.png){kind=small}
Wix and WordPress are two popular website building platforms used by many people, both beginners, and expert developers. Both platforms are able to produce a good website, both in terms of design and function. But these two platforms have some differences that every user should pay attention to. One of these differences is website optimization for Search Engines or SEO.
Website pages that have been well optimized will certainly rank well on search engine pages, such as Google. So, the better the position of your website pages on Google, the opportunity to get traffic (visitors) will also be better and these visitors will become potential customers for your business.
One of the important website optimization factors is website speed. This can have a huge impact on user experience. If you have a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load on a mobile device, then most users will leave your website immediately.
To speed up page load times, you can perform an analysis using speed test platforms to find out what factors are making your website slow. Speed test platforms such as Google PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix, or Pingdom Website Speed Test, and so on can be used to find out what factors need improvement. Several factors that affect website speed are Javascript and CSS files, the number of redirects, website compression, and image or video file sizes, etc.
From the factors above, Wix seems unable to accommodate website optimization. Wix doesn't give users the freedom to change the core of the platform and this is a barrier for those of you who want to create an SEO-friendly website. Fortunately, WordPress accommodates this for businesses, where in this CMS platform, you can improve website performance.
Benefits of Using WordPress
There are definitely good reasons why WordPress is becoming one of the largest and most popular CMS platforms on the market, some of which are:
- Besides offering ease of use for novice users, WordPress also provides a number of options for experienced users so they can improve website performance according to their wishes and needs.
- Thanks to its open-source nature and a large collection of plugins and themes, WordPress has an extra edge when it comes to customization.
- There are a variety of options for creating and managing content.
- As a user, you have almost complete control over the security, performance, and hosting of your site.
WordPress has the same SEO tools that Wix offers. However, WordPress provides more freedom and flexibility in controlling these SEO tools. WordPress also allows you to optimize for site speed and provides access to a number of advanced options to make the indexing and crawling process easier.
Challenges in Wix to WordPress Migration
As we know, Wix is not known for making it easy to move your content to other platforms. This requires manual downloads of your pages, images, and other content.
In the case that 42 Interactive faced when Wix to WordPress migration process, we had to make a WordPress website layout design like the Wix website design. Starting from the header and footer setup, home page and inner page layout, and gallery layouts. All layout setups use the Brizy page builder plugin.
Why do we use Brizy? Because this page builder plugin is very light, easy, and flexible to make various layout designs and produce websites with small file sizes.
Apart from the challenges in terms of website layout, there are also challenges with mail server integration. Because Wix does not have a mail server and many people use Google suite as a mail server and mail client. In webmail integration, problems can arise when setting up the contact form. Website visitors who fill in the contact form, may not see the data coming into the Google suite inbox, unless it is set up correctly.
Thorough testing and mail server setup, both on the contact form page setup and in Cpanel can resolve the issues. The solution for allowing a submission contact form to come into the Google suite inbox, means we have to change two things:
- Create an MX record in the Cpanel editor zone, with the following conditions:
Destination: ASPMX.L.GOOGLE.COM.
Priority: 1 - Add .test-google-a.com behind the recipient's email address
Example: info@domain.com .test-google-a.com
Conclusion
After migrating from Wix to WordPress and carrying out website optimization, and by reducing javascript and css file sizes, reducing image and video file sizes and fixing SEO issues that slow down website speed, we are able to make websites faster to load as they have a much smaller size than Wix websites.
From the speed test results above, we can see the benefits of Wix to WordPress migration. The website becomes faster, lighter, and SEO friendly. With performance improvements seen like the above, the website will be much easier and more likely to rank on page 1 of search engines, with proper SEO.
We hope this article helped you to optimize your website and to get a better rank in search engines.
If you’d like to discuss how we could help you with your website, please feel free to contact us using the form below.