When it comes to website creation and wondering where to host the site. The common and frequent question comes up in asking which would be best to use. There are many sites out there on the internet that can be a host for your website that you wish to have or create for a variety of reasons. First is to ask what is the purpose of the website for? The second question that should be asked is what is needed on the website that can be put together and accomplished? Once these two questions are answered, then the web designers and developers as a team can go into detail about the needs of the owner to the site and the direction to the audience that the owner can provide. I say owner as to whomsoever will be the director or CEO of the site and company or organization.
As I have stated there are many websites that can help you host your very own website and content you provide to it. However, each hosting platform has special features and qualities that are provided. Unfortunately, many sites have limitations to the hosting platform. The previous questions answered from above can give a direction toward which platform is best to use. To this end, each platform has its pros and cons, As well as its limitations, and or level of difficulty to the ease of use. To reference these examples by name among thousands of sites, they are: GoDaddy, WIX, Squarespace, Shopify, WordPress, Web Flow, Hostinger, Fiverr, Bluehost, Cargo collective, Ready Mag, Weebly, and Netlify with GitHub. Each of these hosting sites have different features and tools that one can choose from according to their specific needs.
For now, I wish to talk about the pros and cons of two of these listed above and I will compare them the best that I can side by side. These two sites are WIX.com, and GoDaddy.com. Each of these are great hosting platforms to have and work with while understanding of how widely known or how popular they are. Especially in website building as they are seen in advertisements on tv or Other commercially owned places. Since, each web hosting site has their own features and tools they provide which can be limited, there is no best answer as to which site is better than the other because they factor over the needs of the creator, the needs of the business, and the degree of difficulty towards ease of use and functionality. Therefore, I will start with GoDaddy, and then talk about WIX in comparison to other platforms.
The Trouble with GoDaddy
With the Study and research I have done, GoDaddy is very misleading in its pricing as if it were a company on a budget always asking for more. Because of this, they also have been described by others as if it was likened unto a car dealership! It is not consistent from year to year and prices generally increase or are raised by the company of the site. Although the pricing may not come as a shock to some. The first con is with GoDaddy which has things that show or are claimed as for free on their site or allow others to start out with a cheap optional plan. After a while or according to the price of plans that one would purchase, the hosting site company would throw lots of discounts on you to keep you from choosing another hosting platform. Ads to some people are just annoying all around while looking things up on the internet.
Some people lose their interest with GoDaddy over the pop-ups. They constantly try to give you free add-ons to make more money and profit off their customers and clients. You will even have to pay a yearly fee to keep your site protected by identity theft protection that the platform offers.
The pro to GoDaddy is that they have a connection to Microsoft 360. However, GoDaddy has only a limited portion to Microsoft and rebranded by their own company version with their packages or subscriptions that you buy. It has been said that GoDaddy was designed for very small businesses and gives others the capability of up to 10 users at a time. Another con to add is that GoDaddy does not deal with advanced things because it was made for a quick, and easy beginner place to start up your business. Another con is that they also have signing-in problems. They have 2 authentication methods, but it doesn't mean that hackers can still cause you problems. The Authentications can also be a hassle for some, but it can be useful for the data that the site holds.
The trouble of just simply trying to sign in and make or create an account with GoDaddy. Making the customers sign in twice with two different ways of going to the official home page you want to go to just is a bad thing all around, but it can give you the ease of knowing that your site will be protected and ready to be added upon or to edit the site you’ve created. They do not have the best customer support.
Other facts about GoDaddy are that they do not have a very easy customer support system to resolve questions or problems that GoDaddy lacks to fix in their host platform. Having to only email them and wait for the responses and issues to be resolved by them is a waste of valuable time and can be a pain for impatient people. They do not support digital products very well, but it can do a limited number of products with the e-commerce the platform provides. Their forms have issues as well as the ease of giving out PDF’s or other digital forms, or packages, or products with lots of information. They have limited integrations for templates which can limit the options for a creative site. Some have even found that during a certain time of year, GoDaddy has a slow lag time. However, in the search bar of google published sites with GoDaddy have a fast upload speed to bring the site quickly to the viewer. GoDaddy does have a visual editor tool with premade templates for easy to build sites. But they are not the best in variety over the limited use of customized tools for building the site. Thus, proving to not be as extensive as one would hope as they start their site out with this platform.
What Does WIX Have?
WIX has a better updated and more modern themes and templates rather than GoDaddy. WIX is known as a sort of “Android experience” for building any site. It is a complete “wysiwyg” (what you see is what you get!) type of site. WIX in its origin and history was intentionally created for a portfolio or for small business options. Some have said that WIX is the best choice to customize and place the visual elements on a site. You can move elements down to the pixel with a bonus use of the drag and drop method for content. The only catch to building a website with a drag and drop means that you have to work with everything manually. The editor, or developer of the site may have to continue to adjust things manually.
For some, rebuilding their website may be needed if you have other things to make a drastic change. Because of how much control is in customization in WIX; this means that there is more room for user errors. This can also mean that with lots of creativity given to the user, or developer in the building process. Compared to WordPress, WIX proves to be similar in being a content management system and is fully hosted. Even if WIX is not as powerful with a third-party plug-in system that WordPress has. WIX’s platform was originally designed to be a content based website solution.
WIX can be useful with its resources to create blogs, brochures, portfolios, or a basic company/ WordPress site. It has a way to help you sell physical products online with e-commerce but is not as great with the selling stand points like Shopify is made for with its own inventory ideal usage. WIX may also have a booking option when compared to Shopify. To list another pro in addition to creativity, others find that with creativity is that You can even put in wordy animations, and GIF graphics. Which is cool and useful for making your website stand out and be attractive to the audience and other viewers.
Compared to WordPress, WIX may not be as flexible or powerful as WordPress.
Even though WordPress is for more advanced users that designers and developers combined can use as the site gains a need for a better server. (call them tech savvy people!) WIX was not built with customized third-party plugins advancements That WordPress has which could be useful later as a server or database option when there is so much to store in the site.
It is important to mention that WIX with all its creative user-friendly features is not best for big sites that hold tons of information or products. It can become overwhelming to designers and developers to build or create from scratch an entire website that already holds a lot of content that may otherwise need a server to hold and save all the files and pages it stores. The more images and files a site holds within its pages perhaps there could be a chance that the slower it may become for the audience and viewers to upload the site after the searched site is opened.
WIX However, has an “ADI” feature which is an artificial design intelligence or an automated robot that builds the website for you. If this choice is for you just find and select and accept the options for it and answer the questions it gives, and it creates the site for you before you can do the rest to add to it or customize it to your own needs. If you like your colors and styles and want your site to look a certain way... WIX is an easy peace of mind for you. In a way WIX is just like Canva with lots of flexibility to the elements you want to add and show.
Compared to something like Squarespace it shows better flexibility with more customizable options. However, when compared to Squarespace, WIX will not be as clean in its provided options or screen space as to how things look or are organized. Some say that Squarespace doesn't have a nicer user experience than WIX because Squarespace has a strict layout used in its templates and designs. The Con to WIX that I have found in this study is that WIX may prove to have a lag with longer loading time to bring your site up and make edits or changes. (Sounds like a company site lag issue there!) Also, as a small con in WIX, you will need to make sure the mobile version checks out and looks great before you do any publishing. Which makes it mobile ready even if you have to switch to the mobile side or view manually.
Another positive pro point is that WIX has a better customer support system than GoDaddy with phone support. What is even better is that it also has SEO support. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization which can be applied to WIX. SEO is helpful to understand the grading of the website. It helps sort out problems for better search properties and gives ideas on how to better traffic toward the website and gain more of an audience with how professional it looks and reads.
Gaining popularity as the organization grows into a medium size or to a large size company. The two cons that I have found with WIX is first that the price you have to pay for, is a bit much for some people. Where other platforms except are cheaper according to the ease of use in the platform. The good thing is that they allow a free trial for some time to allow their customers to explore and test or feel if they should jump in and then pay for more optimal features and tools. The second thing to note that is also a con is having to pay in addition for a tracking analytics system that WIX offers. This may or may not be separate from the tools and features in their provided payment plans. Lastly on the payment side of things, WIX does not support apple pay, Android pay, or amazon pay. This is because they are separate entities in which WIX does not allow their customers to have as an option through purchasing the product.
The Conclusion
In conclusion, to the overall experience provided by articles and feedback from other users on YouTube. Let it be known that WIX is the best in a combination of things and we all can see that it has its limitations just like all the other platforms. WIX is a creative platform which is great for beginners to understand how to build a website. WIX is hands down better than GoDaddy with ease of use and may be the next step up in supporting both digital and physical products that any company or organization wants to sell in the worldwide market. The payment plans are not cheap, but you get what you pay for with better service quality and customer support. WIX comes with and ADI option, and an SEO help guide option. WIX was meant to be used for building portfolios and small to mid-sized websites which can be similar to GoDaddy, but with a better quantity of tools and options to choose from.
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