A WordPress Alternative – Wix Studio

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WordPress Alternative Wix Studio - Juan Rojo Design Toronto

A WordPress alternative might be better for you if you are a small business wanting to spend the least amount of time maintaining your website.

Don’t get me wrong, I love working with WordPress! It’s a very flexible and scalable CMS and that’s why it powers nearly 43% of all websites out there on the web. However, it hasn’t always been the best experience for the end user.

Most Common Complaints From End Users

The most common complaint from end users about WordPress is the UI found in the dashboard. It hasn’t changed much in the past 10 years.

WordPress Alternative | WordPress Dashboard - Juan Rojo Design Toronto

All the items displayed on the sidebar can be extremely overwhelming, especially if you are trying do do it all by yourself. In other words, the learning curve can be steep, depending on how tech savvy you are.

The second most common complaint is the constant maintenance. For instance, there are plugins that need weekly updates and sometimes those updates create issues on your website, which then need to be fixed by yet another plugin update.

The third complaint is security. Being the most popular tool for powering websites has its downside, and that is the fact that bad actors are always trying to exploit its vulnerabilities. In order to make your website perform as best as possible, in a secure environment, you need to get a higher tier hosting company (managed WordPress hosting plan) and most likely add a service like CloudFlare to provide an extra layer of security.

Is Wix Studio a WordPress Alternative?

Yes, Wix Studio is a design-driven platform, which can be used in multiple ways. For instance, if you are a designer familiar with Figma, Wix Studio’s designer interface might look familiar.

If you are a business planning to sell online, you can easily add an eCommerce module. In other words, the platform can be expanded based on your needs.

Wix Studio main dashboard - Juan Rojo Design Toronto

Pros of Using Wix Studio vs WordPress

The main difference between Wix Studio and WordPress is that the former is a closed platform. As a closed platform, the company behind the infrastructure is responsible for things like:

  • Hosting
  • Security
  • Performance
  • Maintenance

In WordPress, you need to look after all those elements. In other words, the argument that WordPress is open source and therefore very inexpensive, kind of falls flat when you have to pay for things already included in the closed platform.

Cons of Using Wix Studio vs WordPress

A closed platform is a proprietary system. In other words, if you want to migrate your site, it better be to another Wix Studio instance. Those two platforms operate in completely different ways, so migrating all the content from one to the other is no easy task. In some cases, it might need to be done manually.

Conclusion

Is content migration a legitimate concern for you? It might be if you are at the enterprise level. However, at that level, you probably have your own web development team using custom-built solutions.

There are plenty of small businesses using closed platforms like Squarespace and Wix. Having said that, Wix Studio is superior to those offerings, as you can extend its capabilities via code. Its built-in SEO features are on par to what some of the dedicated SEO WordPress plugins offer. In fact, a recent client using the platform achieved a 1st page ranking within the first few months (shown below):

First page of Google using Wix Studio - Juan Rojo Design Toronto

If you want to spend as little as possible maintaining your website, you might want to go the proprietary platform route. However, make sure that is a robust and mature platform. Wix has been around for 18 years and all the improvements and developments achieved during that time have been distilled into Wix Studio. Let’s talk if you want to get your website on Wix Studio.