It’s funny how costly the word “free” can be in the world of entrepreneurship these days.
Free hosting, free tools, free website. It seems like a great deal, right? Wrong.
The truth of the matter is that there are countless small business and start-up owners who chose Wix over WordPress for their first website, and soon swore they would never do it again.
Here are some of the lessons they learned the hard way.
Table of Contents
1. Wix isn’t Really Free
Wix is positioned and marketed as a free and easy website builder for small businesses. There are some who have called that a bit of a bait and switch offer. Yes, Wix is free. But, doing anything useful with it will cost you extra.
Their freebie sites are on their domain and your URL will be something like wix.com/yoursite, with a very visible Wix watermark at the bottom of every single page. Both of those things look really unprofessional.
If you want to remove the watermark or get your own domain, it will cost you extra. When you add up their add-on costs, you will likely find it would have made more sense to start a WordPress blog and get more value for about the same amount of money, or even less!
2. Customization
It may seem like you can do a lot with a Wix site. There is something like 400 free Wix templates to choose from. That seems pretty good, until you see that WordPress has over 10,000 free templates for you to choose from.
It’s also much easier to switch your template on the fly with WordPress. If you’re not loving your site or you are getting bad feedback, you can choose something else and switch it over in minutes.
3. SEO
This is a deal-breaker for people who need their site to rank well.
One of the reasons that WordPress is the world’s most used CMS is that it offers the most customization options, particularly when it comes to SEO. Wix offers some SEO customization such as individual page titles. However, WordPress simply allows you to do much, much more.
WordPress also offers far more plugin options for you to maximize and monitor your site’s SEO performance.
4. Multiple Users
Wix also doesn’t really work if you have more than one person working on this site. It is simply not built for teams and you can only have one user login.
This becomes a problem as soon as you add a second person into the mix. You have to share that login and this can quickly become cumbersome.
On the other hand, WordPress was built with collaboration in mind. You can create multiple users or authors for the blog. You can also set the level of administrative control that each user has.
Don’t be fooled by the illusion of value or the lure of the word “free.” A Wix site can quickly feel like an old 1980s arcade game that you have to keep feeding quarters into to keep going. Yes, Wix is free out of the box. But, if you want to customize it in any way, that will cost you extra.
Suddenly, “free” becomes very, very expensive.
About Carson Derrow
