Wix vs WordPress: which is better for an Australian business?

On This Page

1. Wix vs WordPress at a glance
2. Wix vs WordPress: what each costs in Australia
3. Who looks after it
4. Wix vs WordPress speed: what the data shows
5. Can you take your site with you?
6. Online bookings on Wix and WordPress
7. Wix vs WordPress for SEO
8. Where your enquiries are stored
9. Accessibility
10. What are the disadvantages of Wix?
11. And the disadvantages of WordPress?
12. Is there anything better than Wix?
13. Which one should you choose?
14. Questions I get asked

I was asked recently whether a small business should build its website on Wix or WordPress. It's a fair question, and most of the answers online are written for Americans: prices in US dollars, nothing about GST, nothing about where your enquiries end up, nothing about the booking systems Australian businesses actually use. So this is my answer, with prices as Wix and the Australian hosts showed them to me on 11 October 2026.

One disclosure before I start. I build websites for Australian businesses on my own platform, so I sell an alternative to both. That's partly why I can be blunt about each of them. Neither pays me anything, and I'm not recommending a host because of a referral fee.

Wix vs WordPress at a glance

First, there are two things called WordPress. WordPress.org is free software you install on hosting you pay for. That's what most people mean, and it's what I mean below unless I say otherwise. WordPress.com is a hosted service run by Automattic, closer to Wix in how it works.

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WordPress runs 40.1% of all websites, according to W3Techs, and Wix runs 4.2%. Among .au websites whose platform W3Techs can identify, WordPress is on 55.7%. Popularity isn't the same as fit, though. For a lot of small businesses the smaller one is the better choice.

Wix vs WordPress: what each costs in Australia

Wix

Wix shows Australian visitors prices in Australian dollars, marked "Price includes GST", for a year paid up front. I checked them in my own browser, because Wix shows US dollars to anything that reads the page from outside Australia.

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A few things the plans page doesn't make obvious. Wix says other billing periods exist but doesn't show the monthly-billing price. Most yearly plans come with a free domain for the first year, but only the first time you buy a plan, only for a new domain bought through Wix, and never for a renewal, so the domain becomes a separate bill from year two. New plans have a 14-day money-back period.

Self-hosted WordPress

WordPress is free. What costs money is everything around it. Australian providers were charging this on the same day:

• Hosting. VentraIP's WordPress plan was $9.25 a month for the first year and $18.50 normally, on servers in Sydney. SiteGround's Australian site showed $4.99 a month, renewing at $26.99 a month, both excluding GST.
• A .com.au domain. $9.95 for the first year at VentraIP, then $22.95.
• A premium theme, if you want one. The bestsellers on ThemeForest were US$59 to US$89, paid once. There are good free themes too.
• Paid plugins, if you want them. Wordfence Premium (security) was US$149 a year and UpdraftPlus Premium (backups) started at US$70 a year. Both have free versions.

The trap is the renewal price. Hosting companies advertise the first year. Compare what you'll pay in year two.

WordPress.com

WordPress.com shows Australians prices in US dollars, "excl. taxes": US$4, $8, $25 or $45 a month on a yearly plan (Personal, Premium, Business and Commerce), or US$9, $18, $40 or $70 if you pay monthly. Every paid plan can now install plugins, which a lot of older comparisons still get wrong.

Work out your own numbers

Change any figure below to match the quotes in front of you. It starts with the prices above.

Run it with nobody paid to help and self-hosted WordPress comes to about $611 over three years, against about $1,558 for Wix Core. Add a $59-a-month care plan to WordPress and it costs more than Wix from the second year on, about $2,735 over three years. So WordPress is cheaper as long as you do the upkeep yourself. Once you pay someone to do it, Wix usually costs less.

GST, if you're registered

The ATO says overseas companies charge GST to Australian consumers. A GST-registered business that gives its ABN shouldn't be charged it, but may then have to account for the GST itself under the reverse charge rules, and an overseas supplier without an ABN can't give you a tax invoice to claim a credit with. Wix's Australian prices include GST, WordPress.com's don't, and each host states it differently. Your accountant can tell you which applies.

Who looks after it

This is the difference I'd weigh most, more than the price.

On Wix, Wix does it. Hosting, the security certificate and software updates are all handled. Wix says it's ISO 27001 certified and a PCI DSS Level 1 service provider for card payments. There's nothing for you to update.

On self-hosted WordPress, you do it. WordPress itself is updated regularly, and most sites run a theme and several plugins written by different companies, each with its own updates. Automattic's own description of self-hosting says it requires "intermediate technical knowledge". The risk sits mostly in the add-ons. Patchstack, a company that sells WordPress security, counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025. Of those, 91% were in plugins, 9% in themes and just 6 in WordPress itself, and 46% had no fix from the developer by the time they were made public. Those are a security vendor's figures for sites worldwide, but they show where to look: a site with a few well-kept plugins, updated promptly, is a much smaller target than one with thirty.

WordPress.com sits in between. Automattic runs the hosting and core updates and you choose the plugins.

Wix vs WordPress speed: what the data shows

Wix used to have a reputation for slow sites. The real-world data says that's out of date. The HTTP Archive publishes how sites on each platform score in Google's Core Web Vitals, measured from real Chrome users. These are the August 2026 figures, the latest available.

Most of the gap is loading speed. Worldwide on mobile, 85.0% of Wix sites show their main content quickly enough to pass, against 55.8% of WordPress sites. On responsiveness to taps the two are close (93.2% and 90.8%), and on layouts that don't jump around while loading, Wix leads again (97.8% and 87.2%).

Read these as averages. The WordPress figure includes every cheap host and every heavy theme on the internet, and a carefully built WordPress site on decent hosting passes easily. What the numbers do show is what happens to a beginner. Wix controls the hosting for every site, so a beginner's Wix site is usually quick. A beginner's WordPress site usually isn't.

Can you take your site with you?

If you expect to grow, or to change who looks after your website, this matters more than the price. This is what comes with you when you leave each one.

Wix's help centre is clear about it. It says "the content you build on Wix belongs to you", and also that a site "needs to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers" because "the SaaS architecture does not support external hosting". On blogs: "Currently, it is not possible to export blog posts to other platforms." Leaving Wix means rebuilding somewhere else and moving the content across.

WordPress is released under the GPL, a licence that lets anyone use, copy and change it, and its built-in export (Tools, then Export) produces a file another WordPress site can import.

Online bookings on Wix and WordPress

Wix has its own booking tool from the Core plan up. WordPress has booking plugins. On WordPress.org, Amelia showed more than 90,000 active installations and Bookly more than 60,000.

But a lot of Australian businesses already take bookings in their own software, and those systems work with either platform because they come as a link, a button or a piece of code you paste in. Cliniko publishes a step-by-step guide for adding its booking page to a Wix site. Halaxy gives you embed code or a link. Nookal gives you a button, a text link or a URL. HotDoc gives you code for a booking button or a booking frame. If you already use one of these, you don't need Wix's booking tool or a WordPress plugin, and you shouldn't buy a bigger plan just to get one. If you're a health practice, my online bookings guide covers each system.

Wix vs WordPress for SEO

Google doesn't prefer either. Its own SEO starter guide doesn't name a preferred platform, and Google's John Mueller has said so in plain words. Asked on Reddit in 2021 whether a small business should move from Wix to WordPress, he wrote "Wix is fine for SEO" and "If Wix works for them, and they don't need more, there's no reason to switch", as Search Engine Journal reported. Earlier that year he'd said that on small business sites, the problems are usually the content, not the technology.

That fits how local search works. What ranks a local business is the same on both: a page for each service that actually answers what people ask, accurate details, a well-kept Google Business Profile and reviews. WordPress gives you more control if you want to get technical. For most small businesses, that control isn't what's holding them back.

Where your enquiries are stored

Every contact form collects personal information, and it's stored wherever your platform keeps its data.

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Whether that matters depends on your business. The Privacy Act covers businesses with more than $3 million in annual turnover, plus every health service provider whatever its size, and some others. If it covers you, the Australian Privacy Principles apply to sending personal information overseas. The OAIC says storing information with an overseas cloud provider can count as a "use" rather than a "disclosure" if your contract gives you effective control of it, which changes what you have to do. Whether a standard Wix account meets that test is a question for your adviser. Either way, your privacy policy should say if information is stored overseas. Health businesses can start with my privacy policy guide.

Accessibility

Neither platform makes a site accessible by itself. Wix has an Accessibility Wizard that scans your pages and lists what to fix, and says it "cannot guarantee" your site meets your region's laws. WordPress themes can carry an "accessibility-ready" tag after a manual review, which WordPress says "does not mean that the theme meets the WCAG guidelines AA-level". On both, what decides it is your headings, image descriptions, colour contrast and forms.

What are the disadvantages of Wix?

Being fair to Wix means being clear about where it's weak:

• You can't take the site to another host, and you can't export blog posts.
• Your data is stored overseas, with no Australian option.
• Bookings and payments need the AU$42 Core plan or above, and the free domain only lasts a year.
• You rent the site. Stop paying and it reverts to the free version with Wix ads.
• A typical Wix page carries a lot of JavaScript you can't remove. It still passes Google's speed test more often than WordPress, but a hand-built site can be lighter.

And the disadvantages of WordPress?

• Someone has to keep WordPress, the theme and every plugin updated, and most security problems come from plugins.
• Hosting prices jump at renewal, often to double the first year or more.
• Speed depends on your host and theme, and about half of WordPress sites fail Google's Core Web Vitals.
• Support is your host, a forum or a developer you pay, not one company that owns the whole thing.

Is there anything better than Wix?

For a small service business, the usual alternative is Squarespace. Squarespace showed Australians prices in Australian dollars, excluding GST, on a yearly plan: A$17 a month for Basic, A$28 for Core, A$49 for Plus and A$109 for Advanced. Two things to know if you're comparing it with Wix. On Basic you can't paste in code, so you can't embed a booking widget, only link to one; that needs Core or above. And Squarespace's own bookings tool, Acuity Scheduling, is a separate subscription. On the plus side, Squarespace can export your pages and one blog to WordPress, which Wix can't. Its sites passed Google's speed test less often than Wix's (64.7% for Australian mobile visitors), but more often than WordPress's.

The other alternative is not building it yourself: a studio, a freelancer, or a subscription service like mine. I've written a separate guide on website subscriptions vs one-off builds that works through the costs and what to check in the contract.

Which one should you choose?

Answer these and I'll tell you what I'd do in your position. It's a starting point, not a verdict.

Questions I get asked

Is Wix better than WordPress?

For a small business that will build and edit its own site, often yes: it's simpler, it's looked after for you, and on average its sites are faster. WordPress is better if you want to own and move the site, host it in Australia or publish a lot.

Is Wix cheaper than WordPress?

Not usually. Self-hosted WordPress with a free theme can cost about $120 to $250 a year for hosting and a .com.au at Australian prices. Wix plans with bookings start at AU$42 a month billed yearly. WordPress costs more once you pay someone to maintain it.

Can I move my Wix site to WordPress?

Not directly. Wix says its sites can't be hosted anywhere else and blog posts can't be exported. You rebuild the site on WordPress and copy the content across. Your domain can come with you.

Is WordPress free?

The software is. Hosting and a domain aren't, and premium themes and plugins cost extra if you choose them.

Is Wix bad for SEO?

No. Google's John Mueller has said "Wix is fine for SEO". Your content, your Google Business Profile and your reviews matter far more than the platform.

Does Wix charge GST in Australia?

Wix's prices for Australian visitors say "Price includes GST". The ATO says a GST-registered business that gives its ABN to an overseas supplier shouldn't be charged GST, but the reverse charge rules may then apply. Ask your accountant.

Which is faster, Wix or WordPress?

On average, Wix. In August 2026, 85.9% of Wix sites passed Google's Core Web Vitals for Australian mobile visitors, against 53.9% of WordPress sites. A well-built WordPress site on good hosting can match it.