Wix versus WordPress

AKA Barbie versus Oppenheimer

Backstory

Once we settled into our new place and got back to city living, I missed the clickety clack of my keyboard and the managed madness of too many screens, windows and tabs. So, I started helping friends out with their business sites. The first ones I did were on Wix. Wix is one of the more popular amongst a number of new-ish platforms to build and host websites. They have fun names like Weebly, Square, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Duda, Shopify … WordPress is the boss of this space at least in terms of number of websites. WordPress has been around long before this new gen and has undergone a number of enhancements to make it more appealing to a small business that doesn’t have the time or budget for a design and dev team to build and maintain their site. Recently I’ve been working on a site redesign in WordPress.

Prologue

For those with better things to do than follow pop culture and watch the internets, some context. Barbie and Oppenheimer were released in US theaters on the same day - July 21st, 2023. Both were marketed as summer blockbusters and the return of moviegoing post-pandemic. This worked btw, with AMC reporting profits yesterday for the first time post pandemic, shaking its meme stock past. The internet pronounced the simultaneous release a thing and big media jumped on board launching quite the hype cycle including a ton of memes and stories playing off the differences between the two movies. I’ve been wanting to write about how much WordPress pissed me off (at first) and I really liked Barbie (foreshadowing … I really like Wix) so this became my frame for the showdown between the two.

Barbie

Wix is Barbie. Wirepine.com is hosted on Wix as well as most of the sites I work on. Wix is quite wonderful with a simple and sparkly layout and oodles of beautiful themes/elements/branding that make me quite happy and for the most part work really nicely drag-n-drop style on a page. Sure sometimes you can't get exactly what you're after but usually the results are quite satisfying for a bit of effort and minimal hair pulling.  I watched a 30 min video when I first started - which really stretched my attention span btw which is possibly problematic? - but regardless I dove in from there and started moving stuff to and fro with gusto once I figured out change management is super easy including rolling back to prior versions and cranking out test sites.  We're talking hours, not days to get productive on Wix for basic sites.

Monday I switched wirepine.com over from the coming soon site to one I had parked on a staging site with GoDaddy.  The GoDaddy one never really looked the way I wanted but I was able to get it all spiffy in less than a day on Wix. GoDaddy is really a domain registrar first and foremost and I found their design tools and templates too simple for all but the most basic sites. I like GoDaddy for domain management (and their O365 integration) and it's easy peasy lemon squeezy to connect a domain hosted on GoDaddy to a site on Wix.

Oppenheimer

Wordpress is Oppenheimer. Wordpress usage is bonkers. Even if you don't believe all the stats you see - it's 20X more popular than Wix and they claim 43% (!) of all sites on the internet are powered by WordPress. Even though most of this is the opensource wordpress.org versus the hosting platform wordpress.com which is more equivalent to Wix - that's just nuts. Part of this also is that WordPress has been around forever in internet time - 20 years driving the initial wave of blogging - versus Wix which is about half that.

I've been working on rebuilding and rebranding a dated site on WordPress on and off for a couple of weeks now.  Such a different learning curve; Wordpress is a beast. Watching a few videos and diving in didn't work out so well. Finally I just started building a bunch of test sites to play around and by the 3rd one I had the hang of it but man there were some hair pulling moments. Like many older systems that have been updated in fits and starts Wordpress is layered with considerable complexity that even their seemingly unlimited cute how-to videos can’t hide. It’s for sure got more range and control than Wix and is also a true developer platform. While you can't beat their breadth of integrations including a command line interface for modular design, it is a deep and nuanced platform that requires both skills and hair pulling.

So I proclaim both Wix and WordPress great. If you’re looking for a place to build and host your site they both deserve a look; make a choice based on your goals and your audience.

Epilogue

Saw Barbie last week - loved it. I haven't seen Oppenheimer yet and tbh I'm not sure how my bladder is going to handle a 3 hour movie but I’m going for the full screen experience and the popcorn. Gotta be at least as rewarding as mastering WordPress. With wirepine.com launched this week, the world does forever change and also if you haven’t seen La La Land (which above is based on) - it’s the best, go watch it now!