Wix vs WordPress

Wix and WordPress are the two names most people meet first when they decide to build a website, and they represent the two approaches described in our guide to WordPress vs website builders. Wix is a hosted builder: one company provides the editor, the hosting and the support. WordPress is open-source software that you install on hosting you choose.

Both can produce a good site. The differences are in how much work each asks of you, how costs behave over time and, above all, what you can take with you if you leave.

At a glance

Ease of use

Wix wins the first afternoon. You choose a template, drag elements onto the page and publish, without knowing anything about hosting, databases or updates. For someone who wants a site this week and does not want to learn anything new, that is a real advantage.

WordPress asks for a little more. You need hosting, and you need to install WordPress or let your host install it. After that, you work in the block editor, which is visual, but you also make choices that Wix makes for you: which theme, which plugins, which host. Those choices are where WordPress sites go right or wrong. A small number of good components gives a fast, stable site. A pile of random plugins gives the opposite.

Cost

Wix’s pricing is easy to read. On Wix’s own pages in October 2026, the premium plans cost, per month on a yearly subscription:

Wix notes that other billing periods cost more, and that prices vary by location. There is also a free plan, which shows Wix ads and puts the site on a Wix subdomain rather than your own domain. Wix has also announced in its help center that premium plan prices are changing, with older plans moving to the current ones.

WordPress itself costs nothing. Running it costs whatever your hosting and your domain cost, plus any premium theme or plugin you choose to buy. Those costs vary too much with the host and the site to give one number honestly. What matters more is the shape of the cost. With Wix, you pay for continued access to a site that stays on Wix. With WordPress, you pay suppliers you can replace at any time, and nothing you have built is tied to any of them.

Design

Wix’s editor gives you a lot of freedom to place things exactly where you want them on the page. That freedom is pleasant at first and harder to keep consistent as a site grows, because every page can drift a little from the others.

WordPress design depends on the theme. Modern block themes, including ours, use a shared set of colors, type sizes and spacing across every page, so the site stays consistent as it grows. You have less freedom to place a single element anywhere, and more assurance that page two hundred looks like page one.

Blogging and content

Both can run a blog. The difference appears as the blog grows. WordPress was built for publishing, and it treats categories, tags, authors, revisions and archives as basic features. It also has the widest choice of tools for structuring content around topics, such as pillar pages, related articles and structured data.

The other difference is what happens to the blog if you leave. Wix’s help center says that it is currently not possible to export blog posts to other platforms. On WordPress, every post can be exported in WordPress’s standard format and imported anywhere else that runs WordPress.

SEO

Both platforms can produce fast pages with clean addresses, titles and descriptions, and both can rank well. Neither is an SEO advantage in itself. What makes a site rank over time is its content and its structure: clear topics, pages that link to each other sensibly, and addresses that do not change. WordPress gives you more direct control over those things, and over structured data, which matters more as the site grows. For a small site with a handful of pages, the difference is small.

Ownership: the part most comparisons skip

This is where the two differ most, and it is documented by Wix itself:

• A Wix site “needs to be hosted and operated on Wix’s servers”, according to Wix’s help center. There is no way to export the site and run it elsewhere.
• Blog posts cannot currently be exported to other platforms.
• It is not currently possible to back up a Wix site outside Wix. Wix offers site history and duplication inside Wix instead.
• What you can export: contacts as a spreadsheet file (up to 50,000 at a time), store products as a CSV file (up to 5,000 rows per file, and not digital products) and content collections as CSV files.

This does not mean you can never leave Wix. It means leaving is a rebuild: the content has to be copied out of the published site and put back together somewhere else. For a five-page site that is an afternoon. For a site with years of blog posts, it is a project.

With WordPress, the site is a set of files and a database on hosting you control. You can copy it, back it up wherever you like and move it to another host whenever you want.

Which one to choose

Wix is a sensible choice if the site is small and unlikely to grow much, nobody wants to think about maintenance, and you accept that the site will live on Wix for as long as it exists.

WordPress is the better choice if the site is meant to grow, especially with a blog, if search traffic matters to you, or if the site is a business asset that you may one day want to move, sell or hand to someone else.

If you are on Wix now and the second description fits, the move is easier the sooner you make it. We make a tool for that, FreeYourWeb, which copies a Wix site’s pages, posts and images into WordPress and redirects any address that changes. It is our product, and you can of course make the move by hand or with someone else’s help.