I'm Moving My Blog to Wix from WordPress

"Whaaaat?! Why?" may be your initial reaction to the title. So the title is click-baity, but the subject is an important one, so hear me out.

I have been using WordPress for almost my entire career - short of the websites I "built" in Dreamweaver or the really early ones that I wrote in notepad. I am not a web developer (not even close), but pretty good with general technical knowledge and I'll find an answer if it means I get to learn something new in the process. WordPress is/was perfect for me!

Having then worked in an Agency that developed 80-90% of its websites in WordPress it's a system I am ridiculously comfortable with. It is no surprise that it is the backbone of the web, it deserves to be!

So why move away from WordPress?

I am not "done" with WordPress, it hasn't wronged me at all and there's no ill-feelings there. That is not why I have moved. I have done it for two reasons:

1. WordPress isn't a fix-all for everyone, in some circumstances it's not needed or not the best tool for the job. I'm always on the look out for the alternatives to help advise people with.

2. To give things a "fair shot" I'm a firm believer you need to really give them a chance. My personal blog/website has been neglected for a long time, so it's a relatively low risk test, but I'm very invested with it "working" as it'll be a net gain to me if it is.

Given the opportunity to creating a "sand box" for Wix to test it (a partner agency were enquiring as to the viability for certain scenarios), I felt that a more realistic test would be a site that I would put the time into and be able to monitor the progress in my analytics data.

Why Wix?

Really simply, I was asked about it during a call with a partner agency and all I knew is what I'd heard on the Search with Candour podcast and then my conversations with Mordy Oberstein, liaison to the SEO community at Wix.

They sound really serious at making the platform better for SEOs (and therefore all business) and even bringing Mordy onboard to work with the community is a huge commitment. That was enough to make me curious and they were gracious enough to let me access the platform (for free) to see what I thought.

Full disclosure, I'm not getting paid by Wix - this isn't a review. I will share my thoughts/feedback with the Wix team and hope they will make the platform better. There is no reason for me to advocate for it if it doesn't work - which seems fair.

A word from a former CMS snob

I was certainly a CMS snob (a term I've recently heard from fellow self-confused CMS Snob Luke Carthy), it was a simple existence really, the answer to most problems were "build it in WordPress" or sometimes "build it in Magento". But having seen some VERY compelling sites built in "off the shelf" platforms like Shopify and Wix, I have had to revise my original thinking.

Convenience couldn't and shouldn't mean a worse product, at least not now.

I'd go as far to say that for the web to progress we NEED platforms like Wix to be solid, viable options for us to build on. No platform is perfect - Wix isn't, and they'll admit that - but we need to give them the opportunity to improve.

Can you rank on Wix though?

Almost certainly, yes.

Why? Well that's simple, the platform can enable you to publish content easily and people can view/consume that content.

All the other questions about the bloat in the code, the page speed (which they are working hard on at the moment) and the frameworks they'd built the platform on are details which are becoming less of a deal-breaker.

The previous decisions of Wix in the past haven't been great and the product was historically one I'd be steered people away from (with some good reasons), but this is me giving it a chance.

Will I be proven right in the long-term? I hope so, but I still have my old site sitting on WordPress in case I need to switch back.