Can Wix Replace WordPress for Small Business?

1. Wix Forces You To Host With Them

Wix keeps your website on their servers, which means you have no choice but to let them house your website permanently. Don't like their service or pricing? Too bad, you are stuck. If they go out of business? Even worse, then your site is likely to disappear. With WordPress you own your website. You want to host it in Africa? Go for it. Want to pay more for priority support or a faster server? You can do that! Or do you want to skimp and get a cheap-o server and no support? Choose to do that too. The important part is, you own and control your entire website and files.

2. Can't Access the Code

With WordPress, the sky is the limit to scalability. You are free to customize, change, delete, add functionality to your heart's content. You are limited only by your budget with a plethora of talented developers worldwide ready and willing to help you improve your site over time. You can do this with WordPress because the CMS is what's called "open source" which means you can open the utility closet door, tinker around and improve the code (or pay someone else to do so). Wix does NOT let you access their code. To a developer, that sounds like a nightmare. Most true developers will not touch a Wix website because they run a very high risk of running in to a client request that they simply can not fulfill, because Wix does not let them access the raw code. This makes Wix scalability very limited. It is a dangerous game to build a website in a platform where you risk randomly needing a feature down the road, only to discover that Wix has decided not to support it yet. With WordPress, there is always a way.

3. Wave Goodbye To Your Content if You Click a Wrong Button

Wix allows you to put your own content in to their templates. However, if you change out the template, you can easily lose some or all of your content with the snap of a finger, making it far more complicated to upgrade your look and feel. In WordPress, content is stored within their system separately from the styles, which means that you may swap out your WordPress theme design as often as you need to. Don't get the wrong impression, WordPress theme design changes can be costly and time-consuming for sure! However, at least you can keep your core content when you make a switch.

4. Plugins to Save the Day.... for Everything WordPress

If you are looking to add functionality to your website that is not built in, such as an XML sitemap index with blog categories for SEO or a new type of image display slider, WordPress offers plugins. Any developer can create a plugin, and the WordPress community rates and reviews them for quality. WordPress offers free plugins for nearly anything you can dream up needing for your website. And if you think of something new, hire a developer to build you a plugin for it. Done and DONE. In Wix, you are limited to the enhancements that Wix deems necessary, and you are forced to pay whatever price they set if you want it on your website. Really, the big picture comes down to control and ownership. With WordPress, you own your own website, host it where you want, and customize it to fit your business. With Wix, you are stuck on their platform, with their prices. Wix is appropriate if you are not tech savvy, have no idea what hosting means, and your website budget is "DIY", or $0! If you have the money to have your site developed or a basic knowledge of code, you are better of in WordPress for a long-term, scalable, controllable small business website. Examiner.com's 5 Simple Reasons to Use WordPress Over Wix, a source for this post, also provides 5 great reasons to use WordPress over Wix.]]>