WordPress is the most used website management system in the world. Wix is one of the easy-to-use hosted web builders, which comes with handy tools to launch your website quickly.
The core difference between WordPress and Wix is that WordPress is a self-hosted content management system, which users host on their server, or more often with a hosting company. Whereas Wix is a hosted website builder managed by the WIX development team.
History of SEO problems with WIX
Complaints like “SEO with Wix sucks” or “I can’t get my site to appear on Google because I built it using Wix” were very common among the users of WIX till a few years back. And all these complaints were valid, as it was very difficult to build an SEO-friendly website with WIX web builder due to the unavailability of limited features, or constricted platform.
Common SEO problems faced by Wix users in past
Bad URL structure
Wix web builder used to be very constricted with how the URL of a webpage was created. It’d create a very long URL that contained incomprehensible characters which couldn’t be optimized for SEO. This was rectified by Wix in 2015, which gave users more options to create an SEO-friendly URL for the webpage.
Meta Tags optimization:
It used to be very difficult to optimize the meta tags such as “title tag, and meta description for a blog post. Wix fixed it in 2016, and now it’s possible to create an SEO Friendly Meta title tag and meta description for the webpages built with WIX.
Alt Tags for images:
Alt tag is an important part of SEO since it tells Google about the context of the image being posted on a webpage. In earlier days of WIX, it wasn’t possible to add an ALt-tag for the image. This was also subsequently fixed along with the above changes in its web builder.
Following the complaints by its users, WIX developers made many more changes to its web builder to help website owners make a more SEO-friendly website. As a result in 2018, WIX web builder received a revamp in its design and features, and now it’s a powerful web builder with inbuilt SEO tools and features to build and deploy a website quickly. Considering the current state of WIX, how does it perform against WordPress in terms of SEO?
Let’s Find out…
Current State of SEO with Wix and WordPress
According to this report by Search Engine Journal, 93% of all website visits on the internet comes through a Search engine. It means to improve the visibility of your business online you must create an SEO-friendly website. Let’s find out where to do WordPress and WIX stand in creating an SEO-friendly website.
The important differences between Wix Web builder and WordPress CMS
1) WordPress is a completely free open-source and self-hosted CMS that you can host on any Hosting service provider of your choice. Whereas, WIX is a closed web builder with a subscription-based pricing model. With WIX you’re stuck with their subscription plans, whereas, with WordPress, you can choose a more affordable web hosting company.
2) In Wix website builder, the customization of titles and meta descriptions is native, while in WordPress, you need a plugin to optimize meta tags. Yoast SEO is one of the most popular plugins to create meta tags easily.
3) Redirects (301) can be created using the Wix URL redirect tool. In WordPress, URL redirects are usually handled by a third party, namely the hosting provider.
4) SSL encryption is available to all Wix users. However, as WordPress is self-hosted, generally by hiring a web hosting provider, SSL availability depends on the hosting company (most hosting companies offer free SSL to their customers).
5) WordPress offers more control over certain parameters like website speed as well as advanced options when it comes to indexing and many more. With the availability of hundreds of plugins to customize and optimize the website for SEO, WordPress offers more control over many parameters like website speed, layout, indexing, and scales of the scope of the website.
Apart from the difference in functionality, there are many external differences between the two website development platforms that can affect the SEO performance of your website. For example integration with third-party analytics tools like Google search console, Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics, etc.
SEO Tools available with WIX
WIX website builder is created to be an all-in-one and easy-to-use platform to create a website. Which makes it a great tool for people with very limited technical knowledge to deploy a website.
WIX has its inbuilt SEO platform called Wix SEO wiz. With this tool, you just have to enter the important keywords for which you want to rank your website, and it’ll create an SEO Plan for you.
The SEO plan helps you optimize your website for important keywords
The plan in question includes a checklist of suitable content and locations on a website where these keywords should be placed. For example, placement of keywords in Title, descriptions, content, etc.
Wix SEO Wiz Features:
- Robots.txt editor
- Structured data markup
- Server Side Rendering (SSR)
- URL customization
- Custom meta tags
- Robots meta tags
- Canonical tags
- Social sharing optimization
- SEO Patterns
- XML sitemaps
One of its main benefits is the fact that you can track the results of the SEO strategies, such as Indexed pages, visitor data, and keyword ranking from SEO Wiz Dashboard.
SEO Tools in WordPress
Even though WordPress doesn’t include SEO features in its native flexibility when it comes to on-page SEO. WordPress has, in fact, third-party plugins as well as easy access to the different tags that can be optimized in order to properly reference your website.
Even though WordPress press doesn’t include many SEO tools in the CMS itself, it has a large number of free plugins which better tools and features to improve the SEO of your website. Some of the most popular SEO tools for WordPress are :
- Yoast SEO
- All In One SEO
- Rank Math
- Jetpack by WordPress
- AMP for WP
These powerful tools come with all features you need to optimize your website for the keywords related to the business.
Comparative study of WordPress SEO and Wix SEO
Ahrefs, the SEO Analytics company, did an in-depth comparative study on the performance of the two CMS in terms of SEO. For this study, they analyzed 6.4 million websites, and the performance was measured using a large number of KPIs like Domain Rating, links, traffic, conversions, and many more. These KPIs were then compared to evaluate the SEO performance of WIX and WordPress.
Domain Rating Wix Vs WordPress
This in-depth study by Ahrefs shows that the average Domain rating for WordPress websites is almost three times higher than that of Wix websites. Also, the number of “do-follow” backlinks pointing to WordPress websites is 22 times higher compared to Wix websites.
We can draw a conclusion after these comparisons, that Wix is a good publisher in general for SEO. But, WordPress is even more powerful depending on the plugins you add to it.
Website Traffic from Search engines
A comparison of the average monthly search engine traffic shows that it’s 49% higher for websites built on WordPress CMS. Wix Websites gets monthly SEO traffic of 1.4% whereas WordPress websites received traffic up to 46.1%.
Many other studies carried out in the last few years arrive at the same result: Websites built with WordPress perform much better than Wix websites in terms of SEO.
Result of studies on Wix SEO vs Wordress SEO
Both WordPress and Wix have impressive SEO tools in their arsenal to help you optimize your website for better performance on Search engines. Nevertheless, it’s clear that these two CMS doesn’t cater to the same types of websites.
Indeed, Wix is a very easy-to-use editor and therefore, ideal for people with little knowledge in website creation and management. To that extent, Wix is a great editor for learning, but much less so for performance.
Wix web builder is easy to use, therefore it’s ideal for people who’re just starting out with very little knowledge in website building and management. However, if you’re looking for performance, WordPress is the best choice.
Thus, Wix is a good way to get started in the world of the internet, and WordPress is the blast platform to build your website if you are serious about building a long-term successful online project or business.
Conclusion
WordPress is the clear winner in SEO performance.
However, let’s give credit where it’s due. Wix has come far from being a terrible CSM, to climbing into the top ranks to be among the best website building platforms. However, Wix still struggles in performance in terms of SEO, unlike WordPress which maintains its leading position in SEO performance with a vast array of free and paid themes, plugins, and tools to optimize for SEO.
However, you must remember that whatever CMS or web builder you choose to build your website, it’s very important to implement a good SEO strategy. Which involves robust keyword research, creating quality content, On-page SEO, Technical SEO, Off-page SEO, link building, and many others. A combination of these strategies with a powerful CMS will allow you to have the desired SEO results.
