Wix the wiz?

For people looking to start a business, having a website is a must. However getting one built can often be a challenge people didn’t envisage when first laying out their plans. If you’re not careful, it’s easy to become confused and lose sight of what’s essential to your business goals.

Do you learn to code and build it yourself? Do you hire a developer and pay for them to get your messaging and aesthetic right? You could, but again, it puts extra stages between your website making you business or not. This is where services like Wix step in so well. They remove the heavy lifting when creating websites, letting you concentrate more on what you do best.

This article will go into more detail about Wix and how it can help people looking to build a website. So to begin:

What is Wix?

Wix let’s you build a website without having to write a single line of code. It’s free and offers a professional finish to your design. There is a visual designer, letting you compose your page out of building blocks, but you get other services as well such as web hosting, security, SEO and a support team.

Company profile and IPO

Wix has become a household name since being founded 14 years ago, back in 2006. In three years, it had grown to having 1 million users and went to IPO on the NASDAQ in 2013. From then up until the present, Wix began cementing it’s corner of the market and growing, reaching 150 million users in 2019.

Wix vs Wordpress

The competition in the website building sphere is fierce. This is particularly the case with Wix having to stake out it’s position against Wordpress. There are some key differences to the operations of the two services, which will make one better suited to your needs depending on what they are.

With Wix, it is an all-in-one system, you don’t need to leave the platform to get your site live, everything is neatly packaged for you right there. No technical knowledge is needed and eCommerce is integrated seamlessly. This is alongside a faster time from zero to up and running as well as a support team to help you in the process as well.

Compare that to Wordpress and you get an idea of each company’s advantages and disadvantages. The software behind Wordpress is open source and free for people. This means a huge community of people collaborating and improving the platform constantly. The size of Wordpress means that there is a lot more plugins to customise your site, as well as initial design templates. There’s a design out there already for almost everyone. The content management system is also extremely sophisticated, particularly comparing it to Wix’s.

So between the two, what is better? It all depends on what you need a website for and how much time you are willing to invest in learning to keep it online. It’s a lot easier to create a great looking website with Wix, it’s easier to make a customised website exactly how you want it with Wordpress.

Pricing

For a simple website, Wix has four plans to choose from:

For people looking to have their website up and running quickly and easily, Wix is a fantastic solution. This is particularly the case if you have no time, or desire, to learn the intricacies and technical side of running a website and keeping it online. If we consider the huge commercial success of Wix over the years - it looks like there are a lot of people out there who feel exactly this way.