Wix vs Wordpress for new small online shop

[Frank the Insurance guy]

Helping a friend with a website!

They have been looking at using Wix for the Wix webbuilder and payment system.

They will only need to list max 20 products, which will include images and video (I am worried Wix page load speed will be slow if video's included?)

Is Wix suitable?

I assume once in you are tied to the Wix ecosystem?

I have suggested setting up their own wordpress site, which will give them much more control over hosting provider and future costs etc.

Have any of you had any experience to compare Wix vs Wordpress - pro's and con's?

I assume there is a WP plug-in for payment processing - are these expensive vs Wix payment system?

email - I think Wix will charge for Google workspace or MS365 to allow email. Is this necessary - do hosting providers include an email server that they can link into their personal gmail account to receive and send emails using their domain email address?

Thanks.

 

[DontAsk]

I have no experience with either, but I would always go for a solution that lets you use your own choice of host, assuming they have the know how or confidence.

All hosting packages I have ever used have included e-mail. Why do they want to use their personal gmail account? Is this for a business or a personal project?

 

[fisicx]

Wordpress. Far more flexible than wix and it’s free.

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

WP (or a dedicated ecommerce package) everytime. If Wix (or Shopify) closed tomorrow, there would be a lot of businesses closing soon after!

With WP/Woo, you control your destiny!

 

[antropy]

Have any of you had any experience to compare Wix vs Wordpress - pro's and con's?

The answer is neither.

Wix will lock you in to their ecosystem forever.
WordPress is incredibly vulnerable and slow.

Instead look at https://www.opencart.com/ and https://prestashop.com/.

Paul.

 

[YasmeenLondon]

+1 for wordpress.

Wordpress is open source, can be used by beginners and advanced developers alike, you own your data, plenty of agenies have wordpress expertise so you can never be locked in, easy to learn, it's just better all around imo

 

[fisicx]

WordPress is incredibly vulnerable and slow.

You keep saying this but that doesn’t make it true.

It can be vulnerable and slow but that doesn’t make it so for all installs.

 

[antropy]

It can be vulnerable and slow but that doesn’t make it so for all installs.

If we see a hacked site 99 times out of 100 it's WordPress. It's vulnerable unless constantly updated, hardened and all users are careful to use very strong passwords - which in reality they often don't.

It's slow out of the box and without extensive tuning, caching and optimisation it remains slow.

Yes you can make it fast and secure with a lot of work, by why not choose a platform that's better to start with?

Paul.

 

[Paul Kelly ICHYB]

If we see a hacked site 99 times out of 100 it's WordPress.

Is that because of its popularity?

 

[antropy]

Is that because of its popularity?

Yes, that's a big factor, but if there weren't security holes it couldn't be hacked however popular it was.

Paul.

 

[fisicx]

A fresh install without using ‘admin’ as the default username isn’t slow or insecure. This has been tested umpteen times.

Poor speeds and security issues happen because people are stupid and don’t follow the guidelines.

So while I agree you may encounter slow and insecure or hacked sites they tend to be the exception rather than the rule. What you don’t see are the millions of site that aren’t hacked or slow.

 

[SEO Lady]

I quote as an ex-IBM employee: IBM and Squarespace, but that's an old story from 2013, the state of the backend was appalling.

If we see a hacked site 99 times out of 100 it's WordPress. It's vulnerable unless constantly updated, hardened and all users are careful to use very strong passwords - which in reality they often don't.

It's slow out of the box and without extensive tuning, caching and optimisation it remains slow.

Yes you can make it fast and secure with a lot of work, by why not choose a platform that's better to start with?

Paul.

I've handled thousands of Wordpress websites in 17 years, most of them would be the ideal entity for hacking when first introduced.

I've come in post-hack as an SEO to recover rankings at twice that my old brain remembers this afternoon.

I handled my first hack from 'incident day' this year in a 24 hour window, so out of (?) 1,200 wordpress websites I've consulted or worked with, I'd only value the single 2025 example to add on my CV.

"If we see a hacked site 99 times out of 100 it's WordPress"
Yeah it was.
"It's vulnerable unless constantly updated"
Yes, it was the site owner's housekeeping fault with an out of date old theme that was not removed. The other 1,199 sites with the same out-of-date-old-themes means that 1 in 1,100 Wordpress websites are hacked in my sample dataset between 2008-2025.

So while I agree you may encounter slow and insecure or hacked sites they tend to be the exception rather than the rule. What you don’t see are the millions of site that aren’t hacked or slow.

I've seen shocking states, worse than mine, that have improved visibility over time - confusingly with WooCommerce so out of date that Walnut Whips were still producing the coffee-filling ones.

 

[martin_shl]

I would always go for the open source solution you can choose where to host.

 

[DontAsk]

If we see a hacked site 99 times out of 100 it's WordPress. It's vulnerable unless constantly updated,

So not unique to Wordpress

hardened and all users are careful to use very strong passwords - which in reality they often don't.

So not unique to wordpress

It's slow out of the box and without extensive tuning, caching and optimisation it remains slow.

Yes you can make it fast and secure with a lot of work, by why not choose a platform that's better to start with?

So which platform never needs updating and doesn't need strong passwords?

 

[kulture]

Realistically, if you want your site to be sucessful, you should really get an expert to create it. Although many sites use services like wix of shopify, it ties you to them, and limits your ability t o make your site unique. Likewise using something like wordpress will inevitably take your site down the same well trodden path as many others.

What no-body has asked you, which they should have before offering advice, is what are you selling? what is your target market? what are your competitors doing? how often do you change products (or is it always the same 20)? do you need real time stock control? and many many other questions.

 

[Nick@Daydot]

Realistically, if you want your site to be sucessful, you should really get an expert to create it. Although many sites use services like wix of shopify, it ties you to them, and limits your ability t o make your site unique. Likewise using something like wordpress will inevitably take your site down the same well trodden path as many others.

What no-body has asked you, which they should have before offering advice, is what are you selling? what is your target market? what are your competitors doing? how often do you change products (or is it always the same 20)? do you need real time stock control? and many many other questions.

!00%. I see time and again people asking what site builder to use, what theme to use, all in the uneducated (not their fault) expectation that all they need to do to create an effective site is choose the right template. So many build a site, spend a ton on marketing, and then wonder why they have no sales.

To OP if you're still there, if you have no experience of UX/UI (effective site design) the advice to get an expert to build the site is the right approach.

 

[Gareth Waters]

My biggest issue with Wix and similar platforms is that once you've got your website built, you're stuck with the wix platform. A new client has just come to me after falling out with his previous website designer. He wasn't told he needed to purchase a premium plan to launch, and because it's ecommerce he can't use the basic plan.

 

[Frank the Insurance guy]

Thanks all - clearly WP is the best way forward and I have let her know.

 

[antropy]

Thanks all - clearly WP is the best way forward and I have let her know.

It's definitely not.

Paul.

 

[YasmeenLondon]

It's definitely not.

Paul.

Paul you've made your points about wordpress, most of them show a deep lack of understanding of the technology, OP made their decision, probably best to move on mate.

 

[antropy]

Paul you've made your points about wordpress, most of them show a deep lack of understanding of the technology, OP made their decision, probably best to move on mate.

Deep lack of understanding I was likely a senior web developer while you were still a child.

Paul.

 

[YasmeenLondon]

If we see a hacked site 99 times out of 100 it's WordPress. It's vulnerable unless constantly updated, hardened and all users are careful to use very strong passwords - which in reality they often don't.

It's slow out of the box and without extensive tuning, caching and optimisation it remains slow.

Yes you can make it fast and secure with a lot of work, by why not choose a platform that's better to start with?

Paul.

Someone with any basic understanding of wordpress would not write this ...

 

[antropy]

Someone with any basic understanding of wordpress would not write this ...

Someone with a Computer Science or software/web development background wouldn't write this.

Paul.

 

[fisicx]

@antropy - many of us are well aware of your dislike of Wordpress. That’s not a problem as there are many products I dislike. But Wordpress now drives a large percentage of the internet donors not going anywhere soon. And most installations don’t get hacked. You just never hear about them as the owners won’t be contacting you for help.

Both Wordpress and Opencart can happily coexist together.

 

[ctrlbrk]

umpteenth pi**ing match starting in three, two, one....

 

[YasmeenLondon]

Someone with a Computer Science or software/web development background wouldn't write this.

Paul.

It's vulnerable unless constantly updated, hardened and all users are careful to use very strong passwords - which in reality they often don't.

It's slow out of the box and without extensive tuning, caching and optimisation it remains slow.

Yes you can make it fast and secure with a lot of work, by why not choose a platform that's better to start with?

Someone with a "Computer Science or software/web development background" does not need to be sold on the importance of having a strong password lol

Also, someone with a "Computer Science or software/web development background" would understand that every framework has best practices, follow them and thrive, go against them and suffer.

 

[antropy]

Ok well perhaps that's enough platform wars for today.

Paul.

 

[Kerwin]

It is a fair point about Wordpress being slow by default. Add a few "essential" plugins and then count the number of SQL queries run to display a single page. It is pretty poor.

 

[antropy]

It is a fair point about Wordpress being slow by default. Add a few "essential" plugins and then count the number of SQL queries run to display a single page. It is pretty poor.

Indeed.

If @fisicx wants to list the essential speed plugins or provide a brief description of the basic steps to get WordPress running really fast then I think that would be helpful to many.

Apart from having decades of experience in the industry myself, many as a senior web developer, I have a team of incredible developers here in the office and they struggled to get WordPress running as fast as we would consider acceptable.

Paul.

 

[YasmeenLondon]

Indeed.

If @fisicx wants to list the essential speed plugins or provide a brief description of the basic steps to get WordPress running really fast then I think that would be helpful to many.

Apart from having decades of experience in the industry myself, many as a senior web developer, I have a team of incredible developers here in the office and they struggled to get WordPress running as fast as we would consider acceptable.

Paul.

My comments should not be interpreted as a criticism of you, your agency or your developers, I am sure your clients love working with you and you deliver quality and excellence to them or else you'd be out of business.

My point is that there are pros and cons to every framework, there are amateurs that make any framework look bad and professionals that can overcome many limitations, also, adherence to best practices is always a good idea.

Finally, the framework a website is built on is probably the least important aspect of a website's success and far to much time is dedicated to answering this question when far more important questions must be answered first.

 

[fisicx]

It is a fair point about Wordpress being slow by default. Add a few "essential" plugins and then count the number of SQL queries run to display a single page. It is pretty poor.

Most of those queries often come from the theme and page builders. Without too much effort I got a site to score 90/100 with 17 queries. It could be better but I'm happy with that.

Even my most plugin heavy site (over 30) still scores 70/100.

If @fisicx wants to list the essential speed plugins or provide a brief description of the basic steps to get WordPress running really fast then I think that would be helpful to many.

I don't use any speed plugins. I just have decent hosting, no page builder and minimise the number of plugins.

 

[antropy]

I don't use any speed plugins. I just have decent hosting, no page builder and minimise the number of plugins.

Nope that can't be it. A fresh install of WordPress runs shockingly slowly even on decent hosting. Unless you're talking about having dedicated servers even for basic sites.

What kind of page load speeds are you considering are acceptable?

Paul.

 

[fisicx]

90+

Getting close to that figure isn’t hard.

Here's a clean install. No plugins, a basic theme, no cache or any optimisation:

Home | Test Site

[attendance-register department="Badminton"]

testsite.testblog.co.uk

Lighthouse scores it 100/100. GTmetrix: 98%. Pingdom: 89

 

[antropy]

90+

I'm talking about the Time To Last Byte which tells you how long it took the server to render the HTML. The metrics you're talking about are all front-end code dependent so they depend on the web developer or theme rather than the underlying CMS.

Paul.

 

[fisicx]

I'm talking about the Time To Last Byte which tells you how long it took the server to render the HTML. The metrics you're talking about are all front-end code dependent so they depend on the web developer or theme rather than the underlying CMS.

Paul.

But you said WordPress is slow out the box. Run your own tests on that site and tell me which bit is slow.

I've tested that site with a number of the free WP themes and the page load speed hardly varies.

Is there some other parameter you are using to measure the speed?

 

[Kerwin]

But you said WordPress is slow out the box. Run your own tests on that site and tell me which bit is slow.

I've tested that site with a number of the free WP themes and the page load speed hardly varies.

Is there some other parameter you are using to measure the speed?

You could run EXPLAIN ANALYZE queries on the database and see how long each query takes to execute and see what you can fix that regard,

MySQL :: MySQL EXPLAIN ANALYZE

dev.mysql.com

 

[antropy]

But you said WordPress is slow out the box. Run your own tests on that site and tell me which bit is slow.

That doesn't look like how WordPress comes though, you've deleted everything and used a minimal theme.

Even so the TTLB is 0.14s vs. around 0.10s for a fully built ConcreteCMS site with loads of content.

Paul.

 

[fisicx]

You could run EXPLAIN ANALYZE queries on the database and see how long each query takes to execute and see what you can fix that regard

Not sure I can. I build plugins. I'm not a DB admin so wouldn't know where to begin. I can just about use phpMyAdmin and that's the end of my DB skills.

 

[fisicx]

That doesn't look like how WordPress comes though, you've deleted everything and used a minimal theme.

Even so the TTLB is 0.14s vs. around 0.10s for a fully built ConcreteCMS site with loads of content.

Paul.

If I switch to the 2025 theme I get the same results. You said Wordpress is slow out the box on a clean install. I've not deleted anything, when you run WP for the first time it doesn't have any content. I just added a homepage.

Which bit of a clean install is slow when your devs run WP?

 

[antropy]

Which bit of a clean install is slow when your devs run WP?

Well that blank page is 40% slower than a fully built site.

We use WordPress for our Intranet - not because we like it but because we want to know what we're talking about - and that is also terrible slow before we installed some caching plugins - but it's still slow even with them.

Also WooCommerce was very slow indeed.

Paul.