Wix vs WordPress: who owns your website?

If your website needs to bring in work, use WordPress. If it’s a hobby, or you’re testing an idea over a weekend, Wix will do.

Most Wix vs WordPress comparisons argue about templates and drag and drop. I’ve been making websites since I was 15, and nearly every one we’ve built at Genius Division runs on WordPress. The question I’d ask first is a lot more boring. If you want to leave one day, can you take your website with you?

On Wix, the answer is no.

Do you own a Wix website?

Partly.

Wix says the content you create belongs to you: your words, your photos, your logo. Fair enough. As of September 2026, its help pages also say a few other things that matter a lot more once you’ve spent money on the thing.

• Your site has to run on Wix’s servers. Wix is software you subscribe to, and its help centre says it doesn’t support hosting your site anywhere else. Its templates, and anything else Wix owns, can only be used on Wix too.
• The account owner owns the site. On a free site, that’s whoever owns the Wix account, which Wix identifies by the email address on it. On a paid plan, it’s usually whoever paid.

Read that last one again if somebody else built your website. If a freelancer set it up on their own Wix account and paid for the plan, then in Wix’s eyes it’s probably theirs. Check whose email is on the account today, while you’re still on speaking terms.

What you’ve really got is a rented flat. You can decorate it however the landlord allows, for as long as you keep paying.

Can you move a Wix website to another host?

No. There’s no button to export your Wix site and put it somewhere else, because it only works on Wix.

What you can and can’t take with you, according to Wix’s help centre as of September 2026:

• Your domain name can be managed somewhere else, or transferred away from Wix. Do that bit early. It’s the one piece you can move easily.
• Your blog posts can’t be exported to another platform. Wix lists it as a feature request people are voting on.

You can also embed a Wix site inside another website, but Wix says it can’t support that, and that Google Analytics and search engines may not work properly with it. For a business that wants to be found on Google, forget it.

So moving off Wix means building a new website and copying your content across by hand. The longer you’ve been on it and the more pages you’ve got, the bigger that job gets.

It also means the monthly price is Wix’s decision. If the landlord puts the rent up, you pay it or you move out and rebuild.

What does WordPress give you that Wix doesn’t?

WordPress is open source. You download it for free, put it on whatever hosting you like, and nobody at WordPress has any say in what you do with it after that. If your hosting company gets expensive or useless, you move your website to another one. The website comes with you, pages, blog posts and all.

The other big one is what you can make it do. Wix gives you what Wix has built, plus whatever’s in its app market. With WordPress there are tens of thousands of plugins, and if none of them does exactly what you need, any WordPress developer in the world can build it. That matters the day you want the website connected to your CRM or your booking system, set up the way your business actually works.

I’m not going to pretend WordPress is perfect. Under the hood, a lot of its code is genuinely terrible. It still does the job better than anything else I’ve used for business websites, and it’s got a lot easier to use over the last few years. I’ve written more about that in is WordPress dead in 2026?

What’s the catch with WordPress?

You have to look after it.

WordPress and its plugins need updating. Something needs to be taking backups. Cheap hosting keeps the website online and not much else. On Wix, all of that is Wix’s problem, and that’s what a lot of the monthly fee pays for.

With WordPress, somebody has to do it. That’s you, or somebody you pay who knows what they’re doing. Leave a WordPress website alone for a couple of years and it’ll let you know about it.

So WordPress is buying the house instead of renting the flat. Nobody can put your rent up or change the locks. When the boiler packs in, though, that’s your Saturday gone.

When is Wix fine?

More often than I’d like to admit.

If it’s a hobby, go for it. If you’ve got a new business idea and want a page up this week to see if anyone bites, Wix is quick and cheap to start with. Same goes for a single page that says who you are, that you’ll never touch again. I’d say the same about using AI to build it for those jobs.

Nobody’s relying on those websites to pay the bills. Once somebody is, the question of who owns the thing starts to matter a lot.

So, Wix or WordPress for a small business?

If your website needs to bring in enquiries or sales, I’d build it on WordPress, on hosting you control, with the account and the domain in your name.

If you’re already on Wix and it’s working, there’s no need to panic and move tomorrow. Get the account and the domain into your name. Then plan the move for when the website needs to do more than Wix lets it.

If you’re not sure whether yours is holding you back, have a go at our do I need a new website? check. Or see what we build and what it costs.