WordPress vs Wix: Which One Actually Suits Your Small Business?

If you're setting up a website for the first time — or wondering whether to move off the one you've got — you'll hit this fork in the road fairly quickly: WordPress or Wix?

There isn't a universal right answer. Both can produce a perfectly professional small business website. The honest answer is "it depends what you need it to do, how much you want it to cost over time, and how much of the ongoing admin you're prepared to own yourself." Here's what actually differs, in plain terms.

The core difference Wix V's WordPress: software vs platform

WordPress.org is free, open-source software. You install it on hosting of your choice, and from that point you own everything — the code, the content, the data, the lot. You can move it to a different host whenever you like.

Wix is an all-in-one hosted platform. You're renting space and tools from Wix rather than owning any infrastructure. That's a large part of why it's simpler to use — but it also means that if you ever decide to leave, you're rebuilding elsewhere rather than exporting your site as-is.

That single distinction — own it vs rent it — explains most of the other differences below.

Cost: the real numbers (2026, UK)

Wix pricing is straightforward and all-inclusive — hosting, templates, support, SSL and bandwidth are bundled in:

Plan	Price (annual billing)	Best for
Light	from £9/month	Simple brochure site, no online store
Core	from £16/month	Small online store, bookings
Business	from £25/month	Growing store, multi-currency, tax tools
Business Elite	from £119/month	High-volume stores

A free plan exists too, but it carries Wix branding, no custom domain, and no payments — fine for testing, not for a live business site.

WordPress software itself costs nothing, but you're assembling the pieces yourself:

• Hosting: roughly £3–£15/month for shared hosting, £14–£35+/month for managed WordPress hosting

• Domain: £10–£15/year

• A premium theme, if you want one: £30–£100 one-off

• Plugins: many free, but useful ones often run £50–£100+ each

The catch on both sides is worth knowing. With Wix, the headline plan price is fixed, but every extra app or feature (bookings, loyalty, advanced marketing) can add £20–£40/month on top. With WordPress hosting, the bigger trap is renewal pricing — it's common for a plan advertised at £2–£4/month to jump to £12–£35/month once the introductory term ends. Always check the renewal rate before you commit, not just the sign-up price.

Bottom line: for a simple site, Wix is usually cheaper and far more predictable year to year. For something that will grow substantially — more content, more products, more customisation — WordPress can work out better value long-term, but only if you (or someone you pay) is genuinely managing the moving parts.

Getting started, and the day-to-day after that

Wix's drag-and-drop editor means no code and a site that can be live within hours. It's also leaned hard into AI tools recently — AI site generation from a text prompt, AI-written copy, that sort of thing. Crucially, hosting, security patches, backups and uptime are all handled for you as part of the plan.

WordPress takes more setup up front — choosing hosting, installing a theme, configuring plugins — and has a steeper learning curve. What you get in return is complete design and functional freedom. The trade-off is responsibility: you're on the hook for keeping plugins and themes updated, or paying a host/agency to do it. Skipped updates are the single biggest reason self-hosted WordPress sites get compromised.

SEO and growth

The old line that "Wix is bad for SEO" is out of date. Wix now includes built-in SEO tools — Google Search Console integration, meta tag controls, an SEO checklist — on all its paid plans.

WordPress still has an edge for content-heavy sites: blogs, resource libraries, anything with a lot of pages that need categorising and cross-linking. Its taxonomy system (categories and tags) is more flexible, and plugins like Yoast or RankMath go deeper than Wix's built-in tools.

For a typical five-to-ten-page small business site, though, the platform is rarely what's holding your search visibility back. Consistent, well-structured content usually matters far more than which builder you chose.

Selling online

Wix eCommerce is built in — no plugin needed — and handles up to 50,000 products, which covers the vast majority of small and mid-size shops.

WordPress + WooCommerce (a free plugin) scales further with more flexibility over product types and payment gateways, but brings more setup and more ongoing maintenance with it.

So which one, for which business?

A rough steer, not a sales pitch:

• Need a professional site live fast, want a predictable monthly cost, and don't want to think about tech admin → Wix is the more comfortable fit.

• Planning heavy content, a large product catalogue, or you want full long-term ownership and control of your site → WordPress, accepting the trade-off of more ongoing management (yours or someone else's).

• Not sure yet how the business — or the website — will grow → Wix removes the early technical burden while you find your feet. Worth knowing that migrating from Wix to WordPress later is considerably more involved than the reverse, so if you suspect you'll outgrow a simple platform, it's worth thinking a step ahead now rather than in eighteen months' time.

There isn't a "correct" platform — only the one that matches what you're actually trying to run. If you're weighing this up for your own business and want a second opinion on which fits your plans, that's a conversation I'm always happy to have.