Wix and Their Dirty Tricks

Wix – the famous website-builder company that you may have seen steal WordPress code and lie about it has decided that the best way to gain relevancy is to attack the open source WordPress community with a strange set of ads. They have attempted to imitate Apple’s Macvs PC ads but instead tastelessly portray the WordPress community as an absent father who is in therapy.

I feel a lot for those who were forced to work on these ads. Even the actors. It must have been a terrible feeling working on something like Encyclopedia Britannica attacking Wikipedia. WordPress is a global community of hundreds of thousands of volunteers, and community members working together to make the internet a better place. You own the code and all that you have put into it. The open-source license gives you complete control over your code and ensures you are in total control of your code for now and forever. WordPress is free and gives you freedom.

Wix, a for profit company valued at approximately 20 billion dollars, has a business model that requires customers to pay more each year. This makes it hard to leave the site or get a refund. You can see their investor presentations, but don’t believe me. They are so insecure that they are the only website creator that I know of that does not allow you to export any content. It’s like a motel where you can check-in but never check-out. Their proprietary stack locks you in. Even their support documentation admits it.

If we compare website builders to abusive relationships then Wix is the one that locks you down in the basement and won’t let anyone out.

Philosophically, open source is what I believe in. If WordPress isn’t for you, there are many great open source communities such as Joomla, Jekyll and Typo3. We have great relationships with our proprietary competitors. I also have high respect for Squarespace and Shopify. I have always seen their integrity, and would recommend them to anyone.

It’s hard to believe that users will be interested in this in the long-term. That could explain why Squarespace recently surpassed Wix in market share . They support the native export to WordPress’ format and don’t need to resort to any dirty tricks to succeed. Squarespace’s upcoming IPO is going to be a success, I believe.

Wix continues to display their true colors, however. I encourage people to think about the behavior of the companies they fund with their dollars, regardless of the product they use. Wix wants you to see their latest campaign, so let’s go ahead and take the bait. Let’s watch the misleading, creepy way they try to portray themselves.