Wix: quick online, but with a ceiling
Wix is designed to be as easy as possible. Dragging blocks, choosing a template, going live. For a starting freelancer or a simple business card site, that’s fine. But as your business grows, you will encounter limitations.
Wix manages your website for you, which means you have little control over it. You are tied to their infrastructure, their pricing, and their capabilities. Exporting to another platform? Practically impossible. Wix is a closed ecosystem, and that is comfortable as long as you stay small.
Shopify: strong for webshops, weak for the rest
Shopify is built for e-commerce, and you can tell. For selling products online, it is one of the best solutions available. Payments, inventory management, shipping integrations: Shopify has it all well organized.
But as soon as you want a strong corporate website alongside your webshop, want to write blogs, or need more complex content structures, Shopify falls short. It is a powerful tool for one specific task. If you use it for something else, you will feel that mismatch.
WordPress: flexible, scalable and yours
WordPress runs on more than 40 percent of all websites in the world. That’s no coincidence. The platform is open source, which means you are fully the owner of your website, your data, and your code. No platform decides to raise prices or remove features.
For SMEs that want to grow seriously online, WordPress is the most logical choice. You can do almost anything with it: from a simple corporate website to a complex webshop, a membership area, or a multilingual platform. And because WordPress is so widely supported, there are always developers, plugins, and integrations available when you want to scale further.
The only downside: WordPress requires more than Wix. You need a good hosting provider, regular maintenance, and preferably an agency that knows what it’s doing. Having a WordPress website made by a specialized agency costs more than a Wix subscription, but delivers a platform that grows with you.
The question you should ask
Not "what is the cheapest?", but: "What will my business need in three years?"
A Wix site for €20 per month sounds attractive until you realize that you will have to start over in two years because the platform cannot handle your growth. A well-built custom WordPress website is an investment that pays for itself because it is customizable, findable, and scalable.
You choose Shopify if e-commerce is your core business. You choose Wix if you need something quickly and growth is not a priority. You choose WordPress if you want a website that truly supports your business.
For most SMEs, that answer is actually not that difficult.
