Comparing two of the most popular website builders
Wix vs WordPress

As a small business, establishing an online presence can be fundamental to initial and continued success. An attractive and well-built website is helpful in communicating what you can offer to a wide base of potential customers. Meanwhile, good SEO and analytics capabilities are essential in giving you a deeper understanding of who your customers are, where they are coming from and what they are looking for. Many start-ups will need to save costs initially by building their own website, and Wix and WordPress are widely regarded as market-leading options for this. By providing easier development, high-quality web page templates and easy ways to add content, these builders reduce the effort and skill required to build a great website for your business.

These two suites have differing approaches to website building, and so have varying strengths and weaknesses. Wix aims to provide an intuitive interface with a flexible approach to design that suits novice website builders, whereas WordPress design is a little more complicated, and a little more constrained, but offers more options in management and functionality of your website. Although WordPress requires some coding in order to design a professional-looking site, add-ons like Elementor do a great job of making the design process flexible and responsive with a visually-focused design process, whilst removing the need to extensively dive into countless lines of text. The Catalyst Team has worked on web design projects for our members using both Wix and WordPress with Elementor, and right here, over the next four days, they’re going to share what they’ve learned about how the two compare.

Round One: Usability
Wix provides an intuitive drag-and-drop, WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface for website building, and it really is impressive. With barely an hour of tinkering, you can have the bare bones of a great website with nice features, running at a very quick speed, and you can iterate and modify this design very quickly. The preview function does a great job of allowing you to see exactly what your site will look like when it’s published, and it’s easy to precisely adjust the look and layout of elements using the toolbars and menus provided. Essentially, the back-end of the website reflects the front-end very accurately, which makes it very easy to use and to understand exactly what the final product will look like.

On the other hand, WordPress has a back end that’s generally well-presented, but doesn’t represent your website very accurately. This is remedied somewhat with Elementor, which allows you to design pages with a strong visual indication of what the end product will look like, but even this isn’t always completely accurate. Additionally, whilst Wix’s front-end style design process allows everything to be modified in the same place, WordPress has a menu system that requires a bit of practice in order to understand where different parts of the website can be modified. Overall, WordPress requires a lot more practice, a bit of guidance and some research before using it becomes intuitive, whereas Wix is basically pick-up-and-go.

Winner: Wix

Wix

Click here for Part 2 – Design Options and Functionality.

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