My wife and I started trying to put together our blog on Wix, because we had heard it was really good for people with practically zero tech skills like us. Once we started trying to put it together ourselves, it quickly became evident that we were even more unskilled than we thought. We reached out to a website design firm, and they are putting the site together also using Wix. After doing some more research into the specifics of what we would like to do with the site, it appears that we have made a huge mistake. As i’m sure you’re all aware, EVERYONE appears to use wordpress, and they seem to be the only way for us to get the functionality that we need. Does anyone have any experience with this, or have any advice as to what we should do?
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Hey @Jason ! I have experience with this! I started on Squarespace 12+ years ago and stuck with it for NINE years. It was one of the biggest most regrettable mistakes I’ve made in my blogging business and wish I’d switched over to WP far sooner than I did.
I know it might seem like a pain, but it would best serve your business if you make the switch to Wordpress sooner rather than later. All of the WP plugins/schema play VERY well with Google and that is where you are going to get the best optimization. In our competitive space, you want to have as much on your side as possible.
That is all assuming that you want this to be a thriving, lucrative business. If not, ignore everything I’ve just said. 
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Thank you for your quick and helpful reply. Unfortunately, we’ve already paid a contract for this site to be put together using wix, and have extremely limited funds to move forward at this point. As I expressed in my original post, we are both pretty much the opposite of tech savvy, and although we are extremely committed to make this site a success, are both afraid that the learning curve to construct this ourselves is so steep that were we to take this on, we would maybe at best have a relatively mediocre site together in a year. Do you think that we can scrape along with this and make at least a little bit of money so that we can save up and have someone help us migrate it over to WP, or do we have to just try to learn it ourselves? When I say that we are not savvy, I mean that we couldn’t figure out how to post basic links on the Wix format.
I mean, a lot of us aren’t super tech savvy 
so WP isn’t as hard to figure out as you might think. If you have a good web host they can migrate for you. I think you’d learn faster than you think. Once you’re in the hang of it, it’ll get so much easier. It’s just a matter of digging in and taking a bit of time to learn those basic functions.
I agree with what @megan has said. Wordpress really is the best for your business long term, and the more you put posts and recipes on Wix, the harder it will be/longer it will take to move it over to Wordpress when you finally decide to do it.
Is there no way to get out of the contract? I would at least ask. Or ask if they could do something on Wordpress for the same amount of money instead of Wix (if that’s an option).
And I agree that a lot of people aren’t super tech savvy. Wordpress was a whole new experience for me and it took a lot of research and learning on my part to understand what to do. I would suggest starting with a good theme - Feast is the most common one that people use and it’s fairly simple to configure with a lot of good support and documentation.
From the looks of things, according to the research that I’ve done so far, we would need to first host the site on wix, and then set up a new host service that supports wp, set up a new site there, and then move over the posts to it from the rss feed on the wix site. Unless I’m wrong, this means that all of the actual website creation work that these people have done for us would disappear, leaving us with only the actual posts that we’ve created ourselves. If that is actually the case, it sounds like we would be better off not doing anything with the site that they have created at all and just start getting together our site on wordpress, and start putting our posts on there to start with. We just got off the phone with the designer, telling him that we want to put everything on pause for now whiile we research our options further. he is not going to charge us the other half of the money in the contract agreement unless we close the deal.
He mentioned in trying to convince us to stay with wix that he has done many pages for other people based on the cost associated with getting a wordpress site designed being a lot more than a wix one. At this point we’ve blown our budget for a designer already, and will have to design it ourselves anyway. I guess that designers charge more for a wordpress site just because they are inherently better? We want to get this up and running as soon as possible, so I guess we just need to go ahead and get started. I wish we had done more research before we spent all of this money. I guess you live and learn, though, huh? Thanks again for all of your help and advise on this, You’ve been very kind, especially since I am brand new to the forum.
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You are more than welcome, and I’m glad that he’s not going to charge the other half of the money.
And you don’t need a designer to get a Wordpress site up and running. It’s really not too hard and I was able to google and find some good step by step articles to do it. This one looked to be one of the better ones: https://wpastra.com/guides-and-tutorials/start-food-blog/
Something to watch out for - a lot of articles will tell you to host your site with BlueHost. Don’t do that - use one of the other ones suggested in the article I linked. I know a lot of people use Big Scoots, but it’s on the expensive side so you might want to wait on that. I use Cloudways, which is what’s recommended in the article.
You can do this! 
Unfortunately, I’m currently going through this and let me tell you is it horrible to move things over. I highly recommend trying to figure out how to do it now, not later. I totally get the whole thing with funds and everything, but seriously. I’ve spent the last 3 months moving everything over one-by-one from WIX to WordPress. I will say… WordPress did work ok for me for the time I used it, but as I advanced in my blogging, it became clear I needed something better and quite frankly… more affordable.
WordPress Beginner is amazing especially if you’re not tech-savvy.
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I agree with @megan on this. I also started with Squarespace and it was the worst mistake I made. Then I switched to bluehost, the second worst mistake.
A lot like you, I also quickly realized how limited I was with Squarespace and that I really did need to be on WordPress. Honestly the time it took to learn and figure out WordPress was so worth it. If I had switched later on down the road I think that would have been an even bigger pain. Even three years later I’m still uncovering things that didn’t transfer well. My advice is to make the switch as soon as possible.
You are so smart for seeking out this info so early and learning from others in this group! There is so much value here.
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