Wix vs WordPress for a Canadian small business (2026)

The quick answer

• Pick Wix if you'll build and run the site yourself, want bookings or payments with no setup, and won't need to move it.
• Pick WordPress if you want to own a portable site, need specific features, or will have a developer work on it. Budget for upkeep, or choose WordPress.com, which handles it.

Cost: cheap to start vs cheap to run

WordPress is cheaper on paper: WordPress.com Personal is $60 a year and self-hosted runs about $72 a year for Canadian hosting and a .ca domain, against $252 a year for Wix Light. But Wix's price includes the upkeep. Self-hosted WordPress needs updates every few weeks, done by you or paid for. Over three years, a self-hosted site that needs one cleanup can cost more than Wix. A maintained one usually costs less. Numbers: Wix pricing, WordPress pricing.

Ownership and moving

This is the biggest difference. WordPress's export tool produces a standard file of posts, pages, comments, custom fields and users that any WordPress site can import (docs), and you can move hosts whenever you like. Wix states that a Wix site must run on Wix's servers. If your business depends on the site for years, that matters.

Features and growth

Wix includes payments, a store and scheduling from Core, plus apps from its App Market. WordPress has more than 60,000 plugins: if a feature exists for websites, someone has built it for WordPress. That reach is why growing businesses tend to end up on WordPress, and why WordPress sites can become a tangle of plugins without discipline.

Editing day to day

Wix is easier for a first-timer: drag, drop, publish. WordPress's block editor is good with a well-built theme and frustrating with a poor one. One thing to know about Wix: you can't switch the template once the site exists. On WordPress, changing the theme is routine.

Our take

If the site is a simple online presence you'll run yourself, Wix is fine and the upkeep you skip is worth something. If the site is how customers find you and will grow, WordPress's ownership and flexibility win, provided someone keeps it maintained. We build on WordPress, so factor in our bias; the Wix review and WordPress review lay out both sides.