Wix vs WordPress: A Letter to Anyone About to Choose Wix

Dear business owner,

I had a call recently with someone who runs a small homeware shop. She had a Wix site she was happy with for the first eighteen months. The renewal email arrived. The price had jumped substantially. She asked me what to do.

There was a problem with my answer, and that is what I want to write about.

You did not ask me for a letter. But if you are reading a Wix vs WordPress comparison in 2026, you are most likely a business owner who is either looking at Wix for the first time, or already on Wix and starting to ask the questions you wish you had asked before you signed up. Either way, please read this through. There are a few things about Wix that the marketing pages do not put front and centre, and they matter for your business.

The first problem with Wix is the renewal email

Wix's introductory pricing is genuinely attractive. You can start a Light plan at the equivalent of about €13 a month ^[1]. The Core plan, which is what most small business owners actually need because it removes Wix branding and adds basic ecommerce, runs at an introductory price of around €11.75 a month at the time of writing.

That is the offer.

Here is the renewal. Light renews at roughly €17 a month. Core renews at roughly €29 a month. The Business plan, which most owners need once they grow into selling more than a handful of products, jumps from around €15.50 a month to €39 a month. Business Elite, which a small number of operators reach as they scale, goes from €55 a month to €159 a month ^[1].

Read those numbers slowly. Core jumps roughly two and a half times. Business goes up two and a half times. Wix does not hide this, exactly, but they do not put it on the headline price.

Now do the three-year arithmetic. A Core plan owner who started at €11.75 a month in year one and renewed at €29 in years two and three will pay roughly €141 in year one and roughly €348 a year for the next two years. That is comfortably north of €800 over three years. Plus a domain. Plus any apps you have added from Wix's app store. Plus any premium themes or plugins. The real Wix bill at three years, for a typical small business with a basic shop, is well above €900 once the extras are counted.

I am not telling you Wix is bad value at €11.75 a month. I am telling you that €11.75 a month is not the price you will be paying.

The second problem is the one you cannot see yet

The renewal price is annoying. It is not the trap. The trap is what happens if you decide you would rather spend that money somewhere else.

You probably assume that, like an email account or a phone contract, you can take your business website with you when you leave. You can copy the words. Re-use the photos. Maybe recreate the look. That is true.

But your actual website, the working thing customers visit, cannot leave Wix.

This is not me being cynical. This is from Wix's own help documentation. Their support page on exporting your site states, plainly: "Your site must run on Wix's servers. The reason you can't use another host for your Wix site is that the SaaS architecture does not support external hosting since it uses Wix's proprietary technology and relies on Wix's services to operate." ^[2]

In practical terms, that means:

• You cannot move your Wix site to any other hosting provider. Ever.
• If you have an online shop, you can export your product list, but only up to 1,000 products and 1,000 orders ^[3]. Customer purchase history beyond that limit is not portable.
• Member lists, which include the email addresses of people who registered on your site, cannot be exported at all. Wix cites privacy as the reason, which is fair, but the practical effect is that the most valuable customer relationships you built on the platform belong to the platform.
• Sites built in the older Wix Editor cannot be moved into the newer Wix Studio without a manual rebuild ^[4].

Read that list once more, with your business in mind. The website you have spent three years investing in, the SEO you have slowly built, the customer relationships, the content, the product catalogue, the look and feel, the integrations: all of it lives on rented ground that you cannot move.

What does this mean for you in practice?

Here is a typical case. A craft retailer on the Galway Quays I spoke to earlier this year had been on Wix for four years. Lovely site. Decent traffic. The owner wanted to add a custom shipping integration with an Irish courier the Wix app store does not support. Her options were: pay a Wix developer to build a workaround at hourly rates, do without, or rebuild the site somewhere else from scratch.

She rebuilt. It cost her about three weeks of evenings and a weekend with a freelancer. The brand survived because she had her own photography and her own copy. The SEO took the better part of a year to recover.

She is fine now. But she would tell you, if you asked her, that she would have made a different choice on day one if anyone had explained this trade-off in plain language.

The honest case for Wix

I should give Wix credit where it is due. If you want a static one-page site for a three-month pop-up market, a temporary event, or a personal portfolio you do not expect to monetise, Wix's all-in-one editor genuinely is the path of least resistance. You sign up, you drag, you publish, you close the laptop. For that use case, the lock-in does not matter, because there is nothing on the platform you would later want to move.

That is not most Irish businesses.

Most of you reading this are building a website that you want to grow with the business. You will want to add things. Take payments differently. Integrate with accounting software. Send better emails. Run loyalty campaigns. Connect to a Point of Sale. Plug in a booking system that suits your specific trade. The closer you get to wanting any of those things, the more painful the Wix walls become. If you want a wider view of the platforms business owners are leaving and the patterns behind those moves, I wrote about that shift in 2026 here.

The case for WordPress, briefly

WordPress runs roughly 42 per cent of the public web, according to the latest figures from W3Techs at the time of writing ^[5]. That is not a marketing statistic. That is the practical reason WordPress integrates with almost everything. Every accounting platform, every email tool, every payment processor, every CRM, every booking system worth using has a WordPress plugin. The official wordpress.org plugin directory hosts more than 59,000 free plugins, and the theme directory holds more than 12,000 themes ^[6].

You do not pay extra for any of that. You install what you need. If you change your mind, you uninstall it. If a plugin does not exist, somebody has usually built one and is selling it for less than a Wix app costs over a year.

The bigger point is that with WordPress, your site is yours. You can move it from one host to another in an afternoon. The files. The database. The lot. If your hosting provider raises prices unreasonably or the service drops in quality, you leave. That is not an accident of WordPress. That is the design.

A brief honest admission

I want to admit something. Years ago, earlier in my career, I recommended a closed platform to a client because the editor looked easier to learn. The first year went well. The second year their needs grew, they wanted to do things the platform did not support, and they could not move. The migration ended up costing them more than the time they had saved. I would not make the same call today, and I do not want you to make it for the first time on your own.

What about Wix's AI builder?

Wix has done strong work on its AI tools. Their Harmony AI builder, which evolved from the older Wix ADI product, will generate a working website from a single business prompt and a short questionnaire ^[7]. It is fast, and the results look polished.

The problem is that it lands you in the same place. A site built with Wix's AI is still a Wix site. It still cannot be moved. It still renews at full price. The AI saved you a couple of hours of editor work. It did not change the deal.

Web60 takes the opposite approach. We use AI to build you a real WordPress site in about sixty seconds, on enterprise Irish infrastructure, with the full WordPress plugin and theme ecosystem available to you from day one. The AI gets you to a working site in under a minute. WordPress gives you somewhere to grow into. The combination is what your business actually needs.

What it looks like with Web60

Here is what is actually included in Web60's all-inclusive WordPress hosting at €60 a year, so you can compare like for like:

• AI-built professional WordPress site, deployed in under sixty seconds, no agency or freelancer required
• Hosting on enterprise Irish infrastructure, with all data resident in Ireland
• Free SSL via Let's Encrypt, automatically provisioned and renewed
• Automatic nightly backups with one-click restore
• One-click staging environment for testing changes before they hit your live site
• Server-level security hardening and automatic malware scanning
• Privacy-first analytics with no cookie consent banner required for tracking
• Free migration service if you are moving from another host
• Irish-based human support, no offshore call centre
• Year-one and year-three pricing identical: €60 a year, no renewal jump

For a fuller breakdown of how the hosting maths actually plays out at the small-business level, my colleague's piece on what a website costs for a small business in Ireland walks through the numbers in more detail than a letter like this allows.

A reality check

I want to be straight with you about what WordPress does not magically solve. WordPress is more capable than Wix, but capability comes with the responsibility of choosing what to put on top of it. Plugin choice matters. Bad plugin choices slow your site down or open security risks. Good managed WordPress hosting, which is what Web60 is, takes care of this for you with curated defaults and automatic security maintenance. It is still your site, though. You will make decisions about what to install. That is a feature, not a bug, but it is worth knowing before you sign up.

The reason we built Web60 the way we did is to keep the ownership and flexibility WordPress gives you while removing the parts that used to require a developer. The AI handles the build. The hosting stack handles the speed. The team handles the security. You handle your business.

So what should you actually do?

If you have not signed up to Wix yet, take an extra hour before you do. Look at the renewal price. Look at the export limits. Decide whether you are building something you intend to keep for five years or longer, or whether this is a project where lock-in does not matter. Be honest with yourself about that.

If you are already on Wix and you are happy with it, you do not need to move tomorrow. Use the time to plan a move properly. Export your product list. Save your photography. Document your content. The earlier you start that work, the easier the eventual move will be.

If you have decided you want to own your site rather than rent it, the next step is straightforward. WordPress is not the obstacle people think it is, especially with AI doing the build for you and managed hosting doing the maintenance. You can have a real WordPress business site, with your own content and your own data, live in about sixty seconds. The price stays at €60 a year. Year one. Year two. Year three.

That is the letter. The decision is yours to make from here.

Sources

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I move my Wix site to WordPress?

You can move your content, photography, copy, and product list within limits. You cannot move the site itself, the design, the integrations, or the underlying database. Most migrations involve rebuilding the site on WordPress and re-importing content. A managed WordPress provider can usually handle this for you in a few days.

Why is Wix so much cheaper in year one?

The introductory price is a customer-acquisition cost. Wix expects to recoup it through renewal pricing in years two and three. Read the renewal terms before you sign up. The headline price is rarely what you will pay long term.

Is WordPress harder to use than Wix?

Modern AI-built WordPress sites, including Web60, are deployed in under a minute and present a simpler editing experience than Wix once you are inside. The complexity people associate with WordPress is usually unmanaged WordPress on poor hosting. Managed WordPress on a curated stack is no harder to use than any drag-and-drop builder.

What happens to my SEO if I move from Wix to WordPress?

A properly handled migration preserves URLs through redirects, keeps content and images in place, and improves performance. Most sites see a brief dip while Google reindexes, then a recovery and usually an improvement, because page speed and structured data on managed WordPress are typically better than on Wix.

Is Web60 just hosting, or does it include the website too?

Web60 includes the website. Our AI builder creates the WordPress site for you in under a minute based on your business description, and the €60 a year covers the design, hosting, SSL, backups, security, analytics, and support. There is no separate agency invoice. You are not paying anyone hourly to make changes.