Checkatrade Alternatives: Where Else Trades Get Work
- Website Strategy
The WordPress vs Wix argument is normally fought over features, ease of use and price, and all three will have moved by the time your first renewal lands. The part that does not move is ownership. On WordPress you own the software and the content, and you can take your website to a different host, developer or builder whenever you decide to. On Wix you are renting a system that, in Wix’s own documentation, has to run on Wix’s servers and cannot be exported anywhere else. Choose Wix if you want one simple website that somebody else keeps running and you are content for it to live there permanently. Choose WordPress if there is a realistic chance your website will need to grow, change hands, or move.
That is the whole answer. The rest is the working. The exit question costs nothing on day one, which is why it tends not to get asked at the point of choosing.
Feature-by-feature comparisons between these two platforms have a shelf life of a few months, because both are actively closing the gaps the other one points at.
Wix has spent years adding developer-facing tools it did not used to have. WordPress has spent the same years getting easier to edit for someone who is not technical. Every honest comparison written three years ago is wrong now in at least one direction, and the one you are reading will age too. Pricing ages fastest of all.
So ask a harder question of every comparison table you find, this one included: which of these differences will still be true in three years.
Two things survive that test: who owns what you have built, and what it takes to leave.
The one durable difference between WordPress and Wix is that a WordPress site can be moved and a Wix site cannot.
WordPress is open source software. You install it on hosting you pay for, in an account in your own name, and the files and the database are yours to copy. If your host puts prices up, you move hosts. If your agency stops answering the phone, you take the site to another one. It also ships with a built in export tool that hands you a portable file of your content. None of it needs anyone’s permission.
Wix works the other way, and Wix is admirably direct about it. Its help centre states that your site must run on Wix’s servers because of how the product is built, and that you cannot export a Wix site to host it elsewhere. A separate article confirms that blog posts cannot currently be exported to other platforms either.
You can take your domain with you. You can copy your text and images out by hand, page by page. What you cannot take is the website.
None of this is a criticism. It is how a hosted product works, and Wix publishes it plainly rather than hiding it. The awkwardness is one of timing, because the decision gets made in week one and the cost of it turns up somewhere around year three.
One clarification, because it catches people out. WordPress exists in two forms. WordPress.com is a hosted subscription service carrying some of the same restrictions as any rented platform at its cheaper tiers. Self-hosted WordPress, the free software you install on hosting of your own choosing, is what this post means and what nearly every agency means. Our guide to how a WordPress website is actually put together walks through the difference.
Very few small business websites stay the shape they launched in, so the platform choice is really a bet on how far yours will travel.
A brochure site becomes a site that takes bookings. Then somebody wants a trade login, a stock feed from a supplier, or the enquiry form wired into the system that actually runs the business. On WordPress those are usually a plugin, a developer, or both, and because the software is open, any competent developer can pick it up. You are not waiting on one vendor’s roadmap.
On Wix you work inside what Wix provides. That is a capable product with a real app market and it covers a great deal of what a small business needs. But the ceiling is set by somebody else, and reaching it usually means rebuilding elsewhere rather than adding something, which puts you straight back into the export problem above.
One thing we would not do: put a business on WordPress when it needs five pages and a phone number and will never need more. That is over-buying, and it leaves you with an upkeep bill for capability nobody asked for.
An unmaintained WordPress site is worse than a maintained Wix one. Anyone selling you WordPress should be willing to say that out loud.
WordPress does not look after itself. Core, theme and plugin updates arrive constantly, and a plugin release can break a contact form without breaking anything visible, so the site looks fine while the enquiries quietly stop. Security is your responsibility, or your agency’s, not the platform’s. Backups only count if somebody has restored one.
Wix takes all of that off your desk. Updates, hosting, certificates, security patching and support sit inside the subscription. For a business with nobody technical and no appetite for finding one, that is worth real money.
So the question worth settling is who is going to do the work.
If the answer is genuinely nobody, Wix is the more honest choice, because a WordPress site with no owner rots and you pay for it eventually in a rebuild. If the answer is a person, in-house or a studio, upkeep becomes a known monthly cost rather than a risk, and what that upkeep costs in the UK has a straight answer.
Settle that before you choose the platform, not after.
Google does not penalise Wix sites, and repeating that old line would be wrong. What can be defended is narrower: how much control you have, and whether the work you put in travels with you.
Both platforms let you set page titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, alt text, redirects, a sitemap and structured data. Wix has put serious work into this and the fundamentals are present. If somebody tells you Wix sites cannot rank, ask for the evidence.
The differences that do hold up have nothing to do with penalties.
How deep you can go. On WordPress, anything a search engine can read is editable, because you hold the templates, the code and the server configuration. On Wix you work with the controls you are given. For most local businesses those are plenty. For a site whose growth depends on technical detail, large catalogues, complex location structures, custom schema, the ceiling starts to matter.
Whose hands it needs. WordPress work can be picked up by more or less any developer or SEO. Wix work needs somebody who knows Wix, which is a smaller pool and a harder second opinion to get.
Whether the work moves with you. Years of content, internal linking and page structure are a real asset. On WordPress that asset exports as a file and imports into whatever comes next. On Wix you would be recreating it by hand and hoping your redirects hold.
Nobody can promise you rankings on either platform. What you can decide upfront is who holds the controls, and whether three years of content work stays yours.
Compare the shape of the bill rather than the monthly figure. The shape stays true long after every published price is wrong.
Wix is one fee that covers everything. Hosting, security, updates, support and the builder arrive as a single subscription. One line on the statement, nothing to assemble. It goes up when the platform decides it goes up, and there is nobody to switch to within it.
WordPress is several smaller costs you assemble. A domain, hosting, occasionally a theme or plugin licence, then either your own time or somebody’s fee for the upkeep. More lines, more decisions, every one of them bought in a competitive market. If hosting doubles, you move hosting and keep the site.
Over month one, the bundled fee usually wins on both price and simplicity, and that is a fair reason to pick it. Over five years the totals tend to converge. What has not converged is that the WordPress costs are separate items you can renegotiate one at a time, and the Wix cost is a single subscription you either accept or leave.
The build itself sits outside all of this and is a separate question with separate numbers.
| If this is true of your business | The sensible choice |
|---|---|
| A handful of pages, and you genuinely cannot see that changing | Wix |
| Nobody in the business will maintain anything, and there is no budget for somebody who will | Wix |
| You want one predictable bill and no supplier decisions to make | Wix |
| The website takes enquiries or orders that matter to turnover | WordPress |
| You expect to add functions later: bookings, memberships, a shop, a link to your own systems | WordPress |
| Search is a real acquisition channel and you want the technical ceiling raised | WordPress |
| The business might be sold, franchised, or handed to a different agency | WordPress |
| You want the option to leave without rebuilding | WordPress |
If most of your rows land on Wix, build on Wix without apology and put the money you saved into something that brings enquiries in. That is a sound decision and we will tell you so.
If they land on WordPress, insist on one thing: that it is built to be portable. Standard WordPress, hosting in your own name, no proprietary lock-in bolted on by the agency. That is why we build WordPress websites built to be moved rather than websites you have to keep asking us about.
Is WordPress better than Wix? Not universally. WordPress is better when you need control, room to grow, or the ability to move your website later. Wix is better when you want one straightforward site that maintains itself and nobody in the business will ever manage it. The answer depends on how far your website has to travel, not on which platform has more features.
Can I move my website from Wix to WordPress? Not as a transfer. Wix states that a Wix site cannot be exported to host elsewhere, and that blog posts cannot be exported to other platforms. You point your domain at a new site and copy your text and images across by hand, so the site is rebuilt rather than moved. Plan your redirects so existing URLs still work.
Is Wix bad for SEO? No, and that claim is out of date. Wix gives you titles, descriptions, headings, redirects, sitemaps and structured data, and Wix sites rank. The honest difference is depth of control and portability. On WordPress you can reach anything a search engine reads, and the content you build can be exported and taken with you.
Is WordPress too complicated for a small business owner? Editing pages and posts is straightforward and most owners manage fine after a short handover. The complexity is not the editing, it is the upkeep: updates, backups, security and the occasional plugin that misbehaves. If nobody is going to hold that, either pay someone to or choose a platform that holds it for you.
Which is cheaper, WordPress or Wix? Month one, almost always Wix, because one subscription covers everything. Over three to five years the totals usually converge and the real difference is structural. WordPress costs are separate items you can shop around for individually. Wix is a single price you either accept or leave, and leaving means rebuilding.
Do I actually own my website on Wix? You own your content in the sense that Wix does not claim it, and you own your domain if you registered it yourself. What you do not have is a portable copy of the site. The design, structure and functionality exist only inside Wix, so ownership in practice covers the words and pictures, not the website.
Judge this on the two things that will still be true in three years: who owns the website, and what leaving would cost you. Features and prices will both have moved by then.
If WordPress is the right call but the up-front build is the sticking point, you can spread the build over a monthly fee instead. And if you would rather we just told you which one your business needs, you know where we are.
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