WordPress vs Wix — honest 2026 verdict.

Wix's adverts make it look like the obvious choice. WordPress's market share (43% of the internet) suggests otherwise. Both are real options for UK small businesses in 2026 — but they suit very different stages of business, very different ambitions, and very different relationships with your website. Here's the comparison the Wix ad won't show you.

The 30-second verdict

Pick Wix if: you're launching a side project, you'll never grow past 10 pages, you don't want to think about hosting or updates, and "good enough" SEO is good enough. Pick WordPress if: your website is a serious business asset, you care about SEO, you want ownership, you'll add features over time, or you might one day hire a developer. The vast majority of UK SMBs are better served by WordPress.

Cost compared properly

Wix subscriptions: Light £8/month, Core £14/month, Business £22/month, Business Elite £37/month — billed annually, locked into Wix forever. Over 5 years on the Business plan that's £1,320. WordPress: one-off build (£0 DIY, £1,500+ pro) plus £100–£500/year hosting and £200/year in plugin licences. Year one looks similar, year five looks very different.

SEO reality check

Wix's SEO has genuinely improved — clean URLs, automatic sitemaps, structured data support, decent Core Web Vitals. But the ceiling is lower. There's no Rank Math or Yoast equivalent. Schema customisation is limited. Page speed plateaus because you're sharing Wix's infrastructure. Content type flexibility (custom post types, taxonomies, ACF) doesn't exist. For SEO-led businesses, WordPress wins comfortably — for "have a website that ranks for my brand name" use cases, both work.

Design and customisation

Wix's drag-and-drop editor is the easiest in the industry. You can produce something that looks polished in a weekend. Customisation runs out when you want something genuinely bespoke — unusual animations, custom interactions, complex layouts that aren't already in a Wix template. WordPress with Elementor, Bricks or Gutenberg matches Wix on ease and beats it on flexibility — but the learning curve is steeper.

Ownership and lock-in

This is the underrated factor. A Wix site cannot be moved off Wix in any meaningful sense. You can export your content, but the design, layout, apps and structure are all Wix-proprietary. WordPress sites are portable — pack up the database and files, move to any host, change anything. You own the asset. If Wix raises prices, kills a feature, or you simply outgrow it, you migrate. Migrating off Wix typically costs £1,500–£4,500 in design recreation alone.

Ecommerce

Wix Stores is fine for under-100-product catalogues with simple shipping. It struggles with multi-currency, advanced variations, B2B, subscriptions and serious volume. WooCommerce and Shopify both go further. If ecommerce is core to your business, neither WordPress (with WooCommerce) nor Shopify will hold you back — Wix eventually will.

Maintenance and security

Wix handles everything — hosting, updates, security patches, backups. WordPress puts that work on you or your maintenance provider (£30–£150/month for a small business care plan). For non-technical solo founders this is Wix's biggest genuine advantage. For anyone with a developer or willing to pay £50/month for managed care, it's a non-issue.

My honest recommendation

If you're reading this article, you probably want WordPress. Wix users don't usually research platform comparisons — they pick Wix because it advertised at them and got them live. The fact that you're weighing it up means you care about the longer-term answer, and the longer-term answer is almost always WordPress.