Wix vs Weebly vs WordPress: Web War 3

Wix is the best overall website builder out there. Why? Because it allows anyone to become a web designer. It loses points, though, based on the fact you can’t change themes after publishing.

Weebly is another builder that keeps things simple, using drag-and-drop like its rival Wix. It’s more complicated to find your way around, though, and you’ll need to contact Weebly’s support team if you want to restore an old website.

WordPress is a tech pro’s dream, and can be an exciting challenge for beginner’s if they have the time to invest in setting up their site. Coding and web hosting knowledge is a must, but if you have the skill, you’ll be rewarded with total creative control.

If you’re not sure what the difference is, you’ll need to know in order to make an informed decision. It’s like ordering food in a different language – why take the risk and pick the wrong thing?

Wix and Weebly are known as drag-and-drop website builders. This means you can select and move text, images, videos – the whole lot – with just a few clicks.

In short, anyone from tech beginners to keyboard kings and queens can use builders like these to create a website, without having to touch any code. Just think of drag-and-drop builders as your foreign language phrasebook when ordering food abroad.

That being said, Wix is the best all-around website builder. Weebly has sadly taken a dip in our research rankings, including a 36% fall in design! Why’s this happened? Well, since Weebly got acquired by Square Online, it has kind of just been left on the backburner, receiving very few updates since being bought. As such, Weebly feels very outdated compared to other builders. But it’s still affordable and offers great value which is why it’s still a favorite for new web builders and small businesses on a tight budget

WordPress, meanwhile, is a different beast entirely.

WordPress is an open-source – or self-hosted – CMS (Content Management System). This is different from a website builder because it means you have full responsibility for coding, and for sourcing a host for your website. A host is what holds your website on the internet, like a rental space. We recommend using Bluehost – it’s our top-rated WordPress host, and it’s been recommended by WordPress itself.

Although coding knowledge is useful for WordPress, it’s not essential thanks to pre-built themes and optional drag-and-drop editors. That said, you’re still signing up for a much bigger time investment than Wix or Weebly, because WordPress requires much more customization and technical upkeep, so be ready for a learning curve!

Which Is More Beginner Friendly?

The Winner

Wix is the easiest platform to use

Wix is easier than Weebly because it has a more intuitive interface and drag-and-drop feature, so you know exactly where and when to click. In contrast, WordPress is very hard to grasp for users without coding knowledge.

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Building a website should be easy. This way, anyone can build a website and have something to be proud of online. So let’s take a look at the learning curve for each platform.

It’s easy to love Wix because, well, it just makes everything so easy. With Wix, you can build a professional-looking website in just few hours. It’s like a high-tech sat nav – you won’t ever get lost.

Weebly has fallen behind in recent years. While other builders have improved and innovated to make the building easier than ever, Weebly has stood still, leading to a builder that feels outdated and hard to use compared to its contemporaries.

Using a drag-and-drop model similar to Wix, our testers found Weebly’s blocks to be far too sticky and awkward to move around, making any customization a challenge. You’ll want to give up before you even begin.

As one of our testers commented:

It just didn’t feel intuitive or pleasant to work with and I got really frustrated with it. It was not an enjoyable experience.

WordPress is more difficult to use than Wix and Weebly. If you’re like most people who haven’t touched code before, you may find creating your dream website much more time-consuming. If you don’t have coding skills, WordPress can be tricky to use.

You can create a WordPress site without coding, but you need to install a drag-and-drop page builder plugin first.

You will also need to source web hosting, and organize SSL certificates (website security) yourself. So, it’s worth weighing up your options if you have a busy working schedule.

Is Ease of Use a Top Priority?

Wix is a super beginner-friendly platform that will help you get online without headaches.

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Who Looks The Best?

The Winner

Wix has the best design of the bunch!

It’s how flexible and easy Wix makes designing websites that earn it our top spot. They look great too; nearly 1,000 professionally-designed templates that you can choose from and then edit to your heart’s content. Weebly’s themes can’t hold a candle to Wix’s variety, and while WordPress’s freedom is tantalizing since you could theoretically make anything you want, the time and effort needed lost points for our testers.

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You now know how easy it is to use each platform, but how flexible are they in design? In artistic terms, how many paints, brushes, and props do they let you get creative with?

Wix has 800 templates across 16 categories, which you can easily search for. What’s more, all of them are mobile responsive, meaning your website looks the part on screens of any size.

With Wix, you won’t struggle to find the perfect theme for your online dreams. In fact, you don’t even need to find it at all! Wix offers an ADI feature, building the site for you. Just fill in a few questions about what type of website you like, and Wix does all the work for you!

We’d like to see an improvement in Wix’s flexibility, though. You cannot switch themes after publishing your website, so you’re stuck with your choice. Of course, it’s easy to completely redesign any theme with Wix, so you shouldn’t worry too much.

Weebly provides fewer themes in comparison – there are only around 50 to choose from – but they still cover all the industries you’d need for any standard website. However, the formatting on mobile is poor, which is a major issue in this day and age, where almost 50% of all internet traffic is now from mobile devices.

When it comes to designing with WordPress, the CMS world is your oyster – provided you know how to code. The scope for customization is endless; you can code what you like, and have access to 54,000 plugins to personalize your website even more.

Looking for a Flexible Platform?

WordPress is advanced, but it offers the most design freedom of these three platforms.

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Who Offers The Most?

The Winner

Wix has better built-in features than Weebly and WordPress

Wix has the best features of any builder we’ve ever tested! There’s no other builder which has the sheer variety of features available in the editor. While it can feel a bit cluttered, it’s better to have too much than too little, which is Weebly’s issue. Through plugins, WordPress has even more features than Wix, but many are locked behind a paywall and it can be a hassle to constantly have to source features for your site.

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A CMS or website builder’s range of tools are the very formula you need for creating, growing, and managing your site. The fewer features you have, the less your website can do.

Ecommerce

Retail ecommerce sales in the US reached more than $768 billion in 2022, and will only get bigger. So if you’re thinking about building an ecommerce store, now’s the time. Let’s see which platform gives you the best tools to sell with.

Our research found Wix was the best “generic’” website builder with ecommerce functionality. It has three ecommerce specific price plans, which come with zero transaction fees, the ability to sell digital and physical products, and support for 15+ different payment providers.

Weebly’s ecommerce options come included in all its plans, even the free plan!. It lets you sell digital, physical, and service products, and gives you the ability to create coupons and send abandoned cart recovery emails.

However, Weebly is a website builder first and foremost. Square Online was designed as the ecommerce side of Weebly and provides a more well-rounded ecommerce offering for Weebly users, meaning ecommerce is no longer Weebly’s strongest asset.

Wix, on the other hand, has really improved its ecommerce in recent years, adding great features such as abandoned cart recovery and unlimited products. It’s improved so much in our research that it actually eclipsed the ecommerce powerhouse Shopify as our number one recommended choice, with a score of 4.7 out of 5!

WordPress isn’t built for ecommerce, but you can integrate its ecommerce specific plugin, WooCommerce, which gives you one-click refunds and plenty of other features.

Blogging

To blog or not to blog, that is the question. Of course, the answer is yes – blogging keeps your audience up to date with your latest offerings. It’s also great for SEO (search engine optimization), which we’ll get into later.

Wix is an all-around solid blogger. You can add comments, build in an RSS feed, and analyze your blog’s performance. On the downside, there is no archive function. This means visitors won’t be able to find your old posts – just think of the precious content they’d miss out on!

Weebly provides all the core blogging features you’d need. Unlike Wix, though, you can archive your blog posts. By the same token, Weebly has no built-in analytics feature, although you can add a third party app like Google Analytics if you’d like.

WordPress began as a pure blogging platform, which makes it something of a pro. Remember, it’s a Content Management System, so its main purpose is to help you –  well – manage content. What’s more, as an open-source platform, your WordPress blog can be coded to look or feel however you like.

Want Great Blogging Tools?

WordPress has got you covered in this area, with plenty of tools to engage readers and analyze performance.

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Marketing

A good range of marketing features will provide the water and sunlight necessary for your website to blossom. They’ll bring more clicks, and more eyes to your site, as well as more dollars (if you’re running an ecommerce store).

Wix understands the power of marketing. It comes with a dedicated dashboard where you can run email campaigns, customize newsletters, and design beautiful social media posts.

Wix has also introduced an all-in-one marketing solution called Wix Ascend. It covers 20 product areas including email marketing and social media, starting from just $10 per month.

You can even integrate a live feed from your Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. There are plenty of apps you can use, too, but we’ll get into that in the next section.

Weebly also has a marketing dashboard, where you can personalize email pop-ups, and a dedicated email template section, which lets you pick the perfect newsletter design for your website.

WordPress doesn’t provide much built-in, so you’ll need to browse the plugin market for your marketing needs. Some of the most popular choices include Monster Insights (for analytics), Yoast SEO (to help your site rank higher on Google), and MailChimp (for emails).

Are Features Your Top Priority?

If so, look no further than Wix’s website tools to get you started.

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What Are The Extras?

The Winner

Wix has the best app market

Wix’s app market combines an easy-to-use search with the best third-party apps out there to create an unbeatable standard in this category. Weebly may offer more volume, but it’s harder to find what you are looking for. Due to its nature as a CMS, WordPress would be nothing without its robust plugin market giving it the features it needs to compete with builders. As such, it offers 54,000 plugins, but with more choice comes more time spent combing through finding the best. Sometimes, less is more.

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Integrating apps can give your website the extra boost it needs to reach the next level. Most website builders come with awesome built-in features, but a helping hand never hurt anyone, right?

The Wix App Market has over 300 options to help bolster and streamline your website. It’s relatively small compared to Weebly and WordPress, but it couldn’t be easier to search for an app, then integrate it – it takes just a couple of clicks!

Weebly’s App Center is bigger, featuring over 400 apps, but it doesn’t possess the simple browsing tools that Wix does. This makes it harder to actually find and install the right app.

WordPress is more of an outsourcer than Wix or Weebly, relying entirely on third party apps for improving your site’s performance. There are more than 54,000 plugins to choose from, but with such a wide choice, you’re more likely to spend time sifting through sub-par plugins. It’s also far more difficult to actually install them.

So, ultimately, with Wix and Weebly, less is more.

Want to Browse a Great App Market?

It’s a case of quality over quantity here, and Wix is the winner, with simple integration to boot.

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How Can You Grow?

The Winner

A tie between Wix and WordPress!

Wix has an impressive range of SEO features that make improving your website’s ranking a piece of cake. Wix has an impressive range of SEO features that make improving your website’s ranking a piece of cake. WordPress is another SEO powerhouse – like Wix, the only thing it doesn’t offer is keyword support. Weebly comes in last for SEO out of the three – it also lacks keyword support, but the real thing that lets it down is its poor mobile experience.

There are a number of processes which can improve your site’s ranking on search engines like Google. This overall process is known as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and is important because it gets your website found more easily.

As always, Wix makes tricky subjects trouble-free. Thanks to a helpful ‘SEO Wiz’, you’re never left feeling lost while improving your SEO. You can select a few keywords (popular words or phrases people are searching for) about your website, and the Wiz cooks up a personalized strategy.

Weebly also makes the topic of SEO more manageable, offering an Ultimate Guide that lets you track your website’s performance. Like Wix, you can integrate the Google Analytics app to generate even more detailed information.

Both platforms have an SEO-specific app, too, so you know exactly where to go for all your search engine needs.

Sadly though, Weebly does not seem optimized for mobile-friendly SEO. Mobile commerce now accounts for 72% of all ecommerce, and being a success online requires as many eyes on you as possible. Mobile SEO is different from normal SEO in many ways, such as mobile searches being more likely to promote local businesses. If you want to grow your site, catering to mobile SEO is a must!

Again, WordPress is ready to go for SEO in terms of design, being very well suited for it in fact. It just needs to be downloaded through the plugin directory. You will need to source one yourself, as well as integrate it, which takes more time than with Wix or Weebly. To save you time, we recommend the most popular SEO plugin, Yoast, which has over 5 million installations.

What To Do When You Don't Know

The Winner

Wix is the most supportive platform

Wix has a better knowledge forum than Weebly but most importantly, Wix comes with onsite editor help, which means help is never too far away. WordPress, meanwhile, doesn’t have its own customer support team.

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Just like building a barbecue in the summer, you’re bound to need a helping hand at some point when making a website. What’s more, the quicker you fix your issues, the sooner you can get back to growing your wonderful webpage.

Wix has the most comprehensive customer support. As well as a huge, insightful knowledge center with tutorial videos, it provides support via phone (Mon – Thurs, 5am- 5pm PST), email, onsite editor help, and social media. It has nearly all the areas covered, but doesn’t currently support live chat help.

Wix is more inclusive than Weebly, which only provides phone help on its higher price plans. However, you can receive live chat and email on all Weebly price plans. Weebly also has a really useful help center, where your Weebly woes will wash away.

Help and support are where WordPress really falls behind. It’s an open-source platform, so it doesn’t have a dedicated support team. This is one reason why it’s so important to choose a good-quality WordPress hosting provider, which gives you hands-on WordPress support. For example, Bluehost provides 24/7 WordPress support.

If you’re using WordPress, your computing experience is probably enough to see you through without too much trouble. If you do have any questions, WordPress does have a knowledge forum like Wix and Weebly.

The Wix Editor is built to guide you as you go. Plus, if you want some deeper explanations, the knowledge forum is always at your fingertips.

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Which Has The Best Value For Money?

The Winner

Weebly is the best value for money platform

Weebly offers great value for money, having the lowest starting plan of the three. Its free plan makes it obviously cheaper than WordPress, which while being free, to begin with, requires you to buy web hosting, SSL, and plugins separately.

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Leaving the boring (but important) stuff ‘till last, it’s time to talk money. Which platform leaves more pennies in your pocket? Let’s find out…

Wix has four price plans, starting from $16 per month. To get ecommerce functionality, you’ll need to be on Core or higher. All plans focus on giving you the tools to build a website, like more storage and higher bandwidth.

It does have a free plan, but with it comes the subdomain ‘.wix.com’ on the end of your URL, and Wix ads all over your website.

This doesn’t look very professional, so it’s definitely worth upgrading your plan for a few dollars per week. See the image below for more information on Wix’s plans. Wix gives you plenty of choices when it comes to pricing.

Weebly lets you build for free and provides a 30-day money-back guarantee on every other price plan, giving you peace of mind. The four Weebly price plans are as follows:

• Personal ($6 per month)
• Professional ($12 per month)
• Performance ($26 per month)

The Personal plan is pretty similar to the free plan, but it does let you connect a custom domain. The Professional plan removes ads from your site and comes with unlimited storage, while the Performance plan gives you more advanced ecommerce tools. As you can see, Weebly is one of the best value platforms around with a 5 out of 5 in value for money in our research. Not an easy feat to achieve.

Like Weebly's Value for Money?

We recommend either the Professional or Performance plan if you want the most bang for your buck.

Pick a Weebly Plan

WordPress.org is a different story. As an open-source platform, your website is what you make it, and there are no price plans. However, the costs rack up as you purchase web hosting, SSL certificates, themes, and plugins.

This makes it to hard to judge how much WordPress costs to run, because it’s different for everyone!

Wix has come out on top, winning 5/7 rounds! After such a dominant performance, you can see why it’s the best overall website builder on the market today.

Weebly is best for value for money. If you are starting out and need a builder on a budget that just covers the basics, Weebly is our choice for you. It offers exactly what is necessary for a very good price. It won’t be able to reach the heights of the features Wix offers, but its decent SEO options and blogging capabilities will carry you further than you might expect.

WordPress is best for tech-savvy users who love total customization control. It’s a self-hosted platform, so you can do almost anything with your website – as long as you have the computing prowess.

Wix is the overall winner because it keeps things simple. Even though you’re building a powerful website, nothing ever feels complicated. By winning most of the battles, it won the war

Wix Is the Winner!

This builder comes out on top, winning the most categories of all three platforms.

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