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Wix V WordPress

I’m probably not going to make any friends with this post – however we all need to wake up to the fact that other solutions around building websites exist. Did Wix do the right thing? – probably not but, it may just get us thinking together to make WordPress a better solution for non developers and in turn, make our lives a little easier too. 

Here’s the transcript, closed captions are on the way! 

(00:00):

I am absolutely loving the campaign of Wix versus WordPress. There is a Twitter storm going on at the moment. The date is Wednesday, the 7th of April, 2021, the year of COVID again. And Twitter’s gone that about Wix sending some influences in the WordPress community headphones. So w

hat’s it all about? Well, basically wicks are saying that WordPress is unreliable. They’re not wrong. And Wix is saying, come to us because we’re an all in one platform, we’ve got security, we’ve got all the, ad-ons all the basics of what WordPress offer you. But with thousands of plugins, now, when you look at it, as I say, they’re not really wrong as a WordPress developer and builder of websites, WordPress is hard work for developers, but customers don’t actually really don’t care about that.

They just want a website that works. So Wix is aiming at people that have had their website hacks, that people that are confused over hosting. What plugin do I need? What booking plugins gonna work? Well, what Facebook integration is it going to integrate with my email marketing system or is Wix just going to offer me everything out of the box? So let’s just have a little pause here and see just one of the adverts that wicks are doing.

(01:35):

So WordPress, how was your week? Any updates? Oh, six new updates. If you know what I, if you know what I mean, no offense, but you don’t know a real doctor. Do you seriously? Can’t even spend two minutes with a client. What’s wrong with him? Who knows? Could be a plugin problem. It could be a hosting issue. Maybe his memory is exhausted.

There’s just too many things that could go wrong, doctor. Okay. He’ll be great. As long as I keep working my butt off on his maintenance white screen of death is that you it’s too late for me, buddy. I hope you back me up. Can we not do this right now? I have a deadline. My client’s going to kill me. And even though this disaster is clearly her fault, I want you to know on switch to a hassle free platform like Wix. You guys need to see your bases. I mean, come on seriously. You’re killing me. You guys are classic.

(03:06):

So let’s have a look at what Wix actually offer out of the box. So there’s the whole holistic approach to building a website with Wix. And then we’re going to have a look at what you have to do with WordPress to pretty much achieve the same thing. And we’re going to look at costings or vape costings because we’ve got some hosts out there that offer 2. 50 a month or $2 50 a month for a web hosting package. And clearly that’s a lead generator because a lot of hosts are saying, well, we’re not charging enough because your website is getting more traffic. So you’re going to have to go out to our business plan or pro plan or whatever. But essentially if you are going to do a WordPress website, buy the pro plan straight away, because then that will stop a few headaches, but let’s have a look at Wix so we can see that creation.

(03:57):

So they’ve got website design, website templates. They’ve got over 800 designer templates and they’re pretty good. If you have a look around wix.com, you’ll see that you can fit pretty much any genre within a Wix template. You’ve got advanced web development. So you can put in things like custom fields and add your own coding and you can also hire a partner. So you’ll see that the pricing of hiring a partner of Wix will be quite expensive, sometimes much more expensive than if you went to a WordPress developer. If you searched the web for web developers and even got three quotes in, you’d see that hiring a partner for Wix is really quite expensive. They’ve got their logo, making everybody loves the logo and probably most people like it bigger. That’s the most commented thing that we as web developers and designers have to put up with from clients saying, I want my logo bigger.

(04:55):

And you can build a portfolio websites. So it’s perfect for say, even if you’re in catering or outside Patrion, you can put in a portfolio of things that you’ve done, even if you’re not offering e-commerce photographers perfect for a portfolio wedding venues, perfect again for a portfolio. And if you want to write a blog, you can write a blog on Wix. And if you look at the business situation, you can do an online store. All the payments would go through Wix, or you can use Stripe or PayPal. It’s up to you. Wix may charge slightly more. It’s kind of a Shopify model if you’ve ever heard of Shopify. And let’s not forget that Shopify has grown their share price. Certainly over the last year has grown by about 130%. So people trying to get online with Shopify and easily, quickly get online with an e-commerce website.

(05:42):

I’ve gone to Shopify as well. So their market share is growing. It’s still only under 5%. WordPress is still 40% of the top 10 million websites that are out there. And certainly government websites in the UK and the U S and all around the world are using WordPress because it’s, it’s easy from a developer perspective. You’ve got services and membership. So you can have a membership site there. If you’re offering a service, you can sort out subscriptions. If you’re offering a membership site, you can have again, subscriptions for that or annual payments, it’s up to you. And you’ve got point of sale. So if you’ve got a bricks and mortar website, again, very much like Shopify or Squarespace, they offer a point of sale till so it really does cover everything and they cover all online payments, orders, and fulfillment. So if you’ve got a, a little business that’s making candles and you want to sell those on the web, you can use a Wix website for that as well and drop shipping.

(06:38):

So they’ll go into a drop shipping t-shirt maker or a mug maker, or a premium items. If you want to sell watches, pens, whatever you like, you can sort out an integration with a drop shipper put a margin on that and use a Wix website to handle all of that. And you’ve got multi-channel sales across. You can sell across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and that sort of thing. So these Wix websites and Shopify websites, they will align with Google shopping and you can sell your products across all of those channels. And they’ll all go through Wix payments situation as well. And it, it allows for growth as well. So when we build a WordPress website, sometimes we say, if you’ve got a MailChimp account or MailerLite or active campaign, any one of the very many, Clavio’s very many email marketing platforms, which are a separate cost and can become very expensive.

(07:35):

Wix has its own email marketing system as well, which is an add on cost. I have to admit, but it’s all in one platform. You don’t have to worry about integrating it. It’s just all there. And it’s got its own little video maker. You can create promotional videos within Wix as well, put them straight on your website. You know, that those videos are going to be optimized for the web. Do your social posts automatically post from a blog post or a page or a product straight from Wix. And you’ve got your Facebook ads where you can target back to your Wix website as well. And it’s got loads of resources as well. The problem with WordPress, and this is what wicks are highlighting is that it has an update. At least it feels like every other day, but it doesn’t because we use plugins and extensions and everything in WordPress, and sometimes those need updating regularly.

(08:26):

So what a lot of WordPress developers and agencies are offering is these thing called care plans, which is yes, it’s an extra cost. And sometimes it can be as much as a thousand pounds a month. Let’s be aware that if you are on wordpress.com as a VIP customer, just to pay for support is 25 grand. It’s crazy, crazy money. So, you know, we’ve got to be aware that even wordpress.com VIP will charge phenomenal amounts of money for you to get support. So if you see a WordPress care plan, have a look at it, see what they offer. It could be backups could be updating your blog, certainly updating plugins and updating WordPress as well. And they may even have a premium hosting offering within that. I know that I certainly do. So you’ve got all of the apps, you know, you’ve got 250 plus apps that you can go in there, and they’re pretty much covered from booking plugins to SEO, to site optimization.

(09:24):

And one of the things that’s really important at the moment is core vitals, which is a Google page speed. So if Google thinks your page speed for web and mobile it’ll desktop and mobile is slow, then they’re going, or they’re saying, they’re going to denigrate your listing on Google. Even if you don’t have a listing, you’ll be even worse off. And you can sort out your blog. And if you’re a developer, which a Wix have sent these developers, these headphones, maybe they’re trying to persuade them to come on board as a partner and earn extra money using Wix. And obviously you’ve got your pricing, which is straight out of the box, you know exactly what you’re going to pay. That’s what you’re going to pay every month, 18 pounds a month in the UK for a VIP unlimited. So you’ve got this is for entrepreneurs and freelances.

(10:13):

So you can have your free domain for a year. You can remove the Wix ads on there, and you’ve got a lot of space. So story space is 35 gigabyte for most websites is okay. And if you need more than they will, they will give you more, but you lawfully obviously have to pay for it. So they go, I like the way they do VIP. First of all, the 18 pounds a month, like I was saying, a lot of WordPress hosts offer two 50 a month, whether it’s dollars or pounds, but really you should go for the premium first thing. And the $25 to $150 a month. I know that can stir for a WooCommerce website is saying really, it’s going to cost you a hundred dollars a month to host your website and WP or flywheel are the same and WP engine pretty much, you know, 50, 50 to 75 to a hundred pounds a month will get you pretty decent hosting for your WooCommerce e-commerce website.

(11:05):

So I love the way that wicks are saying right straightaway. Let’s, let’s highlight the most expensive price because this is what you get. And along with that, you’ve obviously got the business and e-commerce plans. And again, they’re saying business, so for e-commerce it’s 22 a month straight away. So, you know, multiply that by 12 months and you’ve got a few hundred quid, you know, so it’s, it’s, it’s going to be not cheap, let’s say, but again, inexpensive, if you’re serious about building your business on the web and Wix are saying, spend your 22 a month because you’re going to get extra storage space. And obviously the storage is negated because Wix actually used their own CDN, which is a content delivery network. So your images are off late to a a fast server. So it helps weeks be faster if you like.

(11:54):

So you’ve got all the commerce products that you want. Really, you’ve got variable products, you’ve got single products. You’ve got your membership places you can sell your stuff on marketplaces and go through weeks for the payment, et cetera. And that’s it really, Wix is an all around solution. And what they’re trying to do with these adverts is persuade people that it’s better than WordPress. So let’s take a little pause here. Let’s have a lot of, they look at another advert that weeks have done and I’ll move on to why they’re saying WordPress is okay.

(12:34):

Yeah. Again, pled press. You never mentioned you have kids, aren’t they adorable? They’re not kids. They’re plugins. And they’ve been conflicting since we left the house. Well, I just stop at kids plugins just to let them have some fun. And when they accidentally mess up our home page, are you going to clean up after them? Oh, now he’s going to tell you that his career is going nowhere because our plugins are taking up too much of his time or not. Our plugins. There are third-party. They make me nervous. And the short one never blinks dare you. You know what if you’re so unhappy, maybe you should go to wakes with their perfectly integrated third party apps. It’s okay. Daddy’s here.

(13:32):

So you can imagine if you’re looking to build a website and you see those adverts, a Wix versus WordPress, you’re going to think, Oh, I thought WordPress was the best platform out there. Well, clearly, according to Wix, it isn’t. And a lot of WordPress developers, as I said, have found, have found that the Wix adverts are offensive. Are they? Yes, probably, but it weeks and WordPress have always had a bit of an argument. There was an argument over Wix making an app for the phone and iPad and everything and using GPL software and a GPS is the free web software kind of licensing. It’s not actually free, but it’s it’s basically, you have to acknowledge where you’ve got your software from. If you’re using GPL and WordPress PHP most of the things on the web are covered under GPL, even plugins.

(14:31):

So if you’re a plug-in developer and you’ve developed this knockout plugin, anybody can come along repurpose that plugin don’t even have to change the code, call it something else and sell it. Now, this has happened to SEO plugins. This has happened to flip boxes and a variety of plugins that are specifically a particular thing like Divi or Elementor, it just goes on. So people might repurpose it or might just put an addition to it and then go out and sell it as their own. It’s part of GPL. So with Wix, what do you get, where you get your WordPress, you get your website rather, and you get everything in it on the e-commerce it’s limited to 500 transactions a month, and they may charge you a bit more if you’re over that certainly Shopify charge you a premium. If you go over 500 transactions or they up their monthly transaction rate, or they give you a discount on the credit card payments, but they’ll also charge you a bit more for the monthly traffic that you’re using, which is fine.

(15:35):

There’s no problem with that. If you’re selling a hundred million dollars a year, like Jim shark are on Shopify or you’re using something like Squarespace and your Keanu Reeves, and you’re getting a lot of hits on your motorbike shop, then, you know, it’s a cost of sale and that’s the key. What is the cost of sale that you’re willing to pay? Do you want ultimate flexibility with WordPress, where you can do what you like? You can host it with your own server. You can buy a server from vulture or use a company like grid pane. Like I do for managing all my sites on my vulture and my other cloud-based servers that I buy and that I service, or do you want somebody to look after it forever? Now the danger is that if you’re using a web developer and they’re doing the hosting, that web developer may not live forever even with an agency agencies get sold, they changed their plans.

(16:35):

They changed their view on how much they should charge. And also we’re all, you know, let’s, let’s face it. We’re all vulnerable to life and death. You know, death and taxes. That’s all everybody pays for that eventually. Or everybody dies eventually with companies like wix.com as a corporation. There’s always going to be employees there. Same as Shopify. Doesn’t matter if someone dies within Shopify, really it’s sad, but your website is not going to go down or you’re not going to lose access to your website. So the, all these things you have to consider right, onto more cheerful things. What does WordPress offer that Wix doesn’t Oh, as I said, total flexibility. You can either use wordpress.com, where again, the hosting is all built in and you can build pretty much anything you like from a blog to a portfolio, to a weddings, to a floral, whatever you like, yoga, sports, gym, plumber, electrician, all on wordpress.com using their templates.

(17:42):

It’s really quite easy. And you know exactly how much it’s going to cost you a month, or you can go the developer and use something like wordpress.org, where there’s 60,000 plus plugins. And you’ve seen that some of them do conflict and they do. It’s a fact of life. And sometimes developers may add a plugin which mucks up another plugin. And it’s just a learning curve that we all have to go through. With wordpress.org, you download WordPress and install it on a server, or you use a host where they’ve got a one-click install. And that’s what most developers do, to be honest. So we install WordPress on us, on our chosen server. We install a theme or we bootstrap it and build it from scratch, using PHP and bootstrap code and things like that. The customers really don’t want to know about. And there’s inbuilt flexibility. If you want a booking engine in there for a hotel or an event engine or a learning management system like lifter LMS, or learn dash or something like that, then WordPress is the answer to all your problems. So why have Wix really gone against WordPress?

(18:59):

The amount of websites that word press power wicks are envious. Why wouldn’t they be they’re a paid for per month platform? So it’s a premium platform. There are hundreds, if not thousands of web hosts out there that will offer you service. And as I said, some of them are ridiculously priced. You’ve got HostGator, millions of people use HostGator. If you ask a developer, well, I don’t really want to use HostGator unless you’re going to pay premium. The customer says, well, actually I can get this website or I can get my website hosted for two 95 a month or whatever. Let’s have a look at the price pricing it’s shared hosting. So that means your host, your website is on a server that could have one or a thousand sites on it, even 10,000. So you may have some conflicts going there. If it’s one of those sites is particularly busy.

(19:57):

Your site will run slowly. It’s as simple as that. So get started at $2 75 a month. If you’re a WordPress customer, or you’re thinking about buying hosting from any host, this isn’t particularly against HostGator, and you only want to pay two pounds 75 a month. Think again, if you’re not serious about your business, and I know that that might be offensive to people, but if you’re going to go cheap, you’re going to get cheap. We had a saying in the printing industry, when I was in it, there’s always time for a reprint. And what that meant was that a customer would come to us and we’d quote them a thousand pounds to do 10,000 leaflets. And we were maybe even a hundred pounds or 200 pounds more expensive than the guy down the road and guy down the road printed it, it was rubbish.

(20:50):

So the customer comes to us and says, can you print this leaflet? Cause I know your quality is great. And we go, yeah. Okay. That’s no problem, but I need it tomorrow. Well, we can’t deliver it to you tomorrow. We’ll get it to you next week. The customer goes okay, as long as it’s top notch quality. So what was the point of that story from my printing arena, where I was for 20 plus years. And I started building websites when I was still doing printing. The point is, is that there are just so many hosts out there. There’s dream host part of the EIG group and they own hundreds of web hosting companies. So straight away there’s confusion. Then we have in motion, great host reasonably priced, five 99 a month. They don’t offer a two 75 a month like DreamHost or HostGator.

(21:44):

So it’s two 75 a month to start off. And frankly, if you are a customer looking at this and you’re looking thing, Oh, I’ll go to HostGator. That’s only two 75 a month. Think again HostGator are a good host. They’re owned by E I G, which is the same company that owns DreamHost. So again, who do I go to? What are their policies? Are they the same as EIG? Or are they the same as the, which is again an extremely big hosting company? Or should I go to someone like in motion? Or should I go to, if I’m in the UK, one, two, three rage or live, let me see where I’m going with this as a WordPress customer. I’m confused. I just don’t know what to do. Is that the plan? Is it the plan that I should be confused as a WordPress customer and just search Google for WordPress developers?

(22:44):

When I do that, I’m going to get a hundred thousand results. I’m going to get five Fiverr. Wix is going to show up because I’ve put in WordPress. So they’re doing a campaign on ad words, et cetera. And all their SEO is around WordPress to try and Nick me as a customer. So what do we do about it as a WordPress developer? A WordPress is our favorite development platform. We developed for governments. We developed for healthcare. We developed for the small mom and pop businesses. How can I persuade my WordPress clients or potential WordPress clients that I’m better than Wix that I provide a better service? That’s a tough one. Isn’t it? So there’s companies out there like let’s have a look at focus WP. That’s one of my favorite companies out there now focused WP. I’ve got a 3d thing going on there, but I haven’t got any 3d glasses to look at that.

(23:48):

So scale, your agency was white label maintenance, non demand, copywriting and development services notes. So these are divert. These are really aimed at the agency that says, you know what? I can’t cope with all my clients. I don’t, I just want to build websites and I want to do it in WordPress, but I don’t really want to cope with the maintenance. So I’ll sign up to someone like focus WP and they’ll maintain all my websites for me on my behalf and they’ll do it white label. So even if they do have connections with my client, that my client will think I’m doing it myself or it’s one of my staff members. So those are your options. Or you could sign up to a company like grid pane who offer a desk, a desktop dashboard, which allows you to manage your websites on a plethora of hosts, AWS.

(24:42):

That sound what that will look so you can choose your provider, which is DigitalOcean volt, Shirley node, Anna’s in LightSail up cloud, and you can even add your own custom VPs to it. So I use grid pane. I’ve got roadshow high-frequency servers, and I’ve got a DigitalOcean server that I use just for development. And one of my sites, my, this is Andrew palmer.com site sits on there. It’s quite fast getting a hundred and out of a hundred on Google pay, speeding science, which is okay. I use a plugin called nitro pack. So there’s WordPress developers and WordPress people that sell WordPress sites. We need to get our act together and we need to be able to say to customers, WordPress is best because it’s under your control. You can move hosts anytime you like. If you go for a cheap host, are we going to recommend that you go for a slightly more expensive host or you have your own server, which if I’m using grid pane, I can give my client direct access to their website and their own server quite handy, right? Or we say, okay, go for Wix or go for bricks or go for Elementor or go for divvy.

(26:00):

The problem is, is that WordPress is a platform. And the way that WordPress are getting over that is saying, we’re not just going to be a platform for all these page builders and all these solutions and all these plugins. We’re going to introduce something called full site editing within Gutenberg, which is our own plugin, which allows people to drag and drop blocks around the page and truly design wizzy week. What you see is what you get websites now, until that moment comes until that whole euphoria of Gutenberg and the use and the take-up of it, and lots of WordPress developers still don’t like it. Some love it. Some don’t like it. Some see it as the future of WordPress. I do particularly I think page builders aren’t seeing the writing on the wall and I’m not going to make any estimates now, but I reckon a few years time page builders will be the second choice to WordPress and Gutenberg.

(27:04):

Now, what we also need to do is sort these guys out, not just HostGator, not just EIG, not just deluxe, we need to say to them, you’ve got to start charging reasonable prices to the end user and making sure that you have set up your servers so that they are powerful enough to handle WordPress and WooCommerce or any other e-commerce plugin that we plug into WordPress and the 256 megabyte upload or memory limit, make it double it five 28, whatever it is, make sure that your hosting can cope. And the massive shared hosting situations that you have. Don’t put a thousand websites on one server, knock it down to 500 or even two 50. You’ve got enough capacity. You’re making enough money. We know they’re making money because companies like neccess liquid web, I themes. All part of the same company are buying people like cadence, WP, and why have they done that?

(28:15):

Part of the reason is that cadence WP is a theme, but it works on blocks and it works perfectly with Gutenberg. It’s got its own blocks. It’s got its own customizer. It’s the way it works. It’s a great theme. Astra. What over 1 million downloads of Astra, the theme Astra. It’s a fantastic theme. It works with every single page builder out there, Beaver builder, Devi, builder, Elementor all of them. It really is a good thing. And it works perfectly with Gutenberg. They even supply free layouts so that you can build a website very, very quickly, but it’s not Wix. It’s not Shopify. It’s not Squarespace. I don’t just sign up for this. I have to download Astra through the WordPress repository. I then have to sign up to the pro version of that, but I’ve already installed WordPress and I’ve already gone through the mail and signed up to a host that maybe don’t offer something that I want in motion.

(29:19):

For instance, I have bold grid. It’s a fantastic plugin. 600,000 websites are powered by it. Nobody really knows about bold grid in my community, in the WordPress community, because it’s aimed at the user. It’s also used on other hosts. It’s a standalone page builder for other hosts as well. They offer a bold grid subscription. So as soon as we take out the confusion from WordPress, which is pretty much an impossible task companies like Wix, Shopify Squarespace, and all of the other cloud-based hosting all in one solutions are going to take market share. And if you’re a website developer, open your mind, think about what you want to do and what you want to achieve. Do you want to earn money or do you want to sit behind the desk, coding all of your life and not really growing your business? Or do you want to be approachable agnostic in every single sense of the word?

(30:24):

As far as websites are concerned, if you’re the second one, I think you’re going to make some money. We’re agnostic. We’re a Shopify partner. We do Wix websites. Believe it or not. I don’t mind it. It’s fine. It’s a way to get a website up there. And if a customer like has recently happened has a Shopify solution and that solution has outgrown them, then we’ll build them a WordPress website that is exactly the same and works in a similar way, but maybe the transactions are easier to cope with. And the management is easier to cope with WordPress is an all in one solution. As long as you as a WordPress developer can persuade your customer that the plugins they need, they really do need. And as a WordPress developer, I see it as your duty to avoid sliders at all costs. I’m not the only one that says that I have a very good conversation with UST from Yoast and they hate sliders.

(31:31):

So go to yoast.com and search for sliders and you’ll see why they hate sliders. They slow websites down. Their calls to action are not that brilliant. And they take up a lot of space. So on that note, as a WordPress developer, open your mind, look at other solutions out there. Think of your customer first, rather than how you’re offended by Wix, sending people headphones and the adverts that you’ve seen on this video. So thanks for watching. I really do appreciate it. I know it’s long, but WordPress has a great future. And you as a WordPress developer has an even better future. If you open your opinions and look at other solutions that are out there for your potential customers, I’ll speak to you soon.

 

Let’s have a one on one- In May