In today’s live stream, we explored the pros and cons of using Wix and WordPress for building websites. We also touched on the growing impact of AI in web development and shared some personal insights and experiences.
Want to learn more? Check out Reina’s quote about WordPress and Weebly/Wix on CNN.com
Some notes on Wix VS WordPress
- Wix:
- Easy to set up with a monthly subscription.
- Ideal for quick, all-in-one solutions.
- Limited in customization and future scalability.
- Prone to high costs as features are added.
- Difficult to control SEO effectively.
- Proprietary platform, making it hard to migrate.
- WordPress:
- Open-source and highly customizable.
- Better for long-term scalability and future-proofing.
- Offers extensive SEO tools and control.
- Flexible with hosting and can be more cost-effective.
- Allows for better design customization without compromising mobile responsiveness.
While Wix offers a quick and easy setup, WordPress provides greater flexibility, control, and potential for long-term growth. We encourage businesses to consider their future needs and choose a platform that aligns with their goals.
If you have any questions or need help transitioning from Wix to WordPress, feel free to reach out to us. Don’t forget to like, subscribe, and share our content for more insights and discussions!
Also, check out our live stream about the cons of “domain included” packages!
Video Transcript:
What’s up, everybody? Morning. Morning. It’s latte hour. It’s tea hour. Cheers. We got garden mint and oregano. I don’t know if that’s healthy. I don’t know if you’re supposed to dry it out first or whatever, but it is really good. It’s really strong. I have a cup that says I love my cat because.. we love our cat.
So I’m drinking an almond milk latte. Okay. So just started roasting our own beans. So it’s really super fresh. And I do my little latte art. So it’s extra special today for our Wednesday. It’s actually National Ketchup Day and National Starting Over Day. So let’s start this whole broadcast tomorrow. All right. Take two. No. Yeah, this tea is good. We should do this more often.
In case you’re wondering, Reina is over there at the desk. That’s why she probably looks over here. So we’re in the same room. We’re trying to figure out the Wi-Fi conundrum. Yeah, this is our home office, and we usually will swap out sometimes. Sometimes I’ll be at the standing desk, and he’ll be in front of the barn doors. But yeah, we just renovated our beautiful space here. Yeah, it’s nice. We need a door on the other side now. Just lock us in here completely.
So thanks for joining. I see there’s one person. Welcome! We’re going to talk about Wix versus WordPress, which is something that we come across quite often. Why you go with WordPress over Wix, and why you go with Wix over WordPress, if you’re a crazy person.
Yeah, so we when we come across anyone really a lot of the questions we have or the clients that we end up meeting might have a Wix website so we get questioned a lot. Okay well why would I transition to a WordPress site? Wix is kind of that all-in-one solution you can get it up pretty quickly you pay a monthly subscription and you have a website, right?
So you might want to take that easy route of just getting it up right away. You can pick a template and boom, you’re live. Well, today we want to just talk about some reasons and things you should think about before making that decision. And if you have a Wix site, why there’s some benefits of choosing WordPress as your solution.
Yeah. And the first three things I ran, I said, like, it can get up quickly. It can look pretty cool. And you pay a monthly subscription, like it’s an all-in-one thing. So if you’re into that, then that works, you know, but future-friendly, future-proof, it’s not. So if you’re thinking about, okay, I want this in a year or five or ten years. First of all, I don’t know if Wix is going to be around as a company. We could just jump right into just the difference of Wix and WordPress.
WordPress itself is an open source system. So there’s some PHP and database, some SQL, Postgres, and wherever these files and this database can go, it can live. Which is different than Wix. Wix is their proprietary thing. It has to live on the system. There’s no exporting to a different place. There’s something that will export posts, but it’s not your whole site. So you’re latched in there.
You are paying the subscription, which can be $10, which is how they get you in the door. They’re like, here, $10 a month. And you’re like, okay, it’s $120 a year. But you have to upgrade to things like to do anything customized. And it can get pretty pricey. You have different things that are 30 a month. You can do the math. You’re a math genius. 60 a month. And even for enterprise and for e-commerce, which is crazy. I just looked it up. I was like, wow.
Like WordPress itself is open source. You can have things on it, and you don’t have to pay money, unless you upgrade to different plugins and stuff. You do have to pay a whole bank, but we’ll get there in time. And just to talk about, once you sign up for Wix, you’re able to try it out, go on there, and you can see how easy it is to edit things.
But as you get in there, you can move things around and it will impact mobile so they do give you the freedom to move things but then when you look at how it looks at mobile you realize okay that doesn’t look like the template or wow this is impacted this way.
So that’s just something to think about. It may seem easier but if too much freedom and moving things around can actually mess up with the mobile interface. Mess up with everything. We’ve seen some horror stories with, I mean, not even stories, just horrible sites that they look great, of course, in the beginning.
They give you this template and then when you get your hands in there and you’re not a designer or a coder or anything, at the end it’s a different product, you know, and then you’re stuck with it and you got to restart on national starting over day. Yeah, start over with WordPress. Yeah, you can contact us. Here’s a little banner right there. Learn more about our WordPress services at 3tonedigital.com.
That’s what we specialize in. We are WordPress people, but we’re open to anything CMS-wise, even custom sites that have no CMS. We do like WordPress because it gives the client a better end result, an end product that they can go in and manage and update and do themselves. We do offer meeting and services where we can go in monthly, which is great. Keeps everything out of their hands.
WordPress is so cool that you can just go in, do whatever you want and not have a crazy looking thing at the end. And also just to add on, there’s the design, but then there’s also the biggest reason is SEO. Really, when you get Wix, there’s very basic settings and you don’t have control over SEO.
So when you sign up with Wix you’re putting yourself in a very limited box, yeah. You know you have a limited reach no matter what. And when you’re thinking about having a website you kind of plan for, you should plan for the future, your future success not just today. And WordPress allows that. It can be a simple site but you can control SEO, have other tools, Yoast, JSON schema, add that to the pages and really increase your opportunity to reach more customers versus Wix. You’re not able to do that.
So yeah. And they do give you like a title and a meta description and stuff, and they do have plugins. So there’s the whole, one of the big downfalls I see of Wix is, they’ll say, no, it can do everything that WordPress can do. But you’ve got to pay for these. In addition to the subscription that you’re paying, you have to pay monthly for these little plugins.
And maybe they’re $5 a month, but everything adds up. And especially if they’re only doing one task, that something like WordPress, a plugin, or WordPress in general can do for free. Why even bother? They do give you a little bit of access. I think they do have SEO plugins now, but subscription-based kind of thing. Yeah, so you’ve got to pay to even get that reach where WordPress, you have the ability to have that right on your fingertips and have that control. FingertipSEO.com. I’m going to register, and I’m starting over. We’re not doing 3tone anymore. We’re doing fingertip SEO.
Yeah, another thing I would say is the template look. They look good, yeah. But at the back end of all these sites, these Wix sites, it’s the same code. And Google’s not stupid. Sometimes it is. But it’s not usually stupid. And it knows, and it says in itself. This code is exactly the same as this one. So why do I care about really either one? And it’s not going to be like, oh, this site was created in Wix. I’m not going to show it.
Of course, that’s not true. But it will never get as much attention as custom HTML that makes sense semantically that says, this is the H1. What’s an H1? This is an H1 of the page, and it just trails down, where Wix is kind of like, it looks really good. And you can probably control that, but it doesn’t give you the end result of Google looking at it and saying, OK, I know exactly what this thing is. That’s one problem I see. The templates look good at the beginning when you start quantifying. They don’t look good. Especially if you want to just move a couple things, then it’s like not the template anymore. And you’re doing something custom, which is easier to do in a WordPress platform.
Yeah. And WordPress has improved and evolved so much that the block editor itself is turning into a more user-friendly platform that you’re able to make these updates and use already created patterns and things like that to bring in that look more modern than let’s say that box template look so yeah and WordPress I mean not to go into like the history of WordPress it started as a blog blogging platform you know and that’s how it was. And even after they released something called Gutenberg, which is a site editor, it wasn’t very good, but they’ve improved it, where it’s become its own native page builder. It’s called Full Site Editing, FSE. It’s so cool that it’s competing against these Weebly, Weebly. There’s all these things that are out there. And of course, they’re good for what they do.
But I guess the main purpose of this whole thing is like saying, if you’re with Wix or you’re thinking of going with Wix, give WordPress a second thought because you might have had experience with it before you might have even heard stuff from other people like no just does this and you still have to you have to put it somewhere and it’s all manual stuff but it’s becoming so in depth that it’s a good competitor especially in the term of price and being locked into something as much as Wix and Squarespace and I don’t want to say Weebly like why even bother.
I would just say the decision to go with a specific platform should match your future goals. So the decision that you make today should be something that you’re thinking about the success of your business and wanting to grow and expand and having a platform that will support that growth. And that’s really what WordPress is. And a lot of the times when we kind of go through this with businesses and say, okay, well, what would you like to do? Where do you see your client base?
What functionality do you want to include? We’ll even analyze, okay, what can we do on this platform versus this platform? You want that output or that result, this is how you can do it with WordPress. This is the cost to do it with Wix in the sense of it doesn’t come out of the box like that. And all these other things need to be added to it to create that. So once you start seeing what it is to create the end result, you realize what the better solution is. So that’s just something that we kind of evaluate. And, you know, we can talk about, OK, we’re WordPress people. We, of course, love WordPress for a lot of reasons, but it’s really better for the client. It’s better for their business. It’s better for their future growth. So that’s why we recommend it.
We don’t recommend Wix, period, only because unless you’re just you just want a secret website and you just want to have something up there that nobody’s going to find except for word of mouth that’s the only way reason that I would recommend Wix like hey you just want to say you have a website and you know there’s no growth or future so um that’s crazy that’s just how I see it because I want the best for our clients and to achieve the best, you need to have a good solid foundation.
So yeah, we recently had a client go from Wix to WordPress and he came in asking for updates to the site, which is fine, but he realized we realized, and then he realized that you had to upgrade to the different plan to even access the code to make these updates, you know? So at the end of it, he’s going to be paying $60 a month, even though it started at $10 a month. And they said, no, no, you can do, you can do whatever you want here. They didn’t tell him you need to have the upgraded plan. So yeah.
We came in for the meeting, right? And I’m like, yeah, that was a new website. He’s like, no, no, no, no, no. I’m not looking for a new website. And then at the end of the call, we’re finding a new website. Now we’ve made the website. He’s transferred from Wix. He has a lot of, you know, clicks. Everything’s better. You know, he’s in a better place now.
Thankfully, we don’t have to deal with Wix. I mean the stuff you wanted to do you could do but again he’s at the end of the year he’s been paying one of the 60 times whatever it’s like yeah too too much for not enough results so it’s insane but yeah I mean that’s why.
It’s also slower. WordPress can be slow too if you install a clunky theme or a bunch of plugins or it’s on a slow server. There’s a bunch of ways you can make it slow. Wix in general is just it loads every script because it can do everything. It says you want to animate this text going by, you want this to move when you come down here, you want these boxes to explode. These little scripts are in the code. If the person won’t use it, I’ll let them use it, but at the cost of it being loaded by a browser.
WordPress gives you the option to say, I don’t want any of that stuff. I just want it to do this. And when I do want to do something, include it. And that’s, I think, because that really affects SEO. And of course, user experience, which you weigh which one is more important to yourself, but they’re equally important. You don’t want a user to come on and be like, this is horrible. We have Google care about it. Who really cares at that point? Click there. So and vice versa.
Yeah, and one thing that we get a lot of questions about plugins in general, and one thing that was said was, well, how many plugins are too much? Like, what will slow down my site? And the answer to that question really is you can have just one plugin that is one really bad plugin that does all these scripts and take a long time to load to impact your website. It’s not so much quantity, but it’s quality.
And that’s just something that of course having too many and you’re not using and just keeping them on there can take up a lot of resources, but you can still just have one plugin that really slows down your site. So being able to kind of understand that, that, yeah, we talk a lot about having too many is not good, but it’s not really about the quantity and more of the quality of the plugin and how it’s being rendered.
Yeah. I mean, a big offender is like Divi. Divi is a theme, but you get these Divi add-ons, expansion packs that’ll give you every option. And just that plugin alone will destroy the speed of your site. They get better. There’s Divi, Beaver Builder, Elementor, which is personally my favorite if we’re going down that route. But we like to use the block theme. It’s native. It updates easily. There’s not a lot of stuff that’s attached to it. You can always customize it to hardcore. It’s really cool.
Stop advertising WordPress. WordPress. WordPress should be paying. Yeah. And if you have any questions about our process with WordPress or our experience of making a site from Wix to WordPress, again, there’s not a button that does it. There’s something that will export posts. And if it’s a post-based site, then that is helpful. But usually, it does have to be redesigned and that’s usually a good thing because you can really lighten the load use that you want to use it as like a guide I like this my customers are used to it but xyz we can do that we can always say well let’s lighten everything about it and make it look the same more responsive more SEO friendly cheaper um just again Wix could close down tomorrow which they probably won’t but maybe.
Yeah. Yeah, I think we covered mostly Wix versus WordPress, but I think the biggest thing would be being able to own it, own your website and not have to have this monthly subscription and SEO being like huge factor and all the SEO experts that we work with agree. And if you know SEO, you know that WordPress is a better solution.
So now moving on to AI. AI cringe. So since they blasted out ChatGPT, we just kind of wanted to have an open conversation about how we’ve seen this impact all the tools that we use every day. So from Canva to AI writing tools, it’s just kind of been placed into everything. Everything has adopted it. So we kind of want to just talk about that. Yeah, it’s everywhere. I mean, I use it now with, we all use it. I mean, maybe not everybody because your friend didn’t know about it. She didn’t use it. Yeah, it depends on your field. She’s a nurse, so. True. She’s like, how do I help this person? She’s not reliant on AI. Yeah.
We use Copilot which is um GitHub. I pay ten dollars a month. It’s totally worth it. It helps speed up the efficiency of our coding um but like she said Canva, Google Search um when you search in there now like I don’t know. Actually, have you been seeing all the negative things where somebody will search, how many rocks per day should I eat? And Google is like, you should eat one small rock per day. Because the AI, it’s relating it to results, and it doesn’t have the common sense to know that a human should eat a rock. There’s a bunch of these that are out there. It’s crazy.
But I think one of the main things I was thinking of when we were talking about it was, you search on Google now, and say you’re searching how to set up a Raspberry Pi, because there’s one in front of me, which we have to still do. And it’s going to tell you the results right there. It’s going to say, step one, buy a Raspberry Pi. Step two, learn Python, whatever the things are. And you don’t have to, for good or for worse, go to the first result or any of the results because it’s saying right there what exactly you need. So destroying itself from the inside by utilizing this right instead of here’s the information I know they did before but now it’s even more especially with the generative AI where it’s like I’ll tell you exactly whether it’s wrong or right usually hopefully or they might be pretty soon. But it’s telling you that you’re gone. You never click the site. It’s weird, right? It seems like it’s backwards. But that’s Google. Everything they make dies. And I guess the search is probably the last one on their list. Remember Google Photos and stuff? Yeah, yeah.
And like, I’ve seen a lot of, we’ve all seen on social media, right? Just looking at images now, a lot of companies are using AI generated images to sell a specific product.
And seeing all these things and and like headshots everybody doing a headshot to look more professional and things like that it’s so cringy because they’ll be advertisements for certain things and then in our work we do you know we’re on getting like stock photos and I would see an image and I’m being like that’s a stock photo that they used to advertise this and it’s so crazy how it just went full circle. And I see it everywhere. We see it in posts. Overuse of emojis, we know.
Certain words. Yeah, I got it. Certainly. Your bespoke, meticulous website rocket emoji shooting to the sky. It’s so obvious. And of course, they’re improving it with 4 and 4.0 and stuff like that. And it’s going to be harder to tell. But it really rips the soul out of it. And you can tell when you’re, especially if you’re used to the person, say you’re following somebody and all of a sudden their tone changes and you’re like, well, what the hell is this? You know, language. And it’s like almost too obvious where it becomes this like, show and it’s not yourself.
And even if you’re not a great talker or a great writer or anything, at least you’re yourself. And the pictures, forget those AI pictures. I’ve seen a few people on Facebook recently with these. It’s worse than a filter when the Snapchat filters. No, they’re just a completely avatar of yourself.
Yeah, and the crazy thing is this is the beginning, right? So this is probably the worst that we’ll see it. So we’re still at the point where we’re able to identify certain things sometimes. But it’s only going to get better and harder to be able to tell the difference between what’s real and fake. And I think it kind of… It brings an important question, like as a business, how are you going to really stand out and be authentically yourself during this? Because we’re in the era of A.I. so it’s like these are some of the reasons why we kind of decided to just come live and just go for it because there’s just so much content out there there’s just so many posts and things that are generated and you don’t really know what the real voice is and when we work with our clients we kind of want to be able to discover what the real tone of that business is because now you have access to all these tools to create these perfect words or what they think is a perfect generated word for your business. So being able to kind of take control of that and kind of make it yours.
Yeah, that’s true. Very nicely said. Thanks. You’re welcome. I just wrote a little note here: AI, just take it slow really like don’t overuse it because in a few years it’s going to just continue not even a few years a week a month it’s going to continuously grow and to learn how to adopt it into your own business or life even that is beneficial to yourself and not just speak is I think it’s going to be really an important thing over the next next the overall evolution of it until it becomes god help us AGI and that what AGI is in case you don’t know is pretty much AI thinking for itself, almost like a human. It’s artificial general intelligence. So they’re working on it, and they probably have already invented it, but it’s not public. But I assume pretty soon we’re going to be seeing a lot more of it, even if you’re sick of it now. I’m kind of sick of it, honestly. I’m sick of seeing it in things like we were saying, like Canva. I’ll use it to generate ideas, but I’ll erase it all and use it as a squirrel trying to be on the livestream. You can’t be on the livestream. Maybe tomorrow. But really just take it slow and don’t dive in first because personally, I don’t think it’s going to be worth your while.
Yeah, I think if used right, it’s a great tool for certain things to make things more efficient. And even as a developer, it could help. But can it create a whole site? Yeah, it could. But there’s going to be issues. It’s not a perfect creator. There’s things that it can’t take into consideration if not given the right prompt. For now. For now. I think the first experience I had with it feeling threatening to me as a web developer, someone invented it. You’ve probably seen it. If you’re in this field, they said, like, enter a bunch of keywords and it’ll generate a literal hosted site for you with just keywords. I did it and it was horrible. It was about, I just wanted some of the oranges. And again, it’s going to get better, of course, but it’s always going to use what it knows. Not you, not your expertise. It’s always going to use what it knows from the data that has been fed into it to generate it whether it looks like it is now which is or a couple whatever’s it’s going to look amazing it still takes away just like the Wix thing where it’s well here’s that you know Google or again if it stays around or even just people you can see the difference you can see the difference and we just hosted the AI class and we most people got all the things wrong of the difference between people generated and real people.
Yeah, so that class was really about educating parents about AI because the kids are in this era that they’re growing up with this technology not something us 90s kids went through. So there’s a whole aspect of mental health and and educating your child and making sure because there are things out there that are targeting our children that are based off AI chat bots and things like that. And the kids think it’s fun because it’s like, oh, type of this. What is it going to say? But it’s something that as parents, I think we need to stay on top of and stay educated on the technology, know what pros and cons are with it, not just in our business, but just in our lives in general, because it is everywhere and everyone is adopting it. So that was something that in our free time, we do, we are working on an initiative called 518 Power Up, and it’s just trying to power up our community and learning and about the AI technology as we’re learning about it too. So we just want to kind of educate and say, okay, these are the resources you should look at. This is what you should look out for. You need to understand, kind of have these conversations with your children on what they’re seeing, because a lot of the times we don’t know what our children’s, the internet is through our children’s eyes. It’s a whole different experience because they’re either they’re gamers or they’re on social media and things like that. Knowing that and communicating and having that open line of communication, I think is important to just have that and just stay in the know of the new resources.
Yeah, it’s probably the only way, because it’s going to keep growing. It’s going to be everywhere. And just to be open and honest and communicative, that’s a long word, with your children or anybody, really, elderly. This is for a different topic. Yeah, this is a whole other thing. It’s true. If anybody’s interested in it, let us know in the comments. We have a whole class that we’ve done, and there’s a lot of information out there. Phishing and the scams that are coming along with it because it’s utilized giving anybody in the world the power to like pretend there’s somebody else very well too and voice and text and content and images so it’s going to be it is a scary world it already has been with all this scandal fishing for the elderly and children and just people in general you almost.
Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. I don’t know if it was AI, but it’s like, even if you’re in this industry, there’s clever things out there that try to get you. And so if you’re not in the industry, who knows?
Anyways, okay. Keep looking at them. All right. So, yeah, I mean, if you have any questions, like I said, this is a broadcast. Like and subscribe. I don’t know if this is too soon for that, but smash that like button. We’re new at this, and we’re going to keep, what is it? So, yeah, we’re doing a seven-day live. We’re going to test it out here. So this is our second day going live, and we’re just going to go whatever comes to mind when it comes to hot topics or things that we come across. We’re just going to jump on and have a quick conversation and just see how it is because it’s something that we think is important to just kind of create our own tone and our own voice. Yeah and if you feel inspired we’d ask you to share comment like it or subscribe to us wherever the wherever your favorite is twitter we’re on twitter at three tone digital youtube at three tone digital facebook at three tone digital and linkedin slash three times digital whatever.
So we’ll be here and we’re going to, if you have any ideas for anything you want to learn too, if we know it, or if we just know a little bit about it, you know, leave a comment and we’ll discuss it internally over lattes and tea. Yes.
I think the biggest takeaway I think from today would be the decisions that you make today for your business are important for your future. So you don’t want to just decide on the easiest solution, but more so think about what the future of your business is and choose a platform that can create that. We really build our sites, our business growth over time with our client and we build for today, but we also plan for the future and WordPress has the tools to kind of build as you grow. So what you choose today will impact your future.
So, um, I think I’ll end there. Where’d you, where’d you go? I left. I wanted to give you the stage. Oh, I don’t think I like that. You don’t like only. I was like, where’d you go? I’ll just have my face and I’ll be doing like a overdub. Yeah, I thought that was another. You should do a final word, kind of thing, like Reina’s final word. Yeah, I’ll do that next time. We’ll do a final. I’m trying to top my last final word. Yesterday was move with purpose. And we’re moving with purpose today by doing this second live. And really to think about, I guess my final word would really be, or phrase, I guess it would be, would really to think about your future and make decisions that will impact future growth. Yeah. And all sense of that, you know, with your website and just personal life in general too, you know? Yeah. And stay educated about the new technology for yourself. And also if you have children, that’s very important too, I think. Yeah. So I’ll end it here.
Put some lo-fi music on, we’ll fade away into the darkness. Y
eah. Thanks for hanging out with us today, and we’ll see you tomorrow. Yeah. Remember, like and subscribe and share.
