WordPress continues to lead by a wide margin, powering roughly 42.5-43.5% of all websites globally in 2026, and around 60% of the market among sites running an identifiable CMS.

Wix sits well behind at approximately 4.2-4.3% of all websites, though it remains the most widely used dedicated website builder in the world, having grown from close to nothing in 2014. Wix has continued adding share steadily through 2025 and into 2026, driven heavily by its AI-assisted site generation tools and a genuine free tier, both of which lower the barrier to entry for first-time site owners.

Analysis of where WordPress’s market share has shifted in 2026 found that Squarespace and Wix combined accounted for only around 6% of WordPress’s losses, with most movement instead going to modern site builders like Framer and Webflow, or to sites with no detectable CMS at all. Wix isn’t so much stealing existing WordPress users as capturing a different audience from the outset, typically first-time site owners who were never going to build on WordPress in the first place.

Wix’s pricing is straightforward and, notably, drops its platform transaction fee entirely when you use Wix Payments, a genuine point in its favour. WordPress’s costs are more variable, but tend to scale better for growing or content-heavy sites.

Wix UK pricing correct as of mid-2026, billed annually. WordPress hosting costs vary by provider and site requirements.

WordPress’s SEO advantage comes from the depth of control available through plugins like Yoast SEO or Rank Math: granular schema markup, custom redirects, full sitemap control, and complete freedom over URL and content structure.

Wix’s SEO tooling has improved substantially in recent years and is genuinely competitive at a basic level, editable meta tags, alt text, clean URLs, and built-in SEO guidance through its Wix SEO tools panel. Where it still falls short of WordPress is depth: advanced schema types, granular crawl control, and the kind of large-scale content architecture (topic clusters, pillar pages, extensive blog taxonomies) that content-driven WordPress sites are built around.

On raw technical performance, Wix has a genuine edge worth acknowledging. Wix’s Core Web Vitals pass rate sits around 71-75%, ahead of the WordPress average, since Wix controls the entire hosting and rendering stack and optimises it centrally. A well-built, well-hosted WordPress site can match or exceed that, but it takes deliberate work to get there rather than coming as standard.

For businesses planning to invest seriously in organic search over the medium to long term, particularly through content marketing, WordPress’s ceiling on SEO control remains meaningfully higher than Wix’s.

Wix manages security entirely on your behalf. Hosting, SSL, platform updates, and infrastructure security are all handled centrally, with nothing for the site owner to patch or maintain. That’s a genuine advantage for anyone without the time or inclination to think about site maintenance.

WordPress puts security in the hands of whoever manages the site. Core, theme, and plugin updates all need to be kept current, and a proper backup and monitoring routine (tools like Wordfence are standard here) is essential rather than optional. Managed correctly, this isn’t a heavy burden, and WordPress security tooling has matured significantly, but it is an active responsibility rather than something handled invisibly in the background.

The trade-off is the same one that runs through most of this comparison: Wix trades control for convenience, WordPress trades convenience for control.

This is where Wix has made its most significant investment in recent years, and it’s a genuine differentiator worth covering on its own. Wix’s AI site generator can build a full working website, structure, copy, and imagery, from a short text prompt, and its ongoing AI features extend into content editing, image generation, and basic SEO suggestions built directly into the dashboard.

Combined with an app market running into the several hundreds, covering everything from bookings and loyalty programmes to advanced marketing automation, Wix has built a genuinely capable all-in-one ecosystem for businesses that want functionality without custom development.

WordPress’s equivalent isn’t a single unified AI layer, it’s a rapidly growing set of AI-powered plugins (for content, image generation, and SEO) layered onto an existing, much larger plugin ecosystem. The functional ceiling is higher on WordPress since there’s effectively no limit to what a developer can build or integrate, but it doesn’t arrive as a single polished, native experience the way Wix’s does.

For a business that wants AI-assisted building entirely self-serve, with nothing to configure, Wix currently has the smoother experience. For a business that wants AI capability built into a fully custom, owned platform, WordPress still offers the greater long-term ceiling.

There is no universal answer, but there is usually a clearer answer for any specific business.

Here’s how we’d frame it:

As with Squarespace, the deciding factor usually isn’t which platform is “better” in the abstract, it’s whether you’re building something that needs to stay flexible and scale on your terms, or something that just needs to exist, look professional, and be simple to run.

Whether you’re starting fresh, have outgrown Wix’s app market and lock-in, or want a website built to scale properly with your business, we can help you build something on WordPress that’s designed for long-term growth and full ownership.