When it comes to starting up a website for any purpose, from a personal blog where you’ll be sharing your opinion on current issues to a business website for a major corporation, choosing the platform on which to host your site is going to be one of the most crucial decisions you’ll need to make.
Wix, WordPress (as facilitated by stellar hosts like Bluehost), Weebly and other platforms have various features, and it’s crucial to find the one that’s best for you in particular. If you make the right choice, you’ll have a website that’ll work correctly for your needs and help you achieve your goals. If you choose wrongly, you’ll likely face a lot of difficulty in meeting your online targets.
Assuming you’ve narrowed your choices to Wix vs Bluehost, here’s all the information you need to make a perfect decision.
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WordPress Hosting or Wix Platform
Before proceeding, it’s important to understand how both platforms differ when it comes to their fundamental approaches to getting your website on the internet. Bluehost is a web hosting company that allows you to upload any site regardless of the platform or language you used in building it. If you’re like most people though, you’ll be using WordPress to create and manage your website.
Either way, Bluehost offers one-click installation of leading content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, and others. You can use the various themes, plugins, and tools on the CMS of your choice to fashion your custom site. You’ll be able to use the popular cPanel to handle the technical aspects of the backend.
Wix, on the other hand, is a website service that hosts your website and also gives you a proprietary drag-and-drop website builder with which to design your website. You can choose from more than 500 free templates to build everything from a personal blog to an e-commerce site.
The website builder has a user-friendly interface you can use without having to tamper with any code. On the backend, you can tweak your site using Wix’ s own custom website manager. It has a good feature set, though it’s not quite as comprehensive as Bluehost’s cPanel.
Design Interface and Website Builder Features
The way your website appears and how easy it is to navigate are both crucial factors for your site. When done well, they boost visitor engagement and leaving a good impression of your brand in the minds of visitors. Both Wix and WordPress offer different features to make it possible to build elegant-looking websites.
Your choice will revolve around whether you prefer a more complex but more flexible and customizable approach to one that’s more straightforward but with significantly fewer options.
Many website users rate Wix highly when it comes to simplicity. You can pick a theme, use the drag-and-drop website builder to arrange the graphical elements and get the design you want. The next step would then be to change the placeholder text to your excellent website copy.
The flexibility is fantastic, especially for those with graphical chops. Those who don’t might find themselves bogged down trying to make everything fit, however,
WordPress design is driven mostly by themes created and made available for free or at a cost. They usually come with some elements hardcoded, meaning that you can’t edit them as much as Wix themes without basic coding skills. Because there are tons of them though, you’re sure to find one that fits your needs without much modification.
Plan Features and Technical Details
So what exactly will you be getting on either platform? It’s crucial that while considering Wix vs Bluehost, you take note of the technical details. It’s particularly important if you want to expand of switch things up in the future. With Bluehost’s web hosting, you can set up as many websites as you like even on the lowest plan ($5.95/Month).
Another great thing is that you don’t have to worry about bandwidth, storage space or email storage since they are all unlimited. That comes with the condition of a fair usage policy, but it’s one you’re very unlikely to breach.
On Wix, the cheapest plan costs $4.50 per month and offers 1 gigabyte of bandwidth and 500 megabytes of storage for all your files. If you go for that plan though, you’ll be having Wix ads show up on your website. That’s something that makes it unsuitable for anything you intend for people to take seriously. A more realistic plan to subscribe for would be the ‘Unlimited’ one.
It’s designated on the Wix website as being suitable for entrepreneurs and freelancers and costs about $12.50 per month. It offers unlimited bandwidth alongside 10 gigabytes of storage. It also comes with a free domain, removes the ads and throws in a couple of helpful apps.
Again, the Bluehost plan comes out tops when it comes to value. Apart from the fact that it offers everything unlimited at less than half the price of Wix’s comparable plan, it has a lot of other features such as a free SSL, email accounts, etc. It’s clear that for someone willing to put in a bit of work upfront, Bluehost offers far better value for money.
Website Flexibility
Both Wix and Bluehost try to be flexible, but Bluehost is the clear winner here. Bluehost won’t tie you to any single platform, and there are thousands of plugins you can choose to enhance your experience and give your site new features on any of the platforms you decide to build and host your website with on Bluehost.
There’s a plugin for everything. From growing your email list to selling goods online or enabling customers to reserve tables in your restaurant, you’ll have a wide range of apps choices. Like the themes, some are free while you have to pay for others.
On rare occasions, you might have specific needs for which you cannot find a plugin. You can simply get developers to build a custom plugin that provides a custom solution. On Wix, you have to work with the plugins available on the platform.
Multiple Domains
Over time, you might want to expand your business via a second or third website or to create another blog for another one of your hobbies. You’ll need to register new top-level domain names and redirect them to the new sites. With Bluehost, it’s relatively straightforward.
Get the mid-tier hosting plan which costs just about as much as the cheapest Wix plan, and you can add as many new websites to your account as you want. With Wix, you’ll have to upgrade and pay a separate monthly fee for each site. The good thing is that you’ll get a free domain and a few other freebies in the more expensive plans.
E-commerce Features
If you’re running an e-commerce store on the internet or need to receive payments for any reason, then you should be considering the efficiency of the e-commerce systems in all the platforms before making a choice. With a stellar e-commerce interface and backend system, you’ll be able to receive orders, process payments and organize deliveries. This will be without any hassle on your end.
That would make it easy to build your brand’s reputation and avoid customer problems, particularly if you use an Opencart theme or others which are designed specifically for e-commerce.
With Wix, there’s a proprietary e-commerce platform that allows you to set up a shop and organize your products quickly. It has excellent features such as shipping and tax calculator integrations. Those features make the process of placing an order smoother from a client perspective.
Unfortunately, it is still limited in many other respects including keyword search support, abandoned cart recovery, etc.
On Bluehost however, the only limit to your e-commerce store is your imagination. If you’re building a website from scratch using HTML, CSS and other, you can code your custom solutions. This will be a great fit your specific needs. If you’re using WordPress, you can easily install the WooCommerce plugin (which powers almost a quarter of all e-commerce websites on the internet).
You can also use any other e-commerce solution such as the Opencart store products. You can also get more plugins for any other features that you want to have. There’s likely already a plugin for every function you could think of, and if there isn’t, you can build your own.
Data Security
Regardless of your website’s impressive design and all the great features you’ve built into it, it’ll all be irrelevant if your site gets hacked or infected with malware. Wix has the advantage in this area. This is because all the tools it uses are integrated into the website builder. There’s little or no third-party involvement with the code. It’s generally more secure, based on that isolation.
With WordPress on Bluehost web hosting plans, you get more flexibility and access to plugins. However, more plugins mean that you’ll be more exposed you are if one of them malfunctions or is exploited to harm your website. More than 50% of sites that get hacked are WordPress websites.
While that figure might be alarming though, you should keep in mind that most websites that get compromised are those where the owners don’t take even elementary security precautions. Thankfully, Bluehost has a few features to help with that, including a free SSL certificate, spam protection, and automated backups.
With those features and others that you can get via plugins, you can secure your website sufficiently to minimize the risk of getting hacked.
Digital Marketing Integrations
Regardless of your niche and the purpose for which you set up your website, it’s likely that you want it to attract more people. To achieve that, you’re going to have to implement digital marketing strategies on the website. Those strategies could be in the form of SEO, social media integrations or other ones such as those taught in the popular clickfunnels affiliate bootcamp.
In this area, Bluehost excels far beyond Wix. At the point of registration, you receive $200 marketing credit including an AdWords coupon to promote your website and increase your audience. Beyond that, you can tweak your site to your satisfaction to improve its SEO. You can also add social media integrations, email marketing features, pop-ups and other types of ads conveniently.
If you choose to go with a custom-built website on Bluehost, you can write code to meet your specific needs. You can also use WordPress and work with plugins to achieve the same effects. Ultimately, the Wix Platform is too rigid for the testing, tweaking, and iteration involved in effective digital marketing.
Support and Customer Service
Every webmaster knows that no matter how much effort you put into building a website initially, there are going to be bugs. Problems will inevitably show up down the line, regardless of your hosting provider. Being able to handle them in time and get your website back up and running is crucial. That’s true for all sites but especially if it’s a business site or a blog with a lot of traffic.
On Bluehost, you can reach out to the support team via email, live chat or phone. You’ll usually be able to get in touch with them in little time by using the 24/7 live chat. If you want to address server level issues such as DNS records, or other cPanel issues, the experienced staff will likely quickly find a solution.
The problems usually arise when the fault with your website is as a result of a buggy plugin. In that case, it might be difficult to isolate the specific plugin. When you do that even, you might still have to contact the plugin developers for support. That often comes slowly, especially with free plugins.
Wix, in contrast, has a team to help you with any problem you could face on the platform. They can do that because they have full control over the platform and its features. The platform is designed so there’s not much you can tamper with to cause a problem in the first place.
Conclusion
Ultimately, choosing between Bluehost and Wix will boil down to personal preference and the specific needs of your business. Generally speaking though, Bluehost WordPress hosting offers a better value proposition.
You’ll have much more flexibility regarding the features you can incorporate into your website. If you want a fully managed system, you can go for Wix. You won’t have to be concerned with security or tinkering with a control panel to your software up-to-date. The critical thing is to thoroughly evaluate what you need currently and what you’re likely to need in the future. This may change as your business or project grows.