Wix vs WordPress SEO: what 6.4 million domains actually show

Executive overview

Wix has a reputation for being bad for SEO, but the evidence is mostly anecdotal. Ahrefs compared SEO metrics across 3.2 million Wix and 3.2 million WordPress domains to find out.

The raw numbers heavily favour WordPress, but the data is heavily skewed — median figures make the difference statistically insignificant for most comparisons. Among sites getting meaningful traffic (100+ monthly visits), the gap nearly disappears and Wix sites even outperform on raw traffic volume.

The platform matters far less than the SEO effort behind it — but Wix's technical ceiling will limit serious SEO at scale.

What the data shows

• 46.1% of WordPress sites get some organic traffic vs 1.39% of Wix sites
• 8.26% of WordPress sites get 100+ monthly visits vs 0.06% of Wix sites
• Mean WordPress traffic is ~49x higher than Wix — but mean and median diverge sharply, indicating skewed data
• When median is used, the correlation between platform and traffic is insignificant
• Among sites with 100+ monthly visits, WordPress had slightly more top-10 rankings; Wix had higher organic traffic from those rankings
• Wix sites in the active bucket had higher domain rating but fewer referring domains — suggesting traffic driven by brand queries, not link-building

Technical limitations of Wix for SEO

• Blog URLs locked to domain.com/post/slug — not customisable
• No support for hreflang tags (at time of study) — blocks multilingual SEO
• No access to robots.txt — a significant constraint for larger sites
• Relies on client-side JavaScript to render content and links — pages may not be indexable without JS enabled
• Custom or advanced HTML code is unsupported and untested by Wix

When Wix is and isn't appropriate

• Adequate for basic on-page SEO (titles, meta descriptions, URLs) on simple sites
• Suitable for fast setup and non-technical maintenance
• Not recommended if SEO is a long-term strategy or if technical customisation is needed
• Agencies and growth-focused sites should consider platforms with fewer constraints