Wix and WordPress are two of the most popular website solutions available. According to Builtwith, Wix takes over 4.5 million websites while WordPress lags behind 28 million websites.

The main difference between them is that Wix is ​​a website builder and a hosted solution, while WordPress is an open source, non-hosted content management system (CMS).

An important decision that you need to think about when deciding between Wix and WordPress is which one is best for SEO.

In this topic, you’ll learn about the pros and cons of each SEO platform, along with some interesting facts and tips to help you make the right decision for your website.

The argument for Wix

WordPress’ total dominance in the market started to wane as we started to see new website builders appear. These new competitors began to push the boundaries when it came to providing user-friendly interfaces with powerful website functionality.

Wix was the leader of the bunch of this new generation of website builders.

Wix started out as one of the easiest platforms to create a modern looking website. However, users with more technical knowledge tended to shy away from it as they wanted to maintain full control over their site.

Over the past few years, however, that has really started to change.

Wix has added features like crazy, and some of the more recent additions have focused on SEO tools. The tools can get quite technical, but here are some examples of the new features in Wix SEO:

• The ability to change the default URL structure, customize subdirectory names, edit, remove or prefix URLs, and even create a completely flat URL structure.
• Automatic sitemap updates via 301 redirects and updating canonical meta tags and other relevant tags.
• View log files as reports on bot traffic over time, bot traffic per page, and response status over time.

In the past, you had to rely on plenty of third-party tools to do all of this, resulting in disorganization and generally less than optimal results.

The ability to have accurate reports, in particular, has always been a challenge before. Having this integrated with Wix is ​​a major upgrade.

If you are new to SEO or are not familiar with these terms, learn more about Wix. here.

Wix for SEO – The Cons

There are several downsides to Wix, and some of them impact important SEO factors.

• Wix uses an unusual (weird) link structure that most SEO pros don’t care about. In each URL, you will notice a #. This is served via JavaScript, which has a long history of not being ideal for crawling and indexing search engines.
• Another big downside to Wix is ​​the inability of more advanced users to add custom code. Although they do offer a piece of HTML code, it is quite limited.
• There is a lot of bloated code. This can be a problem as it can result in lower than ideal page speed scores.

The argument for WordPress

WordPress was one of the first widely used website solutions that made it relatively easy to get a site up and running. It is also an open source program that relies on contributions from the Internet community.

Its basic features are free, but most modern site features will require you to pay for plugins.

These plugins provide the functionality needed to perform all types of tasks, and they also give you access to SEO tools. Reviewing these tools is where you should look when considering SEO.

WordPress also has more users, which means more forums and more professionals to help you out if you need them.

WordPress for SEO – The Cons

Plugins are created by different companies or groups, so they don’t all communicate the same or work the same.

Although Yoast is the most popular SEO tool on WordPress, there are many, many more.

These tools can work very well sometimes, but can also conflict with each other and potentially cause problems. Like all plugins, they can introduce vulnerabilities and updates can break other parts of the site.

Some say WordPress has become out of touch with the needs of publishers, based on a built-in code overload that hinders the ability of sites to optimize for Core Web Vitals.

Even with that said, the sheer volume of WordPress plugins available has always been a strong selling point. New plugins are added every day, and it is quite possible to create an SEO optimized site in WordPress for this reason.

In fact, Search Engine Journal offers a complete guide to WordPress SEO.

Wix vs WordPress for SEO: compared

If you take a look at the basics of SEO, both solutions offer the following:

Where things start to change is when you step into more advanced SEO functionality needs.

At this point, the flexibility of WordPress tends to win out quite easily. But for many small businesses that only need basic SEO features, either solution will suffice.

WordPress vs Wix: organic traffic

Ahrefs found in a study of millions of sites that 46% of WordPress sites received at least some organic traffic, while only 1.4% of Wix sites experienced the same.

It should be noted that this data is skewed, even according to Ahrefs, simply based on the volume of WordPress sites on Wix that they have been tested against.

Wix vs WordPress: the verdict

At the end of the day, if you ask most SEO pros what their favorite platform is, they’ll likely tell you which one they’ve used the most.

People prefer programs with which they have experience and will find reasons to discredit other options. This is why you see so many different opinions on which platform best prepares you for success.

As we take a look at these platforms today, Wix has made some significant improvements to their solution. All the old complaints about lack of control when using Wix no longer apply as much as they once did, and the ease with which you can perform basic SEO optimizations is on par with WordPress.

For small businesses and sites, this could be the ticket. As John Mueller recently said, the content of the site is increasingly important no matter what it is built on. Unless you are dealing with major technical issues, content is what you need to focus on.

It all depends on what you like. If your SEO needs are minimal and you care about an easy to use website builder, then Wix may be your best bet.

For more advanced users looking for the best of both worlds with scalability and customization, as well as those considering using SEO as a long-term strategy, WordPress wins hands down.

More resources: