I am going to tell you something a web design studio probably should not say: Wix is fine for some businesses.
There. Said it.
We build on WordPress. We have built on WordPress for twenty years. We think it is the better choice in most commercial situations, and this article will explain why. But the “in most” part matters. Some clients come to us, and the right answer is to tell them to use Wix and spend £15 per month. That conversation has happened, and it will happen again.
What follows is the honest comparison. Not a hit piece on Wix, not a WordPress sales letter. The actual factors that determine which one makes sense for your situation.
The 30-second answer
Use Wix if: you are building a basic online presence, you want to manage it yourself without technical knowledge, the site is primarily informational rather than lead-generating, and you are not competing for national search terms.
Use WordPress if: you need serious SEO, you want to own the site outright, you plan to grow functionality over time, you are investing in a professional build, or you are in a competitive market where site performance matters.
If you are buying a professional build rather than doing it yourself, the question becomes largely irrelevant because you are not the one maintaining the platform. The decision then rests on SEO capability, ownership, and long-term flexibility.
Cost compared
Wix charges a monthly subscription. At the Business tier (the minimum for removing Wix branding and using a custom domain), that is currently £17-25 per month in the UK. Over three years, that is £612-£900, with nothing to show for it at the end except a continued right to use the platform.
WordPress itself is free software. Hosting a WordPress site costs £10-20 per month for a competent shared host. Over three years, that is £360-£720.
The upfront difference is the build cost. A Wix site you build yourself costs nothing. A WordPress site built by a professional costs £800-£3,000 depending on who builds it. That is the comparison: no upfront cost plus higher monthly fees versus upfront investment plus lower monthly fees.
Here is the three-year total for the most common scenarios:
| Option | Build cost | 3-year running | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wix (DIY) | £0 | £612-£900 | £612-£900 |
| Wix (agency build) | £500-£2,000 | £612-£900 | £1,112-£2,900 |
| WordPress (DIY) | £0 | £360-£720 | £360-£720 |
| WordPress (Lucent Get Found) | £1,497 | £360-£720 | £1,857-£2,217 |
| WordPress (Lucent Get Ahead) | £2,997 | £360-£720 | £3,357-£3,717 |
The WordPress/Lucent option is more expensive in the first 18 months. By month 36, the gap has narrowed significantly, and the WordPress site is owned outright and can be transferred, sold, or modified without platform dependency.
Who should pick Wix
Wix makes sense when some or all of these are true.
You are managing it yourself. Wix’s editing interface is genuinely good. A non-technical person can update content, add a page, or change an image without touching code. If you want to be self-sufficient with no IT involvement, Wix delivers on that promise. WordPress with Bricks or Elementor can also do this, but the learning curve is steeper.
The site is mostly informational. A site that exists to confirm your business is real, give your opening hours, and show your address does not need the conversion architecture of a lead-generation build. A Wix template handles this fine.
You are not competing for search traffic. If your business runs on referrals, word of mouth, and existing relationships, organic search is not your primary channel. The SEO limitations of Wix are irrelevant if you are not relying on search.
You have a very limited budget and short timeline. If you need something live in 48 hours and have £50, Wix is the answer. There is no shame in that. Shipping something is better than shipping nothing.
Who should pick WordPress
WordPress is the right choice in most growth-oriented situations.
You want serious SEO. WordPress, built correctly, gives you full control over every technical SEO signal. Site speed, schema markup, internal linking architecture, crawl efficiency, Core Web Vitals. These matter more on competitive search terms, but they compound over time even on local terms. A well-built WordPress site has a structural advantage over a Wix site for organic search, and that advantage grows as the site ages.
You want to own the site. On Wix, you rent access to your site. If you stop paying, the site goes. If Wix changes its pricing, you have no alternative. Your content is portable but your design and functionality are not. WordPress is open-source software that runs on any host. The files are yours. You can move them. You can sell them with the business.
You plan to grow. Wix’s functionality beyond its built-in tools requires third-party app integrations, many of which add more monthly fees. Custom integrations are limited or impossible. WordPress has a plugin ecosystem of 60,000+ options, and a developer can build virtually anything on top of it. If you think your site might need a booking system, a client portal, custom search, or integration with your CRM in three years, plan for that capability now.
You are hiring someone to build it. If you are paying for a professional build, the difference in technical quality between a Wix build and a WordPress build is significant. Wix constrains what a developer can do. WordPress, built with the right tool stack, produces a faster, more conversion-optimised, more technically rigorous site. The extra capability is what you are paying for.
The hidden costs nobody mentions
Both platforms have costs that do not appear in the headline price.
Wix hidden costs. The base plan does not allow custom domains. The next tier does, but Wix branding remains. The business plan removes Wix branding and enables e-commerce. If you need a booking system, that is an additional Wix app. If you need email marketing, that is another. Wix’s pricing is designed to start low and grow with feature additions. Many small business owners find their Wix bill significantly higher than their starting plan after 12 months.
WordPress hidden costs. WordPress requires a host. Good WordPress hosting that handles security, backups, and performance costs more than the cheapest shared host. Premium themes and plugins can add £50-200 per year. Security plugins, backup services, and performance optimisation tools exist in both free and paid tiers. A professionally managed WordPress site with proper infrastructure costs £20-40 per month to host, not £10.
Neither platform is as cheap as its headline number suggests. The honest comparison is managed WordPress hosting plus a quality build versus Wix Business tier, and on that comparison the costs over three years are closer than they first appear.
SEO and ownership: where the real difference lives
SEO is where the gap between the platforms is most commercially meaningful.
Wix has closed the gap significantly in the last three years. Custom URLs, meta tags, sitemaps, 301 redirects, and basic schema markup are now all achievable. For local search, a well-set-up Wix site can rank adequately.
The remaining structural disadvantages are three:
Performance. Wix sites run on Wix’s servers, with Wix’s code. You cannot self-host a Wix site on infrastructure optimised for your traffic patterns. Core Web Vitals (the Google page-experience signals that feed ranking algorithms) are harder to optimise on Wix than on a WordPress site built with performance as a first principle. A Lucent WordPress build targets Lighthouse 90+ scores. The equivalent Wix site often scores 60-75.
Schema markup. Structured data tells search engines what your content means, not just what it says. Service schema, FAQ schema, LocalBusiness schema, Review schema. This is why we spend time on it. Wix supports basic schema through integrations, but the control is limited. On WordPress we generate it programmatically for every page type.
Ownership. This is not an SEO factor directly, but it becomes one. If you build two years of organic authority on a Wix site and then migrate to WordPress, you will lose some of that authority in the transition. Internal link structures change. URLs may change. The site’s crawl history is reset. Building on WordPress now is cheaper than migrating later.
The third option: done for you
The comparison above assumes you are choosing the platform. There is a third option, which is to hire someone who makes that choice for you and owns the outcome.
At Lucent, we build on WordPress with Bricks Builder. We choose this stack because it produces the fastest, most conversion-optimised, most SEO-capable result for a service business. The client does not need to know what the stack is. They need to know what it produces.
If you come to us needing a basic online presence and a £15 platform fee is genuinely the right call for your stage and budget, we will tell you that. It has happened. But for a service business with growth ambitions and a revenue target for the site, the professional WordPress build produces a different order of outcome.
The audit call is 30 minutes. We look at your current situation, tell you what is costing you leads, and tell you whether our three packages fit or whether a different route makes more sense. No pitch. No proposal. The worst outcome is you leave with a clearer picture of your options.
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