When it comes to Wix vs Bluehost, both are excellent choices for first-time users and those with little to no web building expertise. Even yet, Wix is significantly easier to operate, whereas Bluehost may be used for more complicated projects.
Wix and Bluehost are both obvious industry leaders. Both are simple to use and powerful. However, in terms of site hosting, Bluehost was significantly less expensive and had superior performance outcomes. So I propose the simple web hosting service.
At the same time, if you’re searching for a platform to construct a site and remain with it, Wix might be just what you’re looking for. It makes site construction extremely simple and gives a plethora of tools for doing it. Whether you require a portfolio or an internet store.
Wix vs Bluehost -- Overview
Wix and Bluehost are market leaders in their respective industries, catering to novice consumers that need to quickly create a website. Wix, a website builder, is easy to use and provides attractive templates for swiftly creating your site. Meanwhile, Bluehost provides significantly cheaper hosting services with a robust control panel.
If you’re just searching for the last decision before we dive into the deep end, here’s your ticket to the finish. You can also accompany me on this exciting adventure.
WINNER
Bluehost
Wix vs Bluehost Pricing Review
When it comes to pricing, Wix versus Bluehost is a clear winner. Wix is far more costly than Bluehost. Its premium plans start at $16.00 per month and go up to $59.00 per month. It offers a variety of options, ranging from basic sites to those with eCommerce capabilities. Wix, unlike Bluehost, also provides a free plan. Bluehost’s most popular plans, shared hosting, run from $2.95 to $13.95 per month.
To have a better idea, let’s compare the lowest plans from both companies.
To begin, there are a few similarities between the two: both give a free domain and an SSL certificate, and both enable hosting of one site. That is when the distinctions begin:
- Wix Combo ($16.00/month) includes 3GB of storage, 30 minutes of video time, and no Wix advertisements on the website.
- Bluehost Basic ($2.95/month) includes 50GB of storage space and 5 email addresses.
Bluehost clearly gives substantially more storage than Wix based only on the entry plans. However, at the end of the day, you are only purchasing hosting services from Bluehost. Wix provides a sophisticated and modern website builder as well as hosting services.
Another key point to note is that Wix offers a free plan. With only 500MB bandwidth and 500MB storage, the resources are somewhat constrained. Furthermore, you cannot utilise custom domain names, and Wix’s advertisements appear on your website. However, the plan allows you to test the builder for free.
When it comes to renewal, it appears that only Bluehost charges higher costs. This is rather typical in the hosting sector. So it’s no surprise that Wix (website builder) resists this temptation.
Here are some examples of prices:
Overall, Bluehost is much less expensive than Wix for the first term, but renewal brings the pricing near together.
Now that we’ve examined the most affordable plans, let’s see which ones are genuinely worth your time.
Wix Pricing Review
Wix provides two types of plans: Website plans and Business & eCommerce plans.
There are four website plans to select from, ranging in price from $16.00/month to $45.00/month with an annual paying term. Wix’s Business option provides three options with yearly paying periods ranging from $27.00/mo to $59.00/mo.
Depending on your requirements, I recommend the following two plans:
- The Combo ($16.00/month) plan is ideal if you want to run a personal or small company website. It includes all of the essential functionality required for such websites.
- Business Unlimited ($32.00/month) is ideal for small enterprises seeking eCommerce capabilities and additional protection. It provides greater storage, ad credit, and other marketing capabilities.
Our Recommendation
Wix offers two comprehensive plans: Combo and Business Unlimited. If you choose annual billing, your yearly total will be $192 for Combo and $384 for Business Unlimited. Remember that you might get a discount during the transaction.
Bluehost Pricing Review
Bluehost, on the other hand, provides four shared hosting plans for $2.95/month to $13.95/month with an annual paying term.
Even though Plus and Choice Plus are the same price, Plus renews for $11.99/mo and Choice Plus renews for $16.99/mo. As a result, I feel Plus is the greatest option.
- In compared to the Basic plan, Plus ($5.45/mo) allows you to connect an infinite number of websites and provides unlimited SSD storage.
When it comes to the Pro plan, it just isn’t worth it for the price. For that price, you could have a cheap but far more powerful VPS.
Our Recommendation
Bluehost’s Plus package is the most affordable. The plan will cost you $5.45/mo or $35.40 total with an annual billing period. The renewal raises the annual fee to $107.88.
Wix vs Bluehost Pricing Review -- Summary
Another thing to consider is that both companies provide slightly different money-back guarantees. While Bluehost provides a 30-day money-back guarantee, Wix only allows you 14 days to decide. However, it does provide a free plan that you may use for as long as you like.
Overall, Bluehost is more cheaper for hosting and provides greater server capacity. Wix, on the other hand, may wind up being more cost-effective in the long term because it is an all-inclusive platform that requires no further investment.
WINNER
Bluehost
Wix vs Bluehost -- Ease of Use
When it comes to simplicity of use, both Wix and Bluehost shine in our comparison. Wix manages your website using a sleek custom-made management panel. Bluehost, on the other hand, offers its customers a native management area with a customised cPanel connection. Both firms also provide tools for quickly creating webpages.
Setting up a website
Wix and Bluehost both make the process of creating a website as simple as possible. Both offer highly automated systems that allow you to view your website ready to go live in only a few clicks.
When you join up with Wix, you’ll be presented with options straight immediately. Don’t worry, the procedure is quite straightforward. You have complete control over how your website is set up.
You may select a template and customise the layout yourself. You may also use Wix’s ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence) to make such decisions for you.
If you go the ADI approach, all you have to do is decide what type of website you want to operate, the colour scheme, and overall design.
After that, all you have to do is add your material. Keep in mind that this method only allows you to select from current templates and layouts. This is a much faster method of creating a website than tweaking every element. However, it provides far fewer customising choices.
You can customise the layout of your site and alter the current blocks, but there is no drag-and-drop functionality.
If you prefer to set up the site yourself, you will be able to select a template of your choice first. Wix has over 400 modern-looking templates, all of which are as elegant as you can imagine.
Then, using a drag-and-drop interface, you may modify the site to your liking. This gives you a far broader range of customising options. You can move any piece around by dragging and dropping it. There are no guidelines.
Bluehost’s website setup is equally simple. This screen will appear the first time you log in to your Bluehost account.
You may begin building your website here. All you have to do is answer a few questions, name your site, and select a theme. That’s all there is to it; it’s that easy. Your website is complete. Keep in mind that this automated installation just instals WordPress.
Simply simply, Wix and Bluehost are incredibly quick and simple to set up the framework for your site.
Website management area
In terms of service/site maintenance, both Wix and Bluehost are equally simple to use. Wix is an easy-to-use builder, and its service administration page mostly displays account-related information. Meanwhile, for all hosting management-related settings, Bluehost combines a unique interface with cPanel integration.
Wix allows you to manage your whole site and account from a single page. You may discover tools like Marketing & SEO on the left side menu to help you set up and manage your advertising campaigns. The major account information may be found by selecting Settings. You may also link your domain here.
At the same time, the most critical settings are conveniently located in the centre of the panel. The “Site Actions” card contains the plan and email settings, as well as a tutorial to help you understand Wix’s various features.
When you log in to Bluehost, the first thing you notice is an exceptionally clean and simple setup wizard. To the left is a sidebar with a few important features – site, app, email, and domain management choices, as well as the Advanced tab to access cPanel.
Then, in the centre of the page, there’s a to-do list to get you started. If you’re using WordPress, this list includes essential web-creation procedures.
My Site will be the primary location for managing your websites.
Each website will have its own administration interface where you can access all of the options like as backups, performance, security, and so on. You may control your whole site from this interface.
Bluehost, on the other hand, has cPanel smoothly incorporated into the native panel for more complex settings. You can find it in the side menu under Advanced.
It’s really only for advanced settings. Simpler features, such as the WordPress installation or domain administration, which are traditionally found in the cPanel, are moved to the primary dashboard. You may use cPanel to establish and manage free email accounts, access databases, and use a file management.
Overall, there are some parallels between Wix builder administration and Bluehost hosting management, but the principles are vastly different. Wix just provides you with front-end capabilities, whereas Bluehost gives you far more power.
Extra hosting management features
In this section of the Bluehost vs Wix comparison, I looked at the extra services that each provider provides to assist you manage your site. Wix features an App Market and the ability to assign multiple roles to site administrators. Bluehost, on the other hand, provides staging and marketing management.
Wix provides hundreds of applications for enhancing the functionality of your website. These applications are divided into several areas, such as analytics, business tools, events, and online retailers. Each plan’s symbol includes a brief description, a rating, and the number of times it has been downloaded.
Wix has also included a fantastic feature called Site Roles.
You may invite people to your site’s management and assign them particular tasks here. Each job also describes how much authority that individual has over your website.
Bluehost also provides staging services. You may use staging to build a replica of your site where you can test any changes and updates before releasing them to the main site.
You may use this tool using the Bluehost plugin in your WordPress admin panel. It only takes a few clicks to make a copy. The same is true when pushing updates to the live site. It’s as simple as one-two.
Bluehost also provides marketing services such as Google My Business and Google Ads. Without leaving the interface, you can effortlessly set up a marketing campaign.
+ Google My Business lets your website to show on Google Maps in response to indirect inquiries such as “best coffee shop.”
+ Google Ads allows you to manage your ads.
Overall, Wix and Bluehost both provide excellent added tools to improve the functioning of your site.
To summarise, both services are really simple to use. Wix is one of the most user-friendly and adaptable website builders available. Bluehost, on the other hand, is the most user-friendly hosting company. Furthermore, the two provide really valuable added functionality.
WINNER
Bluehost
Wix vs Bluehost -- Performance
The site’s performance may make or ruin it. So, to discover which is quicker, I ran both providers through three reliability and speed tests. And it appears that both services are equally trustworthy. However, while Bluehost was significantly quicker, Wix was able to handle more traffic.
Let’s take a look at a more in-depth analysis of the results.
Uptime and response time
In terms of average response time, Wix delivered a pretty acceptable performance. Its average reaction time was 461 milliseconds. That is a terrific result in and of itself. As a point of comparison, the typical response time in the hosting sector is 600ms.
Bluehost, like Wix, has exhibited a very reliable uptime of 99.99 percent.
Its reaction time, however, was substantially faster than Wix’s. Bluehost had a response time of 361ms on average. This is a pretty excellent time, and it would be much better if it weren’t for one huge surge in the midst of the examination session.
Overall, the reliability battle between Wix and Bluehost ended in a draw. Both providers performed admirably, with 99.99 percent uptime. Bluehost, on the other hand, earns a few additional karma points for its speedier average response time.
Website loading time
It’s now time to explore how Wix and Bluehost would fare as fully developed websites.
I did this by installing templates and demo material on each provider’s website. However, because Wix does not utilise WordPress and Bluehost does, the templates differ somewhat.
To provide more comparable circumstances for this Wix versus Bluehost combat, I tested both services from the United States, and both are hosted in data centres in the United States.
The location of the server might affect the performance of the website. Bluehost exclusively has data centres in the United States. And, while Wix offers multiple centres in the United States and Europe, you cannot select the location.
Now, in order to better understand the final findings, these are the three metrics I pay the most attention to:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – the moment when the most content is loaded. It’s best to keep it under 2.5 seconds.
- Fully Loaded Time – If it takes more than 3 seconds to load, visitors will notice.
- TTFB – this indicates how quickly the server identifies and responds to the initial request. It’s best if it’s less than 200ms.
Taking this into account, Wix may appear to be worse than it is. It’s no surprise that website builders add a lot of things to the website, making it take longer to load.
Wix, on the other hand, barely exceeded the necessary 2.5s. Its LCP is 2.6s, which is a fairly respectable duration for a flashy site.
The Fully Loaded Time (8.4s) may appear intimidating at first, but it’s not as awful as it appears. At 3.5s, the webpage becomes completely interactive (time to interactive.) Even though GTMetrix does not name it as such, the site appears to be completely loaded and running at this moment.
Wix’s TTFB time is just 304ms. It’s slightly above the recommended 200ms, but it’s still a very good time.
Wix is doing an excellent job for a website builder that employs so many design aspects.
Bluehost, on the other hand, while not flawless, produced far better outcomes. Its LCP and Fully Loaded Time were both 1.8s. Both measurements are well within the required timeframes.
Bluehost’s TTFB, which is now at 1s, should definitely be improved. This suggests that if the server had been faster to respond, the webpage might have loaded significantly faster.
Overall, both providers were swift, but it was evident that this Wix versus Bluehost duel had a clear winner. Bluehost was quicker, but Wix’s server response was superior.
Stress testing results
The last test looks at how effectively both providers handle increasing site traffic. To begin, I assign 50 virtual users (VUs) to each site and allow them to wander for 5 minutes.
Because 50 visits is a pretty large amount that might substantially interrupt the server’s operation or completely overload it, I generally have to repeat the test. I reduce the number by 5VUs and retake the test till I pass.
With 20 visitors, Wix passed the first test. Such constant traffic might result in around 20 000 monthly visits.
And it appears that’s the most it can handle. However, the response time (blue line) is impressively still. Despite the rising number of tourists, it had no jumps and remained quite flat (grey line.)
Nonetheless, the red line indicates that 248 requests have failed. That is certainly not what we desire.
Bluehost’s first attempt used 15VUs.
The reaction (blue line) is unstable. This shows that response time is heavily influenced by the amount of visitors (grey line) to the site. An increase in visitors causes the server to slow down.
None of the requests, however, have failed.
In summary, both providers handled traffic similarly, with Wix somewhat better.
In terms of dependability, both services are comparable. However, the results were far from equal. Bluehost was significantly quicker, whereas Wix handled somewhat more traffic.
WINNER
Bluehost
Wix vs Bluehost -- Security
Wix and Bluehost are very different in terms of security. Bluehost, as a hosting provider, gives you access to and control over the majority of the security measures. Many of those features, however, must be purchased individually. Wix, on the other hand, has several security mechanisms built in, but you have limited access to them.
Wix and Bluehost both provide free SSL certificates and DDoS protection.
Wix security features include:
- 24/7 website monitoring aids in the prevention of harmful assaults on your site.
- PCI compliance ensures that all card payment transactions on the site are secure.
- 2-Step Verification adds an extra degree of protection to your site when checking in.
- The Site History function is used for automatic backups. If necessary, you may quickly restore the previous version.
Aside from the free tools, most additional Bluehost security measures are paid for:
- Bluehost does not provide a default firewall or virus protection. You may, however, get it for $5.99 each month.
- To obtain backup alternatives from Bluehost, you must first purchase Choice Plus. Otherwise, it costs an additional $2.99 each month.
Overall, it appears that Wix is significantly more suited in terms of security. It includes all of the features you’d expect and more, but you don’t get to handle them all. Bluehost, on the other hand, only provides the most basic functions for free. Everything else is available as an add-on.
WINNER
Wix
Wix vs Bluehost -- Support
Wix and Bluehost provide quite different levels of customer service. You may contact Wix’s customer service by submitting a ticket or seeking a callback. There is no option for live chat. Meanwhile, Bluehost provides a variety of support alternatives, including live chat and phone assistance 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Both companies’ websites also contain a lot of knowledge base material.
Before you can file a case or request a callback from Wix’s support, you must first speak with a bot. This is not the quickest method to handle things.
Despite the lack of a live chat option, Wix processes problems swiftly. So you won’t be waiting for a response for days.
Furthermore, Wix’s service is completely free and available in a variety of languages, including English, French, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. The sole help provided in English is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but others have various hours. Wix gets an extra karma point from me for offering free callbacks and a range of languages.
Bluehost, on the other hand, is more accessible and offers more support alternatives. Fortunately, it may be reached by live chat. Even better, there isn’t a significant wait for an agent to join the conversation.
The representative was prompt and helpful. The talk lasted barely more than 5 minutes, and I got precisely what I needed. However, because they are real individuals, the knowledge levels of the agents may vary substantially.
Wix and Bluehost both provide a huge collection of content in their knowledge bases. There are articles, guides, FAQs, directions, tutorials, and other resources available.
These pages cover almost everything, including how to get started, the many plans offered, billing, maintaining your website, and troubleshooting.
However, the customer service provided by Wix and Bluehost is adequate. Wix just provides ticketing and callbacks. Tickets, on the other hand, are processed fast, and callbacks are free. Bluehost’s customer service is available via live chat and phone. The operators are courteous and informed, however the quality of the conversation is determined by who you are connected to.
WINNER
Bluehost
Wix vs Bluehost -- Our Recommendation
Wix and Bluehost are both obvious industry leaders. Both are simple to use and powerful. However, in terms of site hosting, Bluehost was significantly less expensive and had superior performance outcomes. So I propose the simple web hosting service.
At the same time, if you’re searching for a platform to construct a site and remain with it, Wix might be just what you’re looking for. It makes site construction extremely simple and gives a plethora of tools for doing it. Whether you require a portfolio or an internet store.
WINNER
Bluehost
Wix and Bluehost Alternatives
If Wix and Bluehost aren’t exactly right for you, there are plenty of alternative solutions on the market. Hostinger and HostGator are two excellent solutions worth considering.
Hostinger
Are you on a tight budget? Then Hostinger is the most affordable solution. Its entry-level package starts at $2.59 per month. In comparison, Bluehost charges $2.95 per month and SiteGround charges $2.99 per month. You just cannot. Furthermore, it lets you to select one of its seven data centre locations, making it an excellent choice if your target audience is in a certain place.
When you see pricing like these, you might wonder, “What gives?” Nothing, it appears. Hostinger provides fantastic speed that I can vouch for, a bespoke control panel called hPanel that is simple to use, and trustworthy 24/7 customer service.
DreamHost
DreamHost, like SiteGround and Bluehost, is a WordPress-focused service that has been endorsed by the platform’s designers. It’s a less expensive option, with costs beginning at $2.59 per month.
Simultaneously, DreamHost introduces new security features like as daily backups and domain privacy. Consider this web host if you need a dependable and safe web host at a low cost.
hostgator
HostGator, Bluehost’s sibling company, provides a variety of hosting options. In reality, it caters to both beginners and experts. In addition, if you want to swiftly put up your site, HostGator provides its own proprietary website builder. It has a drag-and-drop editor and is very simple to use.
Its pricing are reasonable, ranging from $2.75/month to $5.25/month for shared hosting. Plans for its website builder begin at $3.46 per month.
InMotion Hosting
InMotion Hosting is a versatile solution for nearly any website building project. The service provider is well-known for its dependable performance and wide range of hosting options.
You may select from shared, WordPress, dedicated, and VPS hosting options. If you want traditional cPanel hosting, shared hosting options beginning at $2.29/month are ideal.
Wix vs Bluehost FAQs
Is Bluehost preferable to Wix?
Only when it comes to cost, website performance, and user control does Bluehost outperform Wix. Wix, on the other hand, is more secure and easy to use.
Wix or Bluehost is easier to use?
Wix is more user-friendly than Bluehost. It’s a beginner-friendly website builder platform. Using a visual editor, you may build your website by dragging and dropping design components where you want them.
Is Wix free to use?
Yes, Wix is available for free. Wix offers a free package with 500MB bandwidth and 500MB storage.
Is it possible to use Bluehost for free?
No, Bluehost cannot be used for free. If you cancel within 30 days, you will receive a full refund for your hosting service but not for the majority of add-ons. Remember that only purchases made with a credit card are refundable.
