Wix vs WordPress for a UK Small Business
We build on both, so we have no particular stake in the answer. That turns out to be unusual: most comparisons of these two are written by people who sell one of them.
The short version. Wix is better than its reputation and genuinely fine for a small brochure site you will manage yourself. WordPress is more capable and more work, and the case for it gets stronger the more pages you need and the harder your market is. Neither one will rank a site that has nothing to say.
Cost over five years
The sticker prices are misleading in opposite directions.
| Wix | WordPress | |
|---|---|---|
| Platform / licence | £11–£29 a month | Free |
| Hosting | Included | £60–£360 a year |
| Premium theme | Included | £0–£70 once |
| Plugins | Mostly included | £0–£300 a year |
| Maintenance | Included | £0 (DIY) or £30–£150 a month |
| Five-year total, self-managed | £700–£1,700 | £400–£2,000 |
Close enough that cost should not decide it. What actually decides it is what happens when something needs to change.
SEO: closer than the internet claims
The “Wix is bad for SEO” line is a decade out of date. Wix now gives you editable page titles and meta descriptions, custom URL slugs, automatic sitemaps, robots.txt control, structured data, canonical tags, 301 redirects and a Search Console integration. That is the full technical checklist for a small business site.
Where WordPress still wins:
- Control over the details. Fine-grained schema, custom canonical logic, internal linking at scale, and the ability to fix something specific rather than work around it.
- Publishing at volume. If you need forty location or service pages, WordPress with a decent template will do it and Wix will make you build forty pages by hand.
- Page speed ceiling. A well-built WordPress site can be considerably faster than anything Wix will produce. A badly built one is considerably slower. The variance is the point.
Where Wix quietly wins:
- Floor, not ceiling. A beginner building on Wix produces something technically sound. A beginner on WordPress installs six plugins that conflict and a theme that loads 3MB of JavaScript. The average Wix site is better built than the average WordPress site, because there is less to get wrong.
For most five-to-ten page local businesses, neither platform is the reason you are not ranking. Your page titles and your lack of a page per service are.
Ownership, and the part people miss
This matters more than the feature comparison, and it gets discussed far less.
WordPress is yours. The files, the database, the content. You can move to a different host in an afternoon and take everything.
Wix is a tenancy. There is no meaningful export. If you leave Wix, you rebuild.
That is not hypothetical: it is the single most common expensive surprise we see, usually three years in, when the business has outgrown the platform and discovers that “moving” means “starting again”.
Whether that matters depends on your horizon. For a business that expects to look much the same in five years, it may never bite. For one that expects to grow, add locations, or eventually sell, it is a real constraint you are accepting.
Separately, and regardless of platform: make sure the domain is registered in your name. Not your agency’s, not your web designer’s cousin’s. This is the one thing that turns a bad relationship into a hostage situation, and it costs nothing to get right at the start.
When we recommend Wix
- You are a one-person business with five to eight pages and no plans for forty
- You will genuinely be editing the site yourself, regularly
- Nobody in your business enjoys or tolerates technical maintenance
- You are not in a brutally competitive search market
- Speed to launch matters more than ceiling
Wix in this situation is not a compromise. It is the right tool, and paying an agency £2,500 to build the same thing in WordPress would be worse value.
When we recommend WordPress
- You need more than about fifteen pages, or a page per town
- You publish regularly, or intend to
- You are competing against established sites in a real market
- You need a booking system, a members area, or a shop with more than a handful of products
- The site is a genuine business asset and you want to own it outright
When we recommend neither
For a site that is mostly content and needs to be fast, we increasingly build static. This site is one. No database, no plugin updates, no maintenance window, and page loads that WordPress cannot match without serious work. The trade-off is that it is less useful if you want to edit everything yourself daily.
The point is that “Wix or WordPress” is a narrower question than most people realise. There are three or four sensible answers depending on what the site is for.
The question that actually decides it
Not “which is better for SEO”. This one:
Who is going to maintain this site in eighteen months?
If the answer is you, and you would rather not think about it: Wix. If the answer is you, and you are comfortable applying updates and occasionally fixing something: WordPress. If the answer is an agency: it does not matter much, so pick on ownership, and pick WordPress or static.
Everything else in this comparison is secondary to that.
Whichever you pick
The platform is maybe fifteen per cent of whether a small business site succeeds in search. The rest is structure (a page per service, a page per place, titles that name what you do) plus content that answers real questions, and time.
If you are still deciding what to spend, we published the full UK cost breakdown with what each band actually buys. And if you have a site already and it is invisible, start here instead. The answer is often four minutes away and free.