits you check our articles on Custom Websites here and Theme Websites here.
We highly recommend that anyone that gets a WordPress site from us signs up for our monthly hosting and maintenance package. This package includes hosting, WordPress & Plugin updates, an SSL certificate (for https protocol), security and uptime monitoring for $85/mo. We also include one hour of content changes per month, the value of which, on its own, is greater than the fee we charge for hosting and maintenance.
Conclusion: Wix is a quick cheap option to get you started, but those savings may end up costing you in the long run. Your site may not be as effective as it could be, and any additional changes you make to your site would have to be performed by your already busy staff members or contracted out at an hourly rate. WordPress on the other hand has a higher upfront cost but gives a much higher level of design, functionality and flexibility for the price while allowing you to still update your own content quite easily.
THE FINAL WORD
If you’ve made it this far you have likely already figured out which of these two platforms we prefer: WordPress all the way. WordPress provides many advantages over Wix in both the Design and Functionality departments. In addition, it provides many more opportunities for your website to scale with your business in ways that Wix just can’t compete with. If it were my money I would put it into building a well designed, flexible WordPress site with Glacier Media Digital but that’s just me.