WordPress and Wix continue to be two of the world‘s most popular website building platforms. As per latest statistics, WordPress now powers over 60% of all CMS websites, while Wix has an impressive 200 million registered users.
So how exactly do they stack up in 2023? As a full stack developer with over 10 years‘ experience in both platforms, here is my in-depth, 3300+ words Wix versus WordPress comparison highlighting all the key factors you need to decide the best platform for your next web project.
Market Share and Growth Trends
Let‘s first look at the latest market share statistics for both platforms.
WordPress Market Share
As per W3Techs, WordPress holds a dominating 63% market share in the content management system (CMS) space as of Feb 2023. This includes both self-hosted as well as WordPress.com hosted sites.
It has near doubled its market share in the past 5 years jumping from 35% in 2018. Major competing CMS platforms have seen declining trends in contrast.
WordPress CMS market share growth from 2018 to 2023 – Source: W3Techs
With these growth trends, WordPress is expected to power over 75% of all CMS websites by 2025.
Driving this growth is WordPress‘ open source foundation that allows unlimited customizations for any type of website. Combined with latest auto-updates and enhanced security, it caters perfectly to developers building secure and scalable sites.
Wix Market Share
As primarily a website builder for non-developers, quantifying Wix‘s market share is a bit tricky compared to WordPress.
But with over 200 million registered users reported in 2020, it continues to dominate the do-it-yourself website builder space for DIY users.
Wix does not disclose exact user growth metrics. However as per SimilarTech estimation, Wix now powers over 5% of all websites globally across various categories.
Wix market share and website category data – Source: SimilarTech
From the above chart, you can see high Wix adoption in certain niches like Design, Education, Shopping etc. where their easy drag and drop site builder performs well.
Clearly Wix targets a vastly different audience than developer focused platforms like WordPress. But it continues to see growth particularly among small businesses, creators and entrepreneurs looking for an easy way to establish an online presence.
Based on these strong growth trends, both WordPress and Wix are expected to add hundreds of millions more sites over the next 5 years.
Ease of Use
For non-technical users, Wix offers a far easier initial onboarding and site building experience compared to WordPress.
Their user-friendly drag and drop editor lets you easily build pages using pre-made content blocks. Elements can be moved around with minimal effort allowing you to create professional looking page layouts.
In contrast, WordPress requires buying hosting, installing WordPress core files, choosing a theme and then setting up plugins. This hands-on approach allows unlimited customizations but involves relatively steeper learning.
However, the WordPress dashboard itself is simple enough for content creation and publishing. The block editor introduced in WordPress 5.0 also makes page building quite easy without need for coding knowledge.
So at the content authoring end, WordPress is fairly easy to use even for non-developers. As such, users like bloggers, content marketers etc. now form a sizable chunk of the WordPress user community.
Advanced customizations do however require knowing HTML, CSS and often PHP. This allows developers to extend functionality far beyond what Wix can handle but it vetoes beginners from using WordPress effectively.
Verdict: Wix is easier for beginners to start with but WordPress offers simplicity for content creators once site is set up.
Customizations and Scalability
When evaluating any CMS platform, two key factors determine long term success – ability to customize to meet unique business needs and scalability to support growth.
Being an open source platform with the world‘s largest developer community, WordPress offers near endless possibilities when it comes to custom features and integrations.
Developers can access and edit source code files directly to build custom sites, apps and complex solutions using WordPress as a foundation.
The plugin architecture allows adding functionality via small modules that can be turned on and off when needed. Most popular plugins like WooCommerce ecommerce and membership plugins extend WordPress seamlessly due to great documentation and developer support.
So WordPress effectively serves as an application development framework in itself rather than just a publishing platform. Solutions built on it can serve thousands to millions of users with the right hosting stack and tuning.
In contrast, Wix adopting a closed "walled garden" infrastructure limits ability to access underlying code or tap into external resources. Sites rely solely on what Wix provides through their template blocks and App Market extensions.
While these allow covering a lot of standard business website needs, complicated apps and highly customized sites are not what Wix easily handles.
To quantify this difference in scalability – WordPress powers 17 of the top 20 global websites including behemoths like Facebook, Twitter, CNN and TechCrunch running almost entirely custom code. Wix sites however rarely reach enterprise scale and max out at a few million monthly visitors.
So when it comes to truly custom builds and large scale production deployments, WordPress is the platform advanced developers prefer by far.
Verdict: WordPress for unlimited customization and scalability. Wix for simpler "out-of-box" sites.
Page Builders
Well designed page builders are crucial for quickly drafting and publishing content in both Wix and WordPress. Let‘s see how the two compare when creating and updating web pages.
Wix Editor
Wix page builder is one of its standout features that makes web page creation easy for non-coders. Just drag and drop elements like images, videos, text etc. and edit settings through a visual interface.
It offers simplicity but also some downsides:
- Each element sits within an independent container limiting alignment and spacing flexibility
- You cannot customize default elements easily or save reused sections as global templates
- Reviewing page structure involves toggling editor settings making some parts confusing
Overall, it is great for basic sites but complex pages become difficult to manage in Wix‘s page builder.
On the other hand, the WordPress Block Editor introduced with WordPress 5.0 simplified page building to a great extent.
It allows quickly stacking content blocks while offering key advantages:
- Easy alignment, spacing and styling through a familiar Microsoft Word-like interface
- Create reusable blocks and design global styles for uniformity across pages
- Switch seamlessly between visual editor and HTML code views for fine grained control
- Extend functionality adding custom blocks powered by React and JS
So WordPress block editor offers the right balance between an easy admin interface through blocks while retaining all the layout flexibility that custom HTML provides underneath.
Verdict: For simpler sites Wix builder offers great convenience but WordPress editor is far more customizable and powerful overall.
Ecommerce Stores and Secured Sites
Two site types that often need deeper evaluation with any CMS platform are online stores and sites needing user authentication.
Let‘s analyze how Wix and WordPress compare when building and managing ecommerce stores as well security for member sites.
Ecommerce Stores
WordPress dominates this space with WooCommerce powering over 5 million online stores at the moment. The reasons being:
- Open source PHP/MySQL foundation offers way more flexibility for store customization coded from scratch
- Support for over 300 payment gateways and shipping carriers through extensions
- Options for unlimited SKUs, product types and inventory only limited by hosting
- Scalability well demonstrated via stores like Urban Ladder built fully custom on WooCommerce handling over $100M in annual revenue
WooCommerce however expects developers to handle site security, performance optimization etc. So it ends up with higher overall TCO for enterprise merchants.
In case of Wix, their ecommerce functionality is relatively new maturing only over the past few years. But it shines in providing everything needed to launch a store out-of-the-box including:
- Intuitive store setup wizard stepping through key settings
- Beautiful store templates fully optimized for conversions
- Built-in secure payment and shipping options
- Marketing and inventory management features
So Wix ecommerce allows quick launch and needs zero coding knowledge. Limitations arise only for huge catalogs or high customization needs.
It caters well to up to tens of thousands of products and a few million dollars in annual revenue. But enterprise scale stores are better managed via WordPress/WooCommerce optimized to their specific needs.
Verdict: WooCommerce for advanced stores and maximum flexibility. Wix for secure "all-in-one" online stores.
Secured Sites
Websites needing user authentication and access restrictions like online courses, membership portals etc. involve added complexity to balance security and usability.
Here again WordPress offers more control options to customize login processes, leverage external auth providers like OAuth and add custom coded access rules across content.
Plugins like MemberPress and Restrict Content Pro make creating full fledged membership sites easy while being adaptable to specific business needs.
For Wix, their Velo platform released in 2018 provides better support for building authenticated sites hosting gated content.
It improves upon limitations with cookie based auth in standard Wix sites that pose issues updating user roles and permissions dynamically.
Velo security integrates better with Wix Editor to manage restricted content but still lags WordPress flexibility being a proprietary implementation.
Verdict: WordPress trusted for membership sites needing maximum custom access rules while Wix Velo offers easier all-in-one security.
Site Management
Two crucial but often overlooked site management aspects are timely software updates and reliable backups.
Let‘s do a quick comparison on how WordPress and Wix handle these.
Updates Management
The WordPress auto-update mechanism introduced recently ensures site software stays secure and bug free transparently in the background.
So as long as you use well supported themes and plugins hosted on WordPress.org, security patches roll out automatically in most cases. Even major software version updates now happen seamlessly with one-click migration assistants.
For Wix sites though, everything from code updates to infrastructure relies on Wix internal teams. Site owners get little visibility or control around maintenance work happening behind the scenes.
So while it saves you overhead, lack of update transparency can be annoying at times. And if an update breaks anything, raising and getting support tickets resolved takes effort.
Verdict: Auto-updates make WordPress virtually self-maintaining while Wix requires relying on their support for post-deployment site issues.
Backup and Restore
Another key area where WordPress offers more visibility and control is around site backups needed for disaster recovery.
Being self-hosted, backing up WordPress boils down to scheduled database exports along with file system snapshots saved offsite.
So once the backup routine is established either natively or through plugins, it can run unattended capturing all site changes – content, files, database, plugins etc.
Restoring WordPress successfully then relies on the quality of these backups rather than chance of hosting provider maintaining internal redundancies.
In Wix, everything including app installs and content revisions stays under Wix platform‘s managed infrastructure.
So backup reliability depends solely on their internal data retention policies rather than something customizable or visible externally.
While this saves headaches, Wix support needs to step in for restoration requests adding delays compared to self service WordPress backups.
Verdict: Self managed backup reliability and instant restores make WordPress a safer bet for sites where uptime is crucial.
Developer Experience
For developers and agencies building client sites, a platform‘s programming experience determines long term happiness and retention rates.
Factors like learning curve, local development options, deployments and most importantly support availability matter greatly in choosing a primary website platform.
Learning Curve
Given its usage of standard web languages like HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL, most WordPress concepts feel instantly familiar to experienced developers.
New developers also find ample learning resources and community help in building confidence with WordPress basics before diving into advanced topics.
With Wix though, their editor and Velo framework rely on proprietary implementations and namespaces.
Expertise gained on Wix isn‘t easily transferable while most WordPress concepts apply directly to general web skills.
So WordPress offers a more universal and rewarding learning experience for web developers.
Local Development
For devs, ability to mirror production environments locally for coding and testing fully before deployment is non-negotiable.
WordPress replicates seamlessly on local machines with most standard LAMP/LEMP stacks like XAMPP, MAMP or Docker containers. Hundreds of configuration management tools also simplify mirroring live sites on local or dev instances.
Wix being a hosted platform expects all development online using their live editor or Velo test environments. This hampers productivity having to constantly preview and debug only on live or staging sites.
While tools like Hoxxy now allow partial Wix replication locally, the editing experience pales compared to flawless WordPress dev environment duplication.
Deployments
Deployment workflows are another key efficiency factor distinguishing the two platforms.
The open nature of WordPress ensures developers enjoy flexible deployment options to production servers – from simple GIT push and FTP transfers to automated CI/CD pipelines.
Hosting choices like managed Kubernetes also simplify launching consistently reproducible WordPress instances.
Wix tying sites to their proprietary infrastructure offers zero exportability outside their platform. So you remain locked to Wix lacking portability developers desire during platform evaluation.
Support Resources
Finally whether tackling common platform issues or unusual bugs, access to expert help can mean saving weeks of struggle.
As world‘s most popular CMS, WordPress developers can tap into thriving platform documentation, forums, blogs and courses for troubleshooting.
Commercial support from reputed WordPress specific agencies is also available as failsafe for complex or bespoke implementations.
For Wix, their customer support team and Velo forum form the primary means for technical assistance.
But response times vary greatly being at mercy of their internal SLAs. Debugging options for advanced sites also get limited on Wix as platform usage goes beyond their narrow prescribed patterns.
So for developers entering unchartered territory, community wisdom and mentor access beats reliability on vendor customer support alone.
Verdict: More universal programming model and freely available help resources make WordPress every developer‘s favorite.
Final Thoughts
Let me summarize the key takeaways from this extensive Wix vs WordPress feature comparison:
Simplicity and Security: Wix
For non-developers prioritizing convenient site building, optional upgrades and reliable infrastructure – Wix balances these well.
Customization and Scalability: WordPress
With unlimited growth potential powered by open source foundations and global community support – WordPress is the undisputed developer‘s choice.
So while both continue seeing increased adoption among their target audiences, WP caters to tech savvy pros wanting maximum control while Wix appeals more to DIY business owners.
I hope mapping out their core strengths and weaknesses helps you choose the ideal platform for your next web presence or client project.
Wix works great for simpler secure sites while WordPress brings infinite possibilities for growth by customizing to your unique needs.
Let me know if you have any other questions in the comments!
