A business’ online presence, regardless of industry, can have a massive impact on its success. In this day and age, some businesses still don’t realize that a majority of their customers will visit their website before making a purchase.
Having a strong online presence, particularly a website, can make or break the generation of more revenue. And yes, the quality of your website impacts results. You have probably heard that it is now possible to create and design your own website on one of the various online website builder platforms available, but is this the right way to go, and what should you consider when making your decision?
You want your site to look great, and you want a lot of features and plenty of customizations to choose from. However, you may not want to learn in-depth web design or coding, and you probably want your site up and running in a reasonable amount of time. Whenever an update has to be made, you want to be able to handle that easily and on your own, too.
WordPress and Wix are two of the most popular ones out there. In this blog, we’ll cover their similarities and differences.
WordPress vs. Wix: The basics
Wix is the most-advertised website-building tool. You’ve almost definitely seen an ad for Wix. WordPress, on the other hand, is the largest site-building tool in the world. Over 50% of the top 100,000 websites use WordPress.
There are two WordPress services: WordPress.com and WordPress.org. WordPress.com is a web hosting service, while WordPress.org is the open-source content management system (CMS) used to build WordPress websites. When we reference WordPress in this article, we are referring to WordPress.com.
You can download WordPress software directly, for free, from WordPress.org or from within your host’s cPanel. Thereafter you can create a hosted site anywhere you like. You will have to, however, deal with the full gamut of site management – hosting, server capacity, security, and so on.
Ease of use: WordPress.com vs. Wix
Both builders are easy to use for beginners, which is their main draw. With both WordPress and Wix, you don’t have to handle coding, HTML or web hosting– it’s taken care of for you.
WordPress is a great way to quickly start blogging but, when it comes to business use, there’s a steep learning curve and it can be a very tricky web builder to use. However, with enough effort and know-how, the extensive customisation options (with plug-ins) and a vast amount of easy-to-use templates do allow you to create a website tailored to the needs of your business.
Wix has a drag-and-drop builder, so you just select an element, drag it where you want it, leave it there and start customizing that area. Add media and/or content, then rearrange everything until it looks just right.
Wix does have less functionality, and it’s intended for fairly simple websites. This can make it easier to set up at first. WordPress requires some web knowledge if you want to use it to its full advantage. With Wix, you’ll likely see obstacles as you scale – things you want to do but won’t be able to because the functionality and options just aren’t there.
Different design options: WordPress vs. Wix
Your website should be eye-catching and user-friendly, no matter how minimalistic or bold it is. The design and template that are right for your site are specific to your branding, goals and taste. Making sure your site looks great and your message is correctly interpreted by your visitors – is imperative. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a website at all?
Wix really stands out when it comes to design – there’s a frankly staggering number (over 800) of templates, covering over 16 different industries ranging from healthcare to pets. The templates are fully responsive, which means they can be easily viewed and interacted with on any mobile device. Once you choose a template, you can use Wix’s tools to edit how it looks and where the elements are placed.
One big drawback of Wix is that once you choose a template, you have to stick with it. Yes, you can edit how the template looks, but once you’ve created a site, it’s not possible to apply a different template – so make sure you’re certain about your choice before making a final decision. If you have to start again, you can’t transfer your contacts, invoices, store, bookings, marketing integrations, and more from your old site. This can make giving your site a much-needed refresh every few years really tricky.
This is in stark contrast to WordPress, which offers its users a measly 50 in-house themes covering less than half of the industries accommodated by Wix’s templates. However, if you begin to dive into the range of plugins WordPress offers, then you can really create a unique website for your business – on the basis that you know how to code and if you are prepared to pay a reasonable price for a well-crafted and unique template you have thousands of options to choose from.
Generally, it’s pretty hard to outgrow WordPress. Their services can handle tremendous scale which is why brands like Microsoft, CNN, Spotify, and Dow Jones trust their services. WordPress also makes it really easy to export all of your content and migrate to another host if desired.
On Wix, it’s really difficult to download your content in case you ever decide to change platforms. There aren’t a lot of options for people who want to move their content off Wix and onto another platform. You can export blogs to XML format, but you’ll have to manually download content like images, pages and videos. Why? The content on your Wix site is hosted on their servers – and only their servers.
Some food for thought…
Will you defend yourself if you have NO legal knowledge or experience? If not, why would you want to design your website yourself if you’re not a professional web designer?
It is possible to build a decent revenue-generating website using online platforms like Wix or WordPress However, the biggest problem with it is that it makes it easy to create a website that you think is great when that’s far from the truth.
Websites are not brochures, and they shouldn’t be treated that way. To bring revenue from a website you need to think of it as an online presence, ticking all the right boxes, and invest time and money to get it right.
If you are searching for a professional web designer to help you get your business online, we’re here to help you! Give us a shout, pop us a mail or send us your details and we’ll get our team to contact you.
Contact us
010 446 5799
067 770 3820
info@lemoenmarketing.co.za
https://lemoenmarketing.co.za/website-design/