What Wix does well

This is an honest comparison, so let's start with what Wix gets right. The drag-and-drop editor is genuinely good. You can produce a professional-looking website without any coding knowledge in a day or two. Templates are well-designed. Mobile responsiveness is handled automatically. Payment processing and booking tools are built in.

For a personal portfolio, a small hobby business, a one-page info site, or any use case where you don't particularly care about ranking on Google for competitive terms, Wix is a reasonable choice. It's also cheaper than hiring a developer for a simple project.

Page speed

This is the biggest practical difference. Wix generates bloated HTML, loads heavy JavaScript, and often produces poor Core Web Vitals scores. Google's PageSpeed Insights regularly rates Wix sites in the 30-55 range for mobile performance. A well-built WordPress or custom site targeting the same load profile typically scores 70-90.

Page speed is a confirmed Google ranking factor. A slow site doesn't just frustrate visitors — it ranks lower. For competitive local searches where multiple firms have similar content and backlink profiles, speed differences can determine who appears in the Local Pack and who doesn't.

Wix has invested in improving speed, but the platform's architecture — where all sites run on shared infrastructure with a JavaScript-heavy rendering approach — creates a ceiling that professional builds don't have.

URL structure

On a professionally built WordPress site, you control your URLs completely. A service page for boiler installation in Leeds can be: yourbusiness.co.uk/boiler-installation-leeds/. That URL contains the keyword, is clean, and tells Google exactly what the page is about.

Wix defaults to URLs like: yourbusiness.wixsite.com/home/boiler-installation-leeds — even on a paid plan with a custom domain, the internal URL structure can be less clean. These aren't catastrophic for SEO, but they're suboptimal, and suboptimal compounds over time across many pages.

Schema markup

Schema markup is structured data you add to your pages to tell Google specific things about your business — your address, phone number, opening hours, services, reviews. Google uses this to populate rich results and to better understand local businesses.

For a local service business, LocalBusiness schema, FAQPage schema on relevant pages, and Review schema are all meaningful. On a professionally built WordPress site with plugins like Yoast or RankMath, or with custom JSON-LD, these are straightforward to implement. On Wix, schema support is limited and often requires workarounds.

Schema and the Local Pack: Google uses structured data to confirm and cross-reference your business information. Sites with properly implemented LocalBusiness schema give Google more confidence in their data — which can influence Local Pack rankings.

Local SEO technical control

Beyond schema, local SEO involves technical elements that Wix limits your control over. Canonical tags (telling Google which version of a page is the primary one), hreflang tags for international sites, robots.txt control, XML sitemap customisation — these are all more flexible on a self-hosted WordPress site than on Wix.

For most simple local business sites, these technical elements won't matter day to day. They become relevant when you're trying to compete seriously in a local market with multiple pages targeting different service and location combinations.

Google Business Profile integration

GBP works with any website. Your business can appear in the Local Pack whether your site is on Wix, WordPress, or Squarespace. GBP is platform-agnostic. If you're choosing between platforms for GBP integration specifically, this isn't a differentiating factor.

Switching from Wix later

One consideration that doesn't come up until it's too late: moving away from Wix is painful. Wix uses its own proprietary URL structure, meaning when you migrate to a different platform, all your URLs change. Implementing 301 redirects correctly preserves most of your existing SEO value, but it's extra work and risk that doesn't exist if you start on a portable platform.

If you build on WordPress from the start, migrating to a different host or a new WordPress setup is straightforward. Content is portable. URLs stay the same if you want them to.

Who Wix is right for

Who Wix is wrong for

The test is simple: if Google brings you meaningful business, or you want it to, start with a platform that gives you full SEO control. If Google doesn't matter for your specific situation, Wix is adequate.