To be honest, I had my doubts about Wix. I've been using WordPress for years before I started building my own custom website systems recently. It was my mother who wanted to make a website for one of her latest projects and was unsure about how to do it. Due to being on sick leave and struggling to spend much time looking at computer screens, I wouldn't be able to be very involved in the development of her website.
After doing some research, we landed on Wix instead of WordPress—basically a coin toss decision. The quick conclusion is that I am very happy we did. I'm super pleased that I didn't need to custom-code her website from scratch because she went all out with advanced features available in Wix that would have taken months to develop from scratch for a professional web developer.
My mom had no prior knowledge of coding HTML, PHP, CSS, or web development before creating her new website. Now she has a website with an email marketing system, international translations, lots of CSS animations, video backgrounds, custom fonts, and it's fully mobile-friendly. It also has great performance, which surprised me quite a lot. It scored 100% on the GTMetrix test for performance and 95% for structure, loading in about 0.5 seconds.
I had to help her out a little along the way to get everything working as expected, but for the most part, she's been figuring this out by herself.
WordPress vs. Wix
WordPress is a great CMS, but it is nowhere near as beginner-friendly as Wix. With Wix, almost everything most people would need comes included, whereas with WordPress, most plugins and themes push premium options to unlock all features.
Wix features an intuitive and easy-to-use drag-and-drop website builder. WordPress has some themes that you can install to enable drag-and-drop website design as well. However, those options usually are not free and require a lot more technical know-how than what's needed to make a website with Wix.
A drawback to Wix is that you'll have to pay extra to use email with your domain once pointed to Wix. They do not have a built-in system for emails; instead, they've partnered with Google. In my mom's case, she has to pay $45 per year for her Google Workspace email, which was the cheapest option we found. After the initial year, I believe they will start charging double that.
If you instead have custom web hosting that has cPanel and use WordPress, emails can be created for free.
Conclusion
Wix impressed me very much, and I have to give it the highest rating of 5 stars. Of course, there are a few drawbacks to using Wix rather than custom-coding everything yourself, but actually, far fewer drawbacks than I had presumed.
Wix makes everything pretty easy. You don't have to deal with web hosting and servers, plugins, themes, and custom code. They also have a nice live chat support, which can be helpful if you are stuck. If you're very new to web development, I would suggest using an AI chatbot like ChatGPT to ask questions along the way before queuing up for their live chat support.
If you are on a small budget and don't need to customize your website extensively—meaning that you'll be satisfied with a premade template—you can save money by instead buying a cheap web hosting package and installing WordPress, which is free.
