Wix vs WordPress vs a Custom Website: which is right for an Indian business?

The short answer

Choose Wix if you need a small site live this week, nobody on your team writes code, and your website is not how customers find or judge you. Choose WordPress if you need a content-heavy site, want an enormous plugin ecosystem, and have somebody — in-house or on retainer — who will actually keep it patched. Choose a custom-coded website when the site is a real business asset: when speed, search visibility, a bespoke booking or portal flow, or simply owning your own code decides whether it earns its keep.

Those are three different answers to three different questions, and the wrong one is not usually the cheap one. The wrong one is the one you have to throw away in eighteen months.

Cost, honestly

Wix publishes rupee pricing and, in India, bills annually — there is no monthly option — with 18% GST added at checkout. WordPress the software is free; WordPress the running website is not. And a custom build inverts the shape of the spend entirely: you pay once, up front, and then hosting a static site costs effectively nothing.

Why the Wix column is a range

Because we could not verify a single figure, and we would rather say so than pick the one that flatters our argument. Wix serves different prices in different countries, and its pricing page shows you your own region's — so from outside India we cannot read the Indian one directly. The Indian sources that quote it do not agree: several report Light at ₹199 per month and Core at ₹399, while Techjockey lists ₹250 and ₹500. Wix's US list price is $17 and $29.

What is consistent across every source, and what actually changes your decision: in India Wix bills annually only — there is no monthly option — and the displayed price excludes 18% GST, added at checkout. Budget for a year up front, plus tax. Before you commit, open wix.com/plans from your own connection; that is the only number that binds.

Two further things are widely misreported and worth stating plainly. First, Wix takes no commission on your sales. You will read otherwise, including a much-repeated claim of 2–4% on lower tiers. Wix's own documentation says the only deduction is the payment processing fee that any processor charges. Second, WordPress's "free" almost never survives contact with a real business. Hostinger's entry WordPress plan advertises ₹69 per month and renews at ₹289, before GST — and the plugins that make WordPress worth choosing (forms, SEO, backups, caching, security) are overwhelmingly subscriptions.

There is also a third WordPress worth separating out. WordPress.com, the hosted service, is not the same product as self-hosted WordPress. On WordPress.com you cannot install custom plugins or themes until the Business plan, which is $25 per month billed annually, or $40 month-to-month. People who are told "WordPress is free" and then hit that wall are usually on WordPress.com and do not realise there are two things wearing the same name.

What you actually own

This is the row that decides most of these arguments, and it is the row nobody puts in the pricing table.

Read the "move without rebuilding" row twice. A Wix site is not portable in any sense that matters. You can export your blog posts and your text, but the pages, the layout and the apps live inside Wix's editor and do not come with you. Leaving Wix means rebuilding. That is not a scandal — it is how the product is designed, and it is the price of the product being as easy as it is. But it means the decision you are making today is far stickier than a two-hundred-rupee monthly bill suggests.

Speed, and why we are not putting a number here

You will find comparisons quoting exact PageSpeed scores for each platform. Ignore them. A PageSpeed score measures one page on one day, and it moves forty points depending on the theme, the plugins, the images and the host. There is no honest single number for "WordPress".

What is structurally true is narrower, and more useful. Wix and WordPress both ship a general-purpose runtime that must handle every site anyone might build — page builders, layout engines, plugin hooks — and your site pays for that generality on every page load, whether or not it uses it. A static custom site ships the HTML and nothing else. That is a difference in what the browser is asked to do, not a difference in how hard someone tried.

The practical consequence: on Wix and WordPress, good performance is something you fight for and keep re-winning after every plugin update. On a lean custom build it is close to the default. We hold our own builds to 90+ on PageSpeed; the point is that hitting it does not require heroics.

When Wix is genuinely the right call

We build custom websites, so treat this section as the one where we argue against ourselves — and mean it.

Wix is the correct answer more often than agencies admit. If you are a two-person business testing whether an idea has customers, spending ₹80,000 and six weeks on a website is not diligence, it is procrastination. Wix gets you a legitimate, secure, mobile-responsive site this week for the cost of a phone recharge, and it removes an entire category of problem — hosting, SSL, patching, backups — from your life permanently.

Wix is right when the site is a few pages, the design does not need to do anything unusual, nobody on your team writes code, and — this is the real test — your website is not how customers find you or decide about you. A neighbourhood clinic whose patients arrive by word of mouth and just need directions and timings does not need a custom build. It needs a page.

Move off Wix when the site starts costing you: when you are turning away a booking flow you cannot build, when a competitor outranks you and you cannot touch your own markup to fix it, when the design constraints have started making decisions for your brand. Not before.

When WordPress is the right call

WordPress earns its 40%-of-the-web position honestly. If you publish a lot — a magazine, a news site, a business running content marketing seriously — the editorial tooling and the ecosystem around it are genuinely unmatched, and rebuilding that in a custom stack is work you should not want to do. WooCommerce is a real ecommerce platform with no per-sale commission. Finding a WordPress developer in Delhi NCR takes an afternoon.

The condition is the one everybody skips: somebody has to own it. Every plugin is code from a stranger running on your server with full privileges. Unpatched WordPress installs are the single most reliably compromised class of website in India, and the recovery is worse than the prevention — we have written up what that recovery actually looks like. If you have somebody in-house or a maintenance retainer, WordPress is a strong, boring, defensible choice. If your plan is "we'll deal with updates when something breaks", you have chosen a liability with a login screen.

When a custom website is worth it

A custom build stops being a luxury at the point where the website is doing a job rather than existing. Four signals, and you probably only need one:

• Search is a channel you compete in. When rankings bring revenue, you need full command of your HTML, schema, redirects and Core Web Vitals — not whatever a theme decided.
• The site has to do something. Bookings, quoting, a client login, an internal dashboard, an AI agent answering enquiries. Once the website is software, build it like software.
• Recurring platform fees have outgrown the build cost. ₹5,000–₹15,000 a year in platform and plugin fees, forever, is a mortgage on a site you do not own.
• The brand has to look like nobody else's. Templates are a floor, and every competitor has access to the same floor.

Nothing about a custom site guarantees a ranking. Google ranks pages, not platforms, and a well-maintained Wix site will beat a neglected custom one every time. What custom removes is the ceiling.

Frequently asked questions

Is Wix or WordPress cheaper in India?

Wix is cheaper to start and far more predictable. Indian sources report its Light plan between ₹199 and ₹250 per month and Core between ₹399 and ₹500 — Wix prices by country, so check wix.com/plans from India for the figure that binds — billed annually, excluding 18% GST, with nothing else to buy. Self-hosted WordPress software is free, but you pay for hosting: Hostinger's entry WordPress plan renews at ₹289 per month before GST, plus a domain and any paid plugins. WordPress wins on total cost mainly if you already run it yourself. Checked 9 July 2026.

Can I move my website off Wix later?

Not as a working site. You can export blog posts and your content, but Wix pages, design and apps are tied to the Wix editor, so a move means rebuilding. WordPress and a custom-coded site both give you files and a database you can move to any host. If there is a realistic chance you outgrow the platform, that difference matters more than the monthly price.

Do I need WordPress to have a blog or edit my own content?

No. A custom-built site can be wired to a headless CMS so you edit text and images yourself in a browser, without WordPress and without paying for a plugin licence. WordPress is one way to get an editor, not the only way.

When is a website builder like Wix genuinely the right choice?

When you need to be online this week, the site is a few pages, nobody on your team writes code, and the website is not how customers find or judge you. A live Wix site beats a custom site that is still three weeks from launch. Upgrade when the site starts costing you leads, not before.

Does a custom website rank better on Google than Wix or WordPress?

Not automatically. Google ranks pages, not platforms, and a well-built Wix site will outrank a neglected custom one. What a custom build gives you is control: server-rendered HTML, no plugin bloat, full command of your markup, schema, redirects and Core Web Vitals. It removes the ceiling — it does not do the SEO for you.

Related

• Freelancer vs agency for website design in Delhi NCR — once you've decided on a custom build, this is the next fork.
• Why Indian business websites fail — the failure modes behind these three choices.
• What Klixo Studio builds — custom websites, AI agents, and CRM, LMS and ERP portals.