Every so often someone comes to me wanting a website built with Wix – and I have to say no, because I don’t work with Wix! And I don’t recommend Wix for 90% of the people out there. Here’s why.

First, let me start with who I do recommend Wix for.

Wix will be fine for you if:

• You want a simple website and don’t care about customizing it fully
• Your website is something you refer pre-existing contacts to, but is not a major client generator

Wix is not for you if you if:

You want full creative control over your website.

You might be wondering, “who doesn’t want full creative control over their website?” Honestly, some people are really OK working strictly from templates. But, most people find they develop strong preferences during the design process. And, Wix is clunky. It has some beautiful drag and drop templates, but when it comes time to fully customize them or to alter the basic structure of elements, I’ve found their design tools to be a little stiff.

You do get more creative control in SquareSpace, especially if you work with a designer who has learned all of the tricks to CSS customization and other SquareSpace workarounds.

P.S. I have two SkillShare courses all about SquareSpace customization. If you’re interested in customizing a SS 7.0 course, click here. For 7.1 (newest edition), click here.

You’ll get the greatest ability for aesthetic customization with WordPress, especially if you pick a theme that utilizes a good front-end page builder. This mimics the easy front-end designing experience of Wix and SquareSpace – meaning, you’ll edit the page while you’re looking at it, instead of working with code or placeholders. But, the two that I most often use in WordPress have way more features than either Wix or SquareSpace. 

You can check out the Divi theme, which uses the Divi Builder here. My other recommendation is the Creativo theme, which uses WP Bakery as a front end builder.

You want to rank highly in search engines.

No offense to Wix, but their SEO just can’t hold a candle to WordPress. (Sorry, SquareSpace, but that goes for you too.) SEO, or search engine optimization, is a set of practices that utilizes keywords both in your text, links and in other specialized parts of your website, to help Google and other search engines to “index” your website.

The easier you can make it for Google to figure out what your website and each page is about, the better it will rank you. Google also uses other information such as how often the website is visited or referenced on other sites to provide its ranking.

Wix is simply not set up as cleanly as WordPress for the purposes of SEO. WordPress sites gain more organic traffic and rank higher for keywords. (If you really want to nerd out about this, you can get way more details in this article).

Ease-of-use is super important to you when it comes to ecommerce.

OK. I’ll admit that I haven’t played around a ton with Wix ecommerce, but in my limited experience it’ll give you a headache way faster than WordPress or SquareSpace ecommerce. In fact, for simple ease of use, SquareSpace wins this one.

As opposed to SquareSpace, setting up a Wix store has multiple steps, as you can see here. You get a little bit more latitude with customization when it comes to the look of your store, but you need to create a lot of the components. With SquareSpace, all of the store design is pre-built for you, and you can customize it in the Design tab. SquareSpace 7.1 has a lot more customization options as well.

To learn more about the differences between SS 7.0 and SS 7.1, click here.

SquareSpace also makes it easy to set up shipping zones, or to add custom shipping prices based on weight. It’s all a lot more intuitive of an experience, if you ask me.

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This blog post uses affiliate links. I only recommend products that I have personally used and would share regardless of any kickbacks! Affiliate income makes it possible for me to continue to provide valuable content for free on the blog and YouTube.