Wix and WooCommerce — A Thorough Analysis On Main Differences
By Litextension
Wix vs WooCommerce, it just isn’t easy for you to choose — particularly if you are new to website building.
There are two very big names we’re going to deal with today. In the past few years, Wix has grown in popularity, and there are many celebrity supporters alongside it, such as Karlie Kloss. In the meantime, WooCommerce is powering a third of the alive websites today.
Both are fantastic platforms but in fact, they are very different. LitExtension has compiled this handy guide that takes you through eight key areas for bettering your understanding in Wix and WooCommerce — and to find out which one works best for you.
Wix vs WooCommerce — How are Wix and WooCommerce different from each other?
Wix is a builder of all-in-one web pages and it is suitable for newcomers and non-coders. Wix helps you to quickly construct a professional website with predesigned templates, integrated security, and in-house technology while WooCommerce is an open-source self-hosted content management framework. It offers you full flexibility and control to create complex sites. Hosting, plugins installation, updates running and much more are provided.
It means that with WooCommerce, you’re designing your site completely from scratch, while with Wix, everything comes built-in and ready for you to begin building.
WooCommerce is more robust than Wix, but it does take more technical know-how — it is especially helpful to know how to code if you want complete versatility.
Wix vs WooCommerce — Ease of Use: Which Has a Gentler Learning Curve?
The learning curve for WooCommerce is certainly steeper when it comes to ease of use. Most people choose WooCommerce for its versatility, but the difficulty comes with this flexibility. Almost nothing can be modified, but advanced technical expertise is required to make modifications. A professional developer can always be hired to help you, but it can be quite costly.
Another downside of WooCommerce is, regardless of the content you insert in the editor, before you preview or publish the article, you won’t see what it looks like “online.” This is definitely not a major problem, but you’ll need to constantly click back and forth between editing modes and demo modes to see how they all fit together.
Wix is restricted but specifically designed and constructed so that non-developers can easily use it. You can learn much easier on how to use Wix. You can also push or drag articles, images, shopping cart buttons, anywhere on your web pages. Wix is a designer of what-you-see-what-you-go-web sites. In a few fast clicks, you can also resize anything.
→ Wix can be used much more conveniently than WooCommerce! Thanks to its quick drag-and-drop app, Wix makes designing websites easy for anyone. On the other hand, WooCommerce is the most strong and dynamic site. You have more time to learn how to use WooCommerce.
Wix vs WooCommerce — Design and Customization: How Creative Can You Get?
Design and customization are things of which WooCommerce is proud. How much you can customize your website is basically done without any restriction, but as you know now, that is not too easy to do.
As long as you’re confident in coding, WooCommerce enables you to make major changes to its themes and actually put your stamp site. Y
ou can work off WooCommerce’s free templates or themes–but when you are serious about the aesthetic beauty of your website, you’ll want to buy one of its premium options.
Although you can buy WooCommerce themes from many different sources, we recommend that you stick to those from your own website. This will prevent you from paying for a dodgy subject to any amateur designer.
Premium WooCommerce themes price ranges from $25 to $299. They aren’t cheap, but they are the best option if you want a slick, bug-protected design.
Wix allows you to pick more than 500 templates from a wide range. All these templates are industrially categorized and are packed with an example of what your final website might look like.
Another nice thing is that each design has standardized features that are essential for the industry under which it is classified. This saves you time and effort to find your magazine website or something like a subscription type, for example.
You can have access to a Wix template file, but it is not recommended unless you have advanced technology. By simply using the drag and drop editor you should be able to adapt everything you need.
→ WooCommerce has better options than Wix in the field of design and customization. Wix is perhaps the simplest and safer option, but WooCommerce is unsurpassed for pure design and configuration. You can modify almost anything in advanced coding to your exact taste and choose from both free and premium themes.
Wix vs WooCommerce — Apps and Plugins
Plugins and applications do the same: Wix and WooCommerce users can add extra features beyond the fundamental elements to their platform.
Common add-ons involve features such as adding website feeds on Facebook or Twitter or reverse such as the addition of a store section to a Facebook page. Additional applications and plugins may allow a website owner to monitor their SEO or provide contact form so that their audience could email them instantly.
WooCommerce ensures that its codes can be used and changed by everyone. Any programmer or coder may use WooCommerce to build their own themes or plugins for others to buy or download free of charge.
This is one of the major reasons that the WooCommerce community has broadened to over 75 million websites (which now holds about 30 percent of all websites on the internet), according to most recent figures. WooCommerce is forecasted to evolve as more people and companies create websites.
There are more than 55.000 plugins, more than 1,2 billion downloaded, giving you an indication of how large the WooCommerce community is.
But it also presents a potential problem since WooCommerce is so growing. As you can imagine, anybody with little coding experience can create a WooCommerce theme or plugin that carries its own set of risks. The standard of these tools can be excellent or garbage.
From this point of view, many of these tools are terrible, while WooCommerce allows you a great deal of flexibility. This is not to suggest that WooCommerce plugins are not great–there are a lot of them actually–but you need to look at them to see who is standing up.
Wix is not a platform of open sources. This means only the private development team of Wix can add building tools for creating websites. Therefore, the Wix tools have a much lower chance of being “buggy” and are fully integrated into the website design.
Wix also grows in the field of Apps Market, which allows you to add a lot of additional features to a Wix website. You don’t have to think about the deployment of these programs. In addition, Wix will fix it for you if you have technical problems with Wix’s software.
→ Wix defeats WooCommerce for apps and plugins because it provides better protection. With Wix, a private development team assesses and controls everything to maintain standards and also, to have good centralized support functions. In comparison, WooCommerce’s main concern is that many of its tools and plugins may not be created by professional developers. However, WooCommerce’s main concern is that many of its tools and plugins may not be created by professional developers.
Wix vs WooCommerce — Ecommerce: What’s Better For Selling Online?
Whether deciding on WooCommerce or Wix, the main difference here is that Wix is built-in with e-commerce. You will need to apply to a Wix e-commerce system, but everything you need to sell online is ready for you from there. You just have to wait for a moment.
WooCommerce is an E-commerce plugin for Wordpress. It is free to install, but additional costs such as transactions are included.
The e-commerce functionality of Wix is quite advanced, but don’t associate them with pure e-commerce sites such as Shopify. To people who really want a website capable of selling a peculiar product here and there, Wix is really up for it. For full-blown online stores, it is not advised.
The WooCommerce plugin is much more complex. That being said, this is a further expense, and some technical knowledge is essential to keep track of. WooCommerce is better if you only need to sell an online website though, if that is your purpose, you may find it far easier to use an e-commerce platform.
→ For e-commerce, WooCommerce is better than Wix! This is a call that summarizes Wix versus WooCommerce: easiness versus power. WooCommerce wins, purely because we’re not speaking about comfort or setup speed–it’s a matter of how well the platform can perform for online sales. Nonetheless, Wix is no bad choice, especially for smaller companies.
Wix vs WooCommerce — Blogging: Which Is Best For Blog Posts?
Wix provides the most basic blogging features: posts, categories, and labeling are supported and an archive of free media such as photos, videos and GIFs is available. A “Wix Blog” app allows you to create authors and enables you to blog from a mobile device directly.
Nevertheless, Wix does not offer great commenting features: you would definitely need to review feedback on Facebook that does not look as clean and may draw spammers. WooCommerce, nevertheless, offers a native commenting functionality for WooCommerce users only.
The origins of WooCommerce in blogging are almost identical to that of Wix, which adds a few others–including a unique icon on top of a blog post and its capability of backdating a post or placing it in a private, invisible mode. WooCommerce offers a few blogging capabilities.
Yet WooCommerce lacks one important advantage that Wix offers: it does not provide a free media library ready to enter a message. Alternatively, on websites such as Pexels or Pixabay, WooCommerce bloggers need to find their own free and copyright-free images.
→ For blogging, WooCommerce is stronger than Wix. All in all, when it comes to blogging, WooCommerce is ahead of Wix, providing more blogging functionality and apps. Nonetheless, Wix is still not a sneeze — bloggers are probably very satisfied with any of the services.
Wix vs WooCommerce — SEO: Is One More Optimized Than The Other?
Actually, in SEO, WooCommerce and Wix have something in common–rely on apps or plugins. You have to have a plugin called Yoast on WooCommerce. Yoast is the SEO plugin number one for WooCommerce, and more than five million sites use it. It provides both free and premium services, but it offers very limited free services.
Yoast Premium for one WooCommerce site requires $69 and is supported by excellent SEO-functions such as:
- Metadata Editing — Modifying text displayed on sites for search results.
- Suggestions for internal linking — Tips for creating a new web page on the best sites to connect to.
- Redirects — send a new URL while updating the slug on an existing page automatically.
Wix also has a number of talented SEO programs, of which Site Booster is the most common. Site Booster is free but it does cost users $3.44/month when you sign up for or higher Wix’s Unlimited Plan. The Site Booster also has loads of cool SEO options, such as integrating the company address in search engine results.
→ Only Wix and WooCommerce deliver good SEO; this is a tie! Both Wix and WooCommerce have basic integrated SEO software, and both of them provide applications or plugins that provide you with advanced SEO functionality. We would claim that Yoast is somewhat better, even though Site Boosters are included without an extra charge in the cost of most Wix plans.
Wix vs WooCommerce — Continuous maintenance: How much maintenance is necessary?
WooCommerce also updates to improve security and fix bugs from the maintenance perspective. You may need to update the WooCommerce website when this occurs (several times a year). If you use the slightly more expensive but more comprehensive WooCommerce hosting option, your host will execute any necessary updates. Therefore, the larger, more famed topic and plugin developers will update their products, but not always.
You could risk conflicting tools and potentially damaging the output of your website if your subject and plugins are not upgraded by the WooCommerce developer. That’s why we should thoroughly recommend testing the themes and plugins of WooCommerce you use. You don’t want to be left out, after all. Wix does not have to raise the finger (and perhaps you won’t know the updates even occurs) to execute all updates by its development department and automatically delivered to your website. This is a real advantage particularly if you are not technically knowledgeable.
Wix also creates new templates and apps to use daily. The applications can always be added to the existing website, but it is important to understand that without developing the whole thing from scratch, you can not alter your website templates.
→ Much less maintenance is needed than WooCommerce for Wix! Clearly, WooCommerce and Wix are not great in this region, but it only gets overshadowed by Wix with its automated, in-house software. Though, there is no hint of the effect that this can have if you use non-compatible plugins, if you upgrade WooCommerce.
Wix vs WooCommerce — Help and Support: Which Is Better For Additional Assistance?
WooCommerce has a huge user community and a massive number of tutorials for you to get aid. Also, there is plenty of great information out there, but it’s not always easy to separate good from bad.
One approach is to employ a professional developer of WooCommerce to help you build, install or change your website-but it can be costly quickly.
Online guides from WooCommerce will take you through common issues if you’re confident in self-educating The searchable guides are divided into topics from “Getting Started” to “Security,” which make finding the right paper a bit easier.
Community forums with more advanced WooCommerce users are also open to anyone who uses WooCommerce. But the WooCommerce user base is just too broad for a valuable dedicated support team to provide the service.
Wix’s support team is committed to help solve problems with its customers. A ton of articles and videos and forums have also been made to help you develop your web. Wix also offers support for email and telephones.
As everything for use in Wix’s website designer is created by itself, the website can face serious problems. The Wix support team can save you energy and time.
→ Wix provides much more assistance and support than WooCommerce. Efficient as WooCommerce is, it is harder to find reliable and sufficient resources. On the other side, with Wix, you will always receive quality aid from your dedicated support team always well. A number of services, including telephone, email and a help center, are also supported
Wix vs WooCommerce — Pricing and Ongoing Commitments: Where Is The Value For Money?
You have a crucial consideration about the amount of money you want to invest in your website and that may vary greatly depending on whether you use Wix or WooCommerce. Wix provides seven heavy-price plans and one free plan.
You could save between 17 and 24 percent annually when you register for an annual plan, depending on what package you select.
Wix vs WooCommerce — Conclusion
As a review of our comparison, here is a brief table with some final suggestions from below:
Ease of Use
Winner: Wix
An easy-to-use website builder drag and drop. You don’t have to learn how to code, as Wix is for non-technical users. Steep learning (not welcoming to beginners). It’s convenient if you know how to code and are technically competent. If you don’t, you could have to recruit someone.
Design and Customization
Winner: WooCommerce
You can use over 500 professional templates, but without redesigning your site you can’t switch templates. Nearly unlimited control of the visual style of your web (if your experience in coding is advanced). Remember that we suggest using the platform built-in WooCommerce themes.
Apps & Plugins
Winner: WooCommerce
Limited customization, but carefully controlled, monitored and tested all features and functionalities to make sure they work appropriately. Pretty customizable, but if your custom software or plugins break down, it can be troublesome.
Sales
Winner: WooCommerce
Integrated sales features in any of their ecommerce plans. Ideal for selling a couple of items. To build an online store you must install a plugin like WooCommerce. Best for pure ecommerce or bulk sales.
Blogging
Winner: WooCommerce
It supports groups, tags, mobile blogs and writers. Supports categories and tagging as well as featured videos, links and private messages.
SEO
It’s a tie
Core SEO features included in the Unlimited Plan or higher via the Site Booster. Basic SEO software like Yoast plugin for a single website providing advanced features for an extra charge of $69.
Ongoing maintenance
Winner: Wix
As the Wix platform is not launched to external developers, it manages everything on the platform — so it handles all your updates and maintenance work for you. Maintenance and regular monitoring are needed, particularly when the framework, subject matter or plugins are modified. You are in charge of running the website.
Help and Support
Winner: Wix
Dedicated team help with tutorials planned. You can also receive assistance through telephone or email. Wide, but not well structured group forum full of discussions. It’s also confusing to get a quick answer.
Pricing and Ongoing Commitments
Winner: Wix
Seven premium plans costing between $13 per month and $49 per month (based on annual plans). You may also openly use Wix, but there are some restrictions. Could be $200–$15,000, regarding different factors (hosting, subjects, plugins, recruitment assistance, etc.). Wix or WooCommerce is a very personal preference–WooCommerce is more robust and powerful, but all of the tutorials and plugins do take time to sort out the right tools. Wix handles its own updates and assistance in the meantime. Although not as robust as WooCommerce, Wix makes it easier and more enjoyable–particularly for non-tech companies, to create a website.
Wanna get a taste of Wix or WooCommerce?
After reading this analysis between these two platforms, probably some of you might be developing some kind of interest in them both. According to our recent data report, our customers have been flocking to 3dCart and we have also received positive feedbacks about their experience with this platform. Most of the migration we have completed so far are: Migration to Wix:
- Migration from Weebly to Wix
- Migration from GoDaddy to Wix
- Migration from Squarespace to Wix
- Migration from Adobe Business Catalyst to Wix
Migration to WooCommerce:
- Migration from Shopify to WooCommerce
- Migration from Magento to WooCommerce
- Migration from Prestashop to WooCommerce
Thank you for keeping up with this article this length. We hope that this Wix vs WooCommerce comparison, in one way or another, has helped you to get to know both platforms and at some point, you could make up your mind about which platform you’ll be settling with in the future. Should you have any concerns, don’t hesitate to leave us a message via live chat on website or an email via contact@litextension.com
