Wix vs WordPress for Canadian Business (2026): The Full Comparison

What is Wix, exactly?

Wix is a Software as a Service (SaaS) website builder launched in Israel in 2006. By 2026 it hosts over 250 million websites globally, making it one of the three or four most widely used website platforms on the planet. You pay a monthly subscription; Wix provides the servers, software, security patches, SSL certificate, and content delivery network — all in one bill, billed in CAD for Canadian accounts.

The core product is a drag-and-drop visual editor. You choose a template from a library of roughly 900 designs, drag elements around the canvas, and publish. In 2023 Wix rolled out ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence), which can generate a basic website from a few answers about your business in under ten minutes. For a Calgary accounting firm or a Halifax hair salon that needs something online before the end of the week with no developer, this is genuinely compelling.

Wix has also built a growing App Market with over 500 third-party integrations — booking systems, CRMs, email marketing tools, and payment processing. For many small Canadian businesses, the native tools (Wix Stores for ecommerce, Wix Bookings for appointments, Wix Blog for content) cover the basics without needing to install anything extra.

The trade-off embedded in this convenience: everything lives on Wix's infrastructure. You cannot switch templates after launch without rebuilding. Content does not transfer between templates. And if you stop paying, your pages are not portable — Wix does not export page content in any standard format. Wix data lives on US servers, which has implications for PIPEDA and Quebec Law 25 covered in detail below. Pricing in 2026 runs from CA$20/month (Light) to CA$159/month (Business Elite); no transaction fees on Business plan and above.

What is WordPress?

WordPress is an open-source content management system (CMS) first released in 2003. It now powers approximately 43 percent of all websites on the internet — every type, from personal blogs to government portals to enterprise media companies. The White House, The New York Times, and TechCrunch have all run on WordPress at significant scale.

There are two completely different products that share the WordPress name, and this distinction is critical:

WordPress.com is a hosted service run by Automattic. Like Wix, it handles your hosting and software. It is easier to start but imposes significant restrictions on the free and lower-paid plans, and does not give you full control over your server or code.

WordPress.org is the free, open-source software you download and install on your own web hosting server. This is what web professionals mean when they say "WordPress." It has no subscription fee — you pay only for hosting, your domain, themes, and any premium plugins you choose. This guide compares Wix against self-hosted WordPress.org, which is the relevant choice for serious Canadian business websites.

On WordPress.org, you have complete access to your database, file system, and code. You can install any of 60,000+ plugins, choose from 10,000+ themes, and export your entire site at any time. The trade-off: you are responsible for updates, security, and backups — either yourself or via a managed host (WP Engine, Kinsta, SiteGround GoGeek) that automates those tasks. Hosting costs range from approximately CA$12/month at budget shared hosts to CA$120+/month at premium managed hosts. The platform itself imposes no growth ceiling.

The core difference: hosted vs self-hosted

The clearest way to understand the Wix vs WordPress choice is through a real estate analogy that Canadian business owners immediately recognize.

Wix is like renting a furnished condo. You move in quickly. The landlord (Wix) handles the plumbing and building maintenance, and you can rearrange the furniture. But you cannot knock down walls, you cannot sublet, and if you stop paying rent the landlord takes back the keys. The furniture stays behind — or more precisely, you cannot take the walls with you when you leave. For the majority of small Canadian businesses that will never need more than what Wix provides, this is perfectly fine and the right choice.

WordPress is like buying a plot of land and building a house. You hire a contractor (your hosting provider and developer), choose every material, and own the result outright. More upfront effort and ongoing maintenance, but the asset is yours. You can expand, renovate, or move it to a new address (new host) at will. Your content is in a database you control — you can export it, back it up independently, and move it to any host on the planet.

In a Canadian regulatory context, there is a meaningful third dimension: who controls the land your building sits on. Wix's servers are primarily in the United States under US jurisdiction. Self-hosted WordPress on a Canadian hosting provider — such as HostPapa (Burlington, Ontario) or GreenGeeks' Vancouver data centre — puts your data under Canadian jurisdiction and on Canadian soil. This is relevant to PIPEDA and critical for Quebec businesses subject to Law 25, both covered in a dedicated section below.

Wix vs WordPress: full feature comparison

The table below covers the twelve dimensions that matter most to Canadian business owners. Each row is expanded in the sections that follow.

True 2026 cost in CAD: side-by-side pricing

Comparing Wix and WordPress on price is deceptively simple if you look only at the subscription line. The real number requires accounting for hosting, security, SEO tools, forms, backups, developer setup, and ecommerce. Here are realistic annual totals in CAD for 2026.

At first glance the numbers look comparable, which surprises most owners. The meaningful difference appears with two variables: developer time and scale. A DIY Wix build keeps annual costs at CA$432; a professional WordPress build adds CA$2,500–$8,000 upfront but has lower recurring costs and no migration risk. At Business Elite (CA$1,908/year), Wix becomes materially more expensive than managed WordPress on Kinsta or WP Engine, which costs less at that tier and gives dramatically more control.

SEO: which platform ranks better on Google Canada?

SEO is the most contested ground in the Wix vs WordPress debate. Wix invested heavily in its SEO infrastructure between 2023 and 2025 — editable robots.txt, schema markup tools, a site speed optimizer, more granular meta tag control. Google has confirmed both platforms can rank if implemented correctly. The honest 2026 answer is more nuanced than either platform's marketing suggests.

For Canadian businesses targeting competitive local keywords — "plumber Toronto," "avocat Montréal," "property management Calgary," "dentiste Québec" — the nuances still favour WordPress for several technical reasons:

Plugin depth. Yoast SEO and RankMath (the two dominant WordPress SEO plugins) provide controls that Wix's native tools do not fully replicate: granular breadcrumb control, advanced redirect management (301/302/410), bulk schema generation across hundreds of pages, and detailed per-page crawl budget directives. For a site with 50–500 pages targeting multiple local keywords, this granularity compounds into meaningful ranking advantages over months and years.

Core Web Vitals. Google has used Core Web Vitals as a ranking signal since 2021. A well-optimized WordPress site on a fast managed host (Kinsta or WP Engine, both with global CDNs) will typically score higher on Largest Contentful Paint and Cumulative Layout Shift than a Wix site, which runs through Wix's shared CDN with less image optimization control. Wix added a built-in site speed optimizer in 2024, which helps, but high-performing WordPress sites on managed hosting still typically outperform equivalent Wix sites on LCP for image-heavy Canadian business pages.

URL structure and canonical tags. WordPress gives you full control over URL structure and canonical tags. Wix generates URLs that can be non-ideal on collection pages (dynamic parameters) and canonical implementation is less transparent for complex multi-template sites.

Multilingual SEO. For Quebec businesses or national brands that need French and English versions, WordPress with WPML or Polylang gives you proper multilingual URL structures — /fr/services/ and /en/services/, or /services/ and /services-en/ — with correctly implemented hreflang tags. Wix Multilingual supports multiple languages but with less flexible URL architecture and hreflang implementation. For a Montreal business competing for "réparation ordinateur Montréal" and "computer repair Montreal" simultaneously, WordPress's multilingual SEO controls are materially superior.

The honest verdict: for a 5-page brochure site in a low-competition local Canadian market, the SEO difference between Wix and WordPress is minimal and both will rank. For a 50-page service site competing in Toronto, Vancouver, or Montreal, or any bilingual Quebec business, WordPress delivers measurably better SEO control. See our local SEO guide for how this plays out in Canadian search results specifically.

Ecommerce: Wix Store vs WooCommerce

Both platforms sell products online, but they suit different business scales. Understanding which fits your store is one of the clearest decision points in this comparison.

Wix Store is built into every Wix Business plan and above. You can add products, accept payments via Wix Payments, PayPal, or Stripe, manage orders, and run basic promotions — all without installing any extension. It is genuinely usable for a Canadian retailer with 10–200 SKUs who does not need complex inventory management, wholesale pricing tiers, or subscription billing. Wix Payments processes CAD natively for Canadian merchants, which removes the friction of a third-party payment gateway setup. There are no Wix transaction fees on Business plan and above — a real advantage over Shopify's transaction fees if you are not using Shopify Payments.

Where Wix Store reaches its ceiling: subscription products are limited, multi-currency checkout is not as robust, affiliate programs require third-party app integrations with additional fees, and B2B wholesale pricing tiers are not natively available. There is also no equivalent to WooCommerce's 800+ official extensions for deeply custom ecommerce logic — things like variable subscription billing, complex bundle pricing, or integration with Canadian-specific logistics providers.

WooCommerce on WordPress is the most widely deployed ecommerce platform globally, powering roughly 37 percent of all online stores. For Canadian businesses, it offers several advantages that Wix Store cannot match:

• Bilingual commerce and Quebec law compliance. The Charter of the French Language (updated by Bill 96, 2022) requires that consumers in Quebec be able to transact in French. WooCommerce with WPML or Polylang creates proper bilingual stores with French as the primary language, separate URL paths per language, and Quebec-specific checkout fields — legally cleaner for Quebec B2C businesses. This is not straightforward to replicate on Wix Multilingual.
• Canadian payment gateway integration. WooCommerce supports Moneris — Canada's largest payment processor, owned by RBC and BMO — through a first-party official plugin. It also integrates with Bambora/Beanstream (used by TD and other major Canadian banks), Desjardins, and credit union processors. These are the processors preferred by Canadian accountants for GST/HST reporting clarity.
• Canadian tax automation. Canadian tax is genuinely complex: HST in Ontario and the Atlantic provinces, GST + PST in BC, MB, and SK, GST + QST in Quebec, and GST-only in AB, NT, NU, and YK. WooCommerce integrates with Avalara AvaTax and TaxJar for automated Canadian tax calculation across all provinces; both update tax tables automatically when rates change. Wix's tax tools are functional but require more manual configuration for Canadian provincial edge cases.
• Scale without platform limits. WooCommerce stores with 10,000+ SKUs, B2B catalogs, multi-warehouse inventory, and complex product variations run without hitting platform restrictions. The same functionality on Wix would require multiple enterprise apps, workarounds, and Wix Business Elite pricing.

For Canadian ecommerce that will stay simple — under 100 products, straightforward checkout, English-only, no bilingual requirement — Wix Store is a legitimate option and meaningfully easier to manage day-to-day. For any store in Quebec, any store over 200 products, any store needing subscriptions or wholesale, or any store that wants Moneris integration — WooCommerce on WordPress is the appropriate platform. Compare detailed store build costs in our ecommerce website cost guide.

Ease of use: setup time and learning curve

If you are a business owner without a developer and you need a website by end of week, the ease-of-use gap between Wix and WordPress is real and significant. It is also the feature that matters least for businesses with developer support and most for sole proprietors managing everything themselves.

Wix setup timeline for a motivated non-technical owner: Create an account, choose a template or run ADI, add your content, connect your domain, and publish. A business owner with content already prepared — text, photos, logo, hours of operation — can have a 10-page Wix site live in two to four hours. There is no FTP access, no cPanel to navigate, no database configuration. The visual editor shows you exactly what visitors will see, in real time. For a Winnipeg plumber or a Fredericton accountant who needs an online presence before the weekend, Wix genuinely delivers on this promise.

WordPress setup timeline: Purchase hosting (15 minutes), install WordPress via your host's one-click installer (10 minutes), choose and activate a theme (30 minutes), configure key plugins — Yoast SEO, a security plugin like Wordfence, a backup plugin like UpdraftPlus, a caching plugin like WP Rocket or W3 Total Cache (60–90 minutes), and then build your content pages. For a non-technical owner working solo, expect 2–3 full days to get a professional-looking WordPress site live and correctly configured. More if you are starting from a blank premium theme and doing custom layout work without prior experience.

The ongoing maintenance difference matters for the lifetime cost of your choice. Wix updates itself automatically — you never need to approve or apply software updates. A WordPress site requires monthly update rounds covering WordPress core, your active theme, and every active plugin. This typically takes 10–15 minutes per session on a well-maintained site, but major version updates can occasionally cause plugin conflicts that require a developer to resolve. On a managed WordPress host (Kinsta, WP Engine, SiteGround GoGeek), core and plugin updates are largely automated and monitored, which reduces this burden to near-zero — but at a higher monthly price than budget shared hosting.

Design flexibility and themes

Both Wix and WordPress can produce professional, visually impressive websites in 2026. The differences are in flexibility, long-term adaptability, and the depth of customization available without writing code.

Wix design system: 900+ professionally designed templates organized by industry, from retail to healthcare to professional services. The editor allows truly freeform element placement — not column-constrained drag-and-drop — which is more flexible than many visual builders. Wix Studio (formerly Wix Editor X), introduced in 2023 for professional builders, brought proper CSS Grid-based responsive layouts rather than the older absolute positioning system. This was a significant improvement that closed part of the design flexibility gap with WordPress page builders.

The critical Wix design limitation that affects long-term Canadian business sites: you cannot switch your template after launch without rebuilding the site from scratch. Content does not transfer between templates. If you launch on a minimalist template and later need a more complex layout — a new service offering, a resource hub, an expanded portfolio — you rebuild from zero. For a business whose brand and design needs will evolve beyond its launch-day requirements, this is a meaningful constraint that many owners discover too late.

WordPress design system: Over 10,000 themes available through WordPress.org (free), ThemeForest, Elegant Themes, and independent developers. Premium themes — Divi, Avada, Kadence, GeneratePress — are used by millions of professional sites and allow visual building comparable to Wix Studio without touching code. WordPress's Full Site Editing (FSE) feature, mature in 2026, allows drag-and-drop editing of the entire site including header, footer, and global templates — without code.

On WordPress, you can switch themes at any time. Your content — posts, pages, products, taxonomies — stays in the database; only the visual wrapper changes. This gives WordPress sites a meaningful design longevity advantage: as design trends evolve (and they do, significantly, every 2–3 years), you upgrade the theme without rebuilding content.

One practical note: Wix uses a separate mobile editor distinct from the desktop editor, and changes can create layout inconsistencies if not managed carefully. WordPress themes built on modern CSS frameworks adapt responsively to all screen sizes without a separate editor — important given that over 60 percent of Canadian website visits are on mobile. See our website checklist for mobile compliance standards relevant to Canadian businesses.

Scalability and long-term growth

Scalability is the dimension most Canadian business owners underweight when choosing a platform, and the one they most regret not thinking about earlier. The site that works for a 5-page launch becomes a constraint at a 100-page growth stage, or when a campaign drives unexpected traffic, or when the business expands into new service areas or provinces.

Wix scalability ceiling: On Business Elite (CA$159/month), Wix handles meaningful traffic loads and supports advanced ecommerce. The infrastructure is enterprise-grade for most small and medium businesses in terms of raw server capacity. The real ceiling is not server load — it is feature flexibility. Custom API integrations, complex database queries across thousands of products, serverless functions, custom authentication systems, and advanced caching strategies are difficult or impossible to implement within Wix's architecture. The platform is closed: you work within what Wix provides or you find a workaround in the App Market.

For a content platform publishing 50+ articles per month, a membership site with user-generated content, a multi-location franchise needing a different site per location, or a B2B SaaS tool with a customer-facing portal — Wix will stop you, and the question is not if but when.

WordPress scalability: There is no realistic platform ceiling. WordPress powers some of the most heavily trafficked sites on the internet. The scaling path is straightforward: move to a larger hosting infrastructure (vertical scaling on managed hosts, or migrating to AWS or Google Cloud with a WordPress stack) as traffic and complexity grow. Adding features is a matter of finding or commissioning a plugin or custom development, not submitting a feature request to a platform vendor and waiting.

Data ownership, PIPEDA and Quebec Law 25

This section is the most important for Canadian businesses that handle personal information — which, under PIPEDA, includes email addresses, names, phone numbers, purchasing history, IP addresses collected through analytics, and any other data that identifies or could identify an individual.

PIPEDA (Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act) governs how private-sector organizations in Canada collect, use, and disclose personal information in commercial activities. The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (priv.gc.ca) enforces PIPEDA federally. A key requirement relevant to platform choice: businesses must inform users about how and where their data is processed. If your website collects any personal information through a contact form, a newsletter signup, an ecommerce checkout, or even through third-party analytics — the location of that data processing is a disclosure obligation.

Wix's data residency: Wix is headquartered in Tel Aviv with primary data processing infrastructure in the United States. Under their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, personal data collected through your Wix site may be processed on servers in the US and other international jurisdictions. For PIPEDA compliance, a Canadian business operating on Wix must accurately disclose this in its privacy policy — which is manageable but requires attention and an up-to-date policy. Wix offers a Data Processing Agreement (DPA) for business customers that documents the processing relationship, but it does not change the physical location of data nor exempt you from Canadian disclosure obligations.

Quebec's Law 25 (Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector, in force since September 2023) is the strictest privacy regulation in Canada as of 2026. It applies to any organization collecting personal information from Quebec residents. For a Montreal retailer on Wix, the cross-border transfer (Quebec visitor data → US Wix servers) triggers a mandatory Privacy Impact Assessment. Law 25 also requires opt-in consent, a designated Privacy Officer, and breach notification to the Commission d'accès à l'information within 72 hours. This is manageable on Wix but adds documentation most small businesses are not set up to handle without legal advice.

WordPress on Canadian infrastructure: Hosting your WordPress site on a Canadian data centre — HostPapa (Burlington, ON), GreenGeeks (Vancouver, BC data centre option), or using Cloudflare's Toronto point of presence for CDN delivery — keeps personal data collected through your site on Canadian soil. CIRA (cira.ca), Canada's internet registry and a credible authority on Canadian internet infrastructure, actively promotes Canadian-hosted infrastructure as a way to simplify data sovereignty compliance. For healthcare clinics, law firms, financial advisors, and other regulated professional services in Canada, this is often the cleanest path to both PIPEDA and Law 25 compliance without a full legal audit of your data transfer agreements.

Migration: the hidden cost most comparison guides skip

"We'll start on Wix and move to WordPress when we need to." This is the single most expensive sentence in Canadian small business web design, and it is worth quantifying precisely because almost no platform comparison guide covers the actual cost honestly.

Wix's export capability is severely limited by design — this is not a bug but a feature of the platform's business model. You can export:

• Contacts — CSV format
• Products — CSV format compatible with WooCommerce import
• Blog posts — limited RSS format, text only

You cannot export your page layouts, your custom section designs, your navigation structure, your dynamic pages (collection pages, event pages, booking pages), or any content built with Wix's native apps. Every page must be rebuilt from scratch on WordPress, element by element, and styled to match your existing brand. Third-party migration tools like CMS2CMS offer Wix-to-WordPress services starting at approximately CA$300 for a small site, but they handle text content only and cannot replicate custom layouts, multi-column sections, or interactive elements.

For a typical 20-page Canadian business site, expect: developer time CA$1,500–$4,000 (at CA$100–$150/hour), a 4–8 week project timeline, 301 redirect mapping for every changed URL, and a 2–6 week Google re-indexing period during which rankings drop. Total cost — developer time, redirect mapping, post-migration SEO monitoring, and weeks of potential ranking loss — regularly reaches CA$5,000–$8,000 for a 30-page business site. It arrives at the worst moment: when business is growing and every week of SEO disruption has a direct revenue cost.

The cleanest path is choosing the right platform on day one. Browse our platform comparison hub for additional resources, or the Shopify vs WordPress guide if your primary question is ecommerce platform selection rather than the Wix vs WordPress choice covered here.

Checklist: should you choose Wix?

Wix is the right choice for your Canadian business if most of the following statements are true. Be honest in your assessment — Wix is genuinely excellent within its target use case, and if it fits yours, it is a better choice than forcing WordPress onto a situation that does not benefit from its complexity.

• ✓ You will manage the site yourself with no developer and no plans to hire one in the next two years
• ✓ Your site has 10 pages or fewer and is unlikely to grow significantly beyond that
• ✓ You are not targeting competitive SEO keywords — your primary traffic sources are word of mouth, Google Business Profile, and direct referrals
• ✓ Your ecommerce needs are simple: under 50–100 products, no subscriptions, no wholesale pricing, no bilingual requirement
• ✓ Your business is not based in Quebec, or if it is, it does not collect personal information from Quebec consumers that would trigger Law 25's cross-border data transfer PIA requirement
• ✓ Speed to launch is a genuine priority — you need something credible and professional live within days
• ✓ You are comfortable with the fact that your site content cannot be exported if you want to switch platforms later
• ✓ Your business does not handle sensitive personal data (healthcare, financial, legal) where data residency on Canadian servers would simplify regulatory compliance

If five or more of these describe your situation, Wix is the smart choice. The simplicity and lower operational friction are real advantages for a small owner-operated Canadian business that wants an online presence without ongoing developer involvement.

Checklist: should you choose WordPress?

WordPress is the right choice for your Canadian business if most of the following statements are true. These are the scenarios where starting on Wix typically leads to a migration cost within two to three years — money that would be better spent on the right build from the start.

• ✓ You want to rank for competitive keywords in a Canadian city market (plumber Vancouver, avocat Montréal, HVAC Edmonton, real estate Toronto)
• ✓ You need a bilingual site (French and English) with proper hreflang SEO — especially if you serve Quebec consumers
• ✓ You plan to run an ecommerce store with 100+ products, subscriptions, wholesale pricing, or Quebec-specific French checkout requirements
• ✓ Your business handles personal data (healthcare, legal, financial, HR) and data residency in Canada matters for PIPEDA or Law 25 compliance
• ✓ You are building a content-driven site with a blog that will grow to dozens or hundreds of articles — your SEO strategy relies on volume content
• ✓ You need to integrate with Canadian-specific tools: Moneris, Canada Post shipping API, Bambora, TD Bank, or custom CRM systems used by your industry
• ✓ You want to own your data outright, with the ability to move hosts without rebuilding and export a full backup at any time
• ✓ You expect significant business growth in the next two to three years and do not want to pay a migration bill at the worst possible moment

If four or more of these apply, choose WordPress from the start. The setup complexity is a one-time investment; the benefits compound with every month of operation. A professionally-built WordPress site costs more upfront than a DIY Wix build, but significantly less than a Wix build plus a migration bill two years later.

How to decide in 5 steps

Use this decision process if the checklists above left you genuinely undecided. Answer each question in sequence — the answer to one often makes the next questions easier.

1. Define your website's primary job in one sentence. "Generate phone calls from local homeowners" has different platform requirements from "rank #1 for HVAC repair in Edmonton and generate 40 leads per month." The specificity of this sentence tells you how much SEO control and ecommerce sophistication you actually need.
2. Count your current and 36-month page needs. Count the pages you will realistically need in three years: city service pages, monthly blog articles, case studies, product pages. Under 20 pages: Wix is fine. 50+ pages: WordPress is the safer platform to grow into.
3. Rate your SEO ambition on a 1–5 scale. Level 1 (hours and phone number online) suits Wix. Levels 3–5 (outranking competitors for 20 keywords in your city) benefit materially from WordPress's SEO depth — particularly in competitive Canadian city markets where every technical advantage compounds.
4. Identify who will actually maintain the site. If the honest answer is "the owner, whenever there is time," Wix's lower maintenance overhead fits better. If you have a developer on retainer or a marketing team comfortable with a CMS, WordPress's flexibility is an asset rather than a burden.
5. Calculate your three-year total cost. Calculate 36 months: platform + hosting + themes + plugins + developer maintenance + a CA$3,000–$8,000 migration in the Wix scenario if you expect growth. The platform with the lower three-year total at your required feature level is the right financial choice — and for most growth-oriented Canadian businesses, WordPress wins that calculation.

Run all five steps and the right answer almost always becomes clear. If you are still undecided, your business is likely at the boundary of Wix's simplicity ceiling and WordPress's complexity floor — which usually points toward a professionally-built WordPress site configured for easy self-management. See our website builder vs hiring a designer comparison for that scenario.

5 mistakes Canadian businesses make when choosing

These patterns surface repeatedly when Canadian business owners describe what they wish they had known before locking in a platform decision.

1. Evaluating platforms on the free trial experience. Wix's free plan has Wix branding and a Wix subdomain — neither present on a paid plan. WordPress's one-click install on shared hosting behaves differently from a properly managed environment. Test the editor with your real business content, not placeholder text. Friction that a demo template hides becomes obvious the moment you try to add your actual service pages and photography.

2. Ignoring bilingual requirements for Quebec. The Charter of the French Language (Bill 96, 2022) requires Quebec consumers be able to interact with businesses in French, including online. A Wix site built in English requires significant rework to comply. WordPress with WPML or Polylang handles bilingual structure from the initial build. Adding bilingual capability after launch always costs more than building it in from the start.

3. Not disclosing Wix's US data processing in your privacy policy. PIPEDA requires Canadian businesses to disclose where personal data is processed. Wix uses US servers — this must appear in your privacy policy. Quebec businesses under Law 25 also need a Privacy Impact Assessment for the cross-border transfer. This is manageable but requires an accurate, maintained policy that most Wix sites do not have. Guidance at priv.gc.ca.

4. The "migrate later" decision made without costing the migration. The CA$3,000–$8,000 migration bill is real and arrives at the worst possible time — when the business is growing fastest. The businesses most likely to outgrow Wix are the ones for whom the migration cost hurts most. Plan for where you are going, not where you are today.

5. Choosing a platform without evaluating who will build and maintain it. The right platform for a DIY owner is different from the right platform for a professional agency build. Ask any agency you consider: which platform do they specialize in and why? An agency with deep WordPress experience delivers a better WordPress site; a Wix-native studio delivers a better Wix site. The builder's expertise matters as much as the platform name.

Frequently asked questions