Drop Wix For WordPress: Here is why
Httparchive published the First Contentful Paint scores of top content management systems. It showed Wix dead last behind every CMS in the analysis for the fastest scores. Yet Wix pulled ahead of WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal in other areas. The data reveals actionable trends.
What is First Contentful Paint
First contentful paint (FCP) is a user experience metric. It measures how fast a web page shows usable content to site visitors.
As can be seen in the above graph, Wix performed last out of the four content management systems under consideration. The full analysis of the performance of 25 content management systems, including Weebly, TYpo3 and others, Wix performed the worst.
What the graph shows is that out of all the Wix sites measured in this study, only 7.99% of those Wix sites were able to earn a ranking of Fast. Of the WordPress sites measured, 30.94% of WordPress sites achieved a ranking of Fast.
That’s a huge performance difference between Wix and WordPress, 7.99% versus 30.94%.
Fastest Mobile FCP Scores
Wix performance scores actually improve when tested in the mobile environment. In desktop it scored 7.99% while on mobile it earned a ranking of 9.01%. That means that of all the Wix sites measured, 9.01% were able to achieve a ranking of Fast.
Nevertheless, Wix is still ranked last out of a total of 290 content management systems analyzed for achieving a score of Fast.
Wix Beats WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal
Among the top content management systems, Wix is a winner in the area that arguably matters the most. Every content management system analysed had the most sites ranking as average. Because this is where most of the sites ranked, this gives a clearer idea of the overall performance.
Judged by how most of the sites ranked, Wix comes out on top:
- Percentage of Wix sites ranking Average – 59.79%
- Percentage of Joomla sites ranking Average – 53.23%
- Percentage of WordPress sites ranking Average – 51.64%
- Percentage of Drupal sites ranking Average – 47.07%
Mobile Performance is Worse than Desktop
WordPress Sites Ranked Fast
Desktop: 30.94%
Mobile: 19.12%
An issue of concern is that aside from Wix (marginally), all the other content management systems performed less well in mobile than in desktop. This may indicate that web publishers have not yet adjusted to designing for mobile.
This may be an indication that publishers have to consider making more tradeoffs in terms of how many scripts, third party scripts, third party fonts, third party icons and the amount of images used in mobile versions of websites.
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While Wix’s performance for achieving Fast scores are dead last, Wix performed better than WordPress, Joomla and Drupal in getting more sites to rank at the Average level on mobile devices. This might sound mediocre, but considering that all CMS’s had more sites ranked average than any other label, Wix’s performance stands out.
First Contentful Paint Matters
If ad views, ad clicks or sales matter to you, then first contentful paint is an important metric to master.
Research from Google discovered that the longer a site visitor must wait the likelier they will leave a site. Site speed is critical for visitors on mobile devices.
Google’s research revealed that on page elements such as third party scripts was the leading cause of a slow site. The second leading cause was the number of images.
According to Google:
“For bounce rate, which measures the percentage of people that leave your mobile site without exploring beyond the first page, speed has the most impact.”
That means nobody’s going to be clicking your ads or buying widgets if they’re racing to get off of your site because the content loads too slowly.
First Contentful Paint is One of Many Metrics
Do not use First Contentful Paint as a deciding factor as to which CMS you will chooose. The ability to update a website yourself in any manner you see fit is something that is lacking in the Wix environment.
Making necessary changes on your own is important. Having to wait for a framework to update can negatively affect your search marketing. While Wix performs admirably in this analysis, there are many other factors that should be considered concurrently.
