Is Wix or Weebly as Powerful as a Hosted Wordpress-Based Sites?

Asking if a free platform is as powerful as WordPress or another CMS is like asking if a bicycle is as powerful as a car. The answer is "no," but whether it's preferable depends on how you're using it. :-) In the same way that in a small town or for a short urban commute, a bike may have less horsepower but is actually more convenient than a car, Wix and similar platforms have their place. Any developer worth their salt should be willing to consult with you to see if you need their more robust service, or if the right fit is something less expensive--or even free. :-)

If you'd like to learn more, feel free to contact me at: www.csdesignstudios.com

Just like Juan, I am a WordPress developer, so I'm going to be a bit biased. But I agree with him that WIX and Weebly can be great starting points. It's an easy way for a new businesses to get online quickly. Though, do be cautious as Justin warns. These sites often start free, but to get to the site to where you want it to be requires some up-charges.

But here's what I find with folks who start with Weebly, WIX, and Squarespace sites. Often within about a year or two, business outgrow their site, find the limits of those web services, and have to move to a custom WordPress type setting. And the process of moving from any of those services to a more custom solution sometimes proves to be a bigger pain than having just started with a WordPress site from the start. Of course, it's hard to know when starting out how far the business will grow, but future-proofing is always a good consideration.

I recently read a good analogy about the difference of having your website being hosted on Wordpress.com vs Wordpress.org (self-hosted wordpresss) and I think it applies to Wix and Weebly. Hosting on any of these platforms is equivalent to renting, whereas hosting your own Wordpress is equivalent to owning.

When you have self-hosted Wordpress site, you can use any plugins you want, you can modify the code and do whatever you like. You can also move your site to another hosting company if you don't like how your current hosting performs.

If you use other platforms, you're basically at their mercy. You also don't have the option to move your site to a new company, since you don't get access to your database.

I'm currently redesigning a website for a client who has the site hosted on Wordpress.com and I'm running in all kinds of limitations. Some plugins can't be installed, there are also lots of limitation on how much customizing and coding I can change. I tried to export it so I could try to install it on another hosting, but apparently you can't clone it. You can only export the content, but not the whole site. So I'm basically stuck and have to work with many limitations.

If I were you I would send your client few links to articles explaining why self hosted WP site is much better way to build the site. They'll be shooting themselves in the foot if they decide to go with a free platform site.

If they're serious about building their business and their traffic, they should definitely stick with self hosted WP site.

Good luck.

Gene
Big Apple Media | Custom Web Design

E.G. Sebastian,

If you don't want your client's site to ever be found organically on Google or Bing by all means use NIX or Feebly as website builders. After all Wix has stolen code from WordPress in the past year so that did make them a bit better until they got caught.

Accessibility a ranking factor for Google is almost non existent with either company.

Load speed, you can't control it. Let hope you don't have a noisey neighbor on that shared server.

The content on Wix and Weebly hosted sites are... Well nothing says it better than Wix's Terms of Use agreement.

Notwithstanding the forgoing, Wix shall have the right to determine the ownership of User Content and/or a User Website as it chooses, including by ignoring the indications set forth above, in event Wix deems, at its sole discretion, that the situation justifies such determination, all based upon the factual situation as determined by Wix.

You hit on one BIG problem with Wix and Weebly with PLUGINS... or lack thereof. Enjoy that website that doesn't do anything. Need to add items for sale? Move to WordPress.

I wrote an article on the Best Website Builder Compared where I compared Wix, Weebly, Wquarespace, GoDaddy's builder and WordPress.org (NOT .com).

Also, please see my comments on Generic Website Builder or invest in a web designer form post.

I hope this helps,

Aaron

ps. Show me one Wix bases site that out performs a WordPress made site that isn't promoted via an AD on Wix.

I have never known of any web developer or word press developer that is ever happy with ANY of the DIY sites like Wix. No matter how great the sites can be.

Wix does have plugins. You can do pop ups (check out our site) and many other cool things. I would say if your budget does not have the room for a "professional" web programmer then, Wix is your best choice. I have in the past designed and programmed my own sites using Dreamweaver. Hope that helps.

I don't know exactly why (I can speculate) but I rarely see one of these sites ranking very well in the search engine results pages. So, from my perspective (as a Google Web Ranking Consultant), I tend to shy away from the canned, template based website systems. I can better control how a website ranks if the platform is more flexible with how pages and designs are laid out.

Oh, God no. If you're serious about SEO, don't walk away, RUN! WordPress platform, if developed smartly, gives you infinite options to properly manage your website. Also know that WordPress is not one size fits all. There are many options to select and not all WordPress professionals are created equal. There are many different frameworks and themes to choose from and not all are SEO friendly although they may look really nice. Here are a couple of resources for you to refer to:

CHOOSING BETWEEN OPEN SOURCE OR PROPRIETARY SOFTWARE

HOW MUCH DOES A WEBSITE COST

I think it really depends on what the client is expecting from the site. How important is "image" to the organization? You will not find any large company or organization using Wix or Paypal to run their business or organizations, not necessarily because of what they do, but because people know "anybody could do it quickly and cheaply". Sometimes that subtle message doesn't resonate with other image objectives the company is portraying. Although people may appreciate a business being cost efficient, they will always prefer what is seen as stable and professional solutions over doing things a group doing thing "cheaply". For personal or side-gig stuff, fine. To grow/scale a business it is usually better to invest in the small monthly difference.

All those free sites are extremely limited. If you can get on page one of google.. good luck. I have never seen it done.

Wordpress is better if you know what you are doing. You can get some phenomenal SEO results. I find that a lot of clients who make constant changes are better off with a crappy free service.
As a business owner you are better off letting them go their own way.

Hi, I am a little biased as we do most of our website development work using WordPress. However, I am not against using WIX, Weebly and other website builders for startups so you can get started. As for your question specifically:

In my experience, most SEO experts prefer WordPress because you have move flexibility, can use plugins like YOAST and Jetpack which can help you in your SEO and marketing strategies. Also you can really tweak your website as needed to make it load faster, integrate with more 3rd party components and have more options to use AMP (accelerated mobile pages) which Google is pushing on. As far as I know, WIX does not have AMP support yet.

That being said, if you are trying to rank, the answer is not 100% with what solution you use, it's more about your strategy. If you have a great site with useful content, lots of back-links, optimized content for tail-end keywords, then I don't think it will really matter what you use unless you are competing with other websites that are also doing a lot of SEO optimization.

As for limitations, yes, you will have more limitations with WIX or Weebly then with WordPress. Also, if you decide to move to a different hosting company for any reason, you lose all the work you did because you don't own the HTML source. I do believe that limitations will eventually go away as they mature.

I hope this information helps you make a decision.

Juan Lopez