Publishing a personal website was once a costly and complicated business. Not any longer. User-friendly platforms such as WordPress and Wix let you publish online for free, and you might not even need to pay for web hosting. They give you everything you need to design and populate your site, maintain it and interact with visitors. It’s estimated that nearly half a billion websites are built on WordPress, while upwards of 200 million people use Wix.
But which one should you choose? It’s not a case of one being better than the other. They’re fundamentally different products, approaching the task from different directions. More apt would be to look at the various jobs that a personal website publisher would need to undertake, to see how each handles them in turn.
The best place to start is with hosting, as the choice you make there can determine on its own whether WordPress or Wix is the right choice for you.
Hosting options
You can host your site for free as a subdomain of wordpress.com – or if you already have your own web domain you can run it there, without paying a penny to WordPress itself. Many web hosts offer one-click deployment of WordPress, and they can also take care of tracking and installing updates to the WordPress software, along with any themes and extensions you’ve installed.
If your host doesn’t offer an option such as this, you can upload and configure WordPress yourself. All you need is a server running
