SiteGround vs Wix
A polished shared host against a closed website platform, compared on what their own pages publish: visit-graded GBP tiers with migrations and daily backups against storage-graded USD plans with a free tier and no stated export path. Two currencies, two philosophies, one honest table.
These two sell different objects and price them in different currencies, so no price ranking is made here. SiteGround sells shared hosting graded by approximate monthly visits, in pounds ex VAT on a 12-month prepay, with free migrations and daily backups stated. Wix sells the whole platform, hosting included, graded by storage in dollars from a genuinely free tier, and its pages state no visit limits, no backups policy and no export path at all.
By Sam Moreton
Researched
Which one for your use case
| Use case | Pick |
|---|---|
| WordPress site that must stay movable between hosts | SiteGround |
| First site, zero budget, ads acceptable | Wix |
| Seller who needs ecommerce from the plan menu | Wix |
| Team that wants a staging environment stated in writing | SiteGround |
| Buyer in the UK comparing like-for-like prices | SiteGround |
Testing overlap: Both sides come from pages captured in October and November 2026 respectively; no site was built on either platform and no performance claim is made here.
What the captured pages state, side by side
From the per-host feature audit, checked through 2026-11-04. Cells carry the date their source page was captured; gaps render as not stated rather than guessed.
| Dimension | SiteGround | Wix |
|---|---|---|
| Entry price (cheapest published plan, trials excluded) | £13.99 per month (StartUp; £1.99 per month first-invoice price) Checked 2026-10-11. | $0 per month (Free) Checked 2026-11-04. |
| Trial | Not stated on the captured SiteGround pages. | Not stated on the captured Wix pages. |
| Apps | Free installation of WordPress or other CMS through the setup wizard; free shopping-cart install for ecommerce, or the all-inclusive SiteGround Ecommerce option. Checked 2026-10-11. | Wix App Market: hundreds of Wix-made and third-party apps are available, including Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel and Zapier (homepage FAQ). App pricing is not stated on the captured pages. Checked 2026-11-04. |
| Staging | Staging is listed as a GrowBig exclusive feature; GoGeek lists staging with Git. Not listed for StartUp. Checked 2026-10-11. | Not stated on the captured Wix pages. |
| Backups | Automated daily backups free on every plan; on-demand backups on GrowBig and GoGeek. Retention is not stated. Checked 2026-10-11. | Not stated on the captured Wix pages. |
| Migrations | Free site migrations: an automatic migrator for WordPress sites or transfer by SiteGround experts, with the site stated to stay live throughout; a free email migrator is also included. Checked 2026-10-11. | Not stated on the captured Wix pages. |
| CDN | Free CDN with every site on all plans; the web hosting page states the built-in CDN serves content from the nearest location. Checked 2026-10-11. | Global CDN with 200+ nodes distributed globally (hosting page), included with every site including the free plan as worldwide CDN coverage (homepage FAQ); the drag-and-drop static deploy also gets SSL and a global CDN included. No per-tier CDN differences are stated. Checked 2026-11-04. |
| Control panel | Site Tools: each site gets its own panel to manage, share access to and switch between sites independently; domain, email, website and backups are managed from one dashboard. Free SSH and SFTP access; WP-CLI is listed under the WordPress services. Checked 2026-10-11. | The Wix Editor (drag and drop on a fluid canvas, no-code design features, 1000's of templates on the free card, 2000+ templates site-wide) plus a central Dashboard described as one central hub for everything happening on the site, an Owner mobile app and AI creation tools. No cPanel, SSH, FTP or server access of any kind is stated on the captured pages. Checked 2026-11-04. |
| Team features | Collaborators included on every plan (web hosting page feature lists); white-label access and a free private DNS are GoGeek exclusives; the full feature list adds 'Ship Site to Client' under agency and designer features. Checked 2026-10-11. | Site collaborators by plan: 2 on Light, 5 on Core, 10 on Business, 100 on Business Elite; not stated for the free plan. The compare table grades related working limits by the same tiers: lead-capture forms 4/10/25/75 and fields per form 10/50/75/100 (Light/Core/Business/Business Elite). Checked 2026-11-04. |
| Support channels | phone, chat, tickets. Checked 2026-10-11. | 24/7 chat, scheduled call with a Customer Care Expert, Wix Help Center, Hire a Professional marketplace. Paid: Priority customer care (Business Elite) (custom pricing: priority customer care). Checked 2026-11-04. |
| Benchmarks | Not tested by Kite: no benchmark runs exist yet (see the methodology). | Not tested by Kite: no benchmark runs exist yet (see the methodology). |
What the published data says
- Entry prices are published in different currencies (SiteGround GBP, Wix USD), so no cheaper-side claim is made: converting between them would need an exchange rate this audit does not hold. SiteGround: £13.99 per month (StartUp; £1.99 per month first-invoice price); Wix: $0 per month (Free) (checked 2026-10-11 / 2026-11-04).
- SiteGround publishes ~10,000 visits/month/~100,000 visits/month/~400,000 visits/month visits (as of 2026-10-11); the captured pages state no overage billing policy.
- Wix sells support escalation above the standard tier: Priority customer care (Business Elite) at custom pricing (2026-11-04).
SiteGround: what the captured pages do not state, and the sources
- No server resources (RAM or CPU) are stated for any shared plan: tiers are graded by approximate monthly visits, storage and feature set, so no like-for-like RAM anchor exists against RAM-graded hosts.
- Backup retention (how long daily backups are kept) is not stated.
- Visit allowances are stated as approximate ('~10,000 visits'); no overage, throttling or upgrade policy for exceeding them is stated.
- All captured prices are from the UK regional site (siteground.co.uk) in GBP, excluding VAT; the captured pages state no monthly (non-prepaid) term prices and no other region's pricing.
- No free trial is stated on the captured pages; the stated risk-free mechanism is a 30-day money-back guarantee.
- No separately priced add-ons are stated on the captured pages, so the add-on list is empty by evidence, not by assumption.
- An uptime SLA or guarantee is not stated.
- SiteGround's navigation lists Cloud Hosting, Reseller Hosting and WordPress/WooCommerce product lines; only the shared Web Hosting line was captured, so this audit covers that line only.
- Node.js application hosting is not documented on the captured pages: a blog headline dated 01 Oct 2026 announces it, but the captured feature lists do not include it.
- Staging is not listed for StartUp: the web hosting page ties staging to GrowBig (staging + Git to GoGeek) as exclusive features, while the full feature list shows staging without a per-plan split.
- Datacentre presence is summarised as 'servers on four continents'; no region choice per plan or customer is stated.
- Support response-time guarantees are not stated.
- Web Hosting Crafted For Top Website Performance & Speed - SiteGround, SiteGround (checked 2026-10-11)
- SiteGround Web Hosting Plans - Full Feature List, SiteGround (checked 2026-10-11)
Wix: what the captured pages do not state, and the sources
- No visit counts, traffic limits or monthly-visit metering are stated anywhere on the captured pages; tiers are graded by storage, collaborators and business-feature limits instead.
- No bandwidth or data-transfer allowance, and no overage wording, appears on any captured page.
- No server RAM or vCPU is stated for the hosting itself; the only compute figures are per-backend-container capacities (1 vCPU with 400 MB RAM on Light and Core, 2 vCPUs with 600 MB RAM on Business and Business Elite) and request-per-minute ceilings from the compare table.
- Staging environments are not mentioned on any captured page.
- Backups are not mentioned on any captured page: no tool, frequency or retention is stated for any plan, including Business Elite.
- No site migration into Wix and no export or migration-out path is described on the captured pages; what moving a Wix site to another platform involves is not stated here.
- Monthly-billing prices are not stated: displayed prices are for yearly subscriptions paid in full at purchase, and the 50% offer applies only to the initial term of yearly or multi-year subscriptions; no month-to-month term price appears anywhere.
- Prices and currency vary by location: the USD rendering carries a 'USD prices displayed for reference only' disclaimer while a UK rendering of the same page the same day showed GBP 9 / 16 / 25 / 119 with identical numbers; all prices exclude taxes determined by billing address.
- The compare table's Uptime row states only 'SLO' for every paid tier with no percentage and no compensation or remedy terms; the 99.99% figure appears only as a marketing claim on the hosting and home pages.
- Support response times are not stated, no phone number is published, and the contact page gates personalized help behind login.
- The number of websites each Premium plan covers is not stated on the captured pages; the ladder is presented per site but no figure appears.
- Free-plan resource limits (storage, collaborators, CMS items, container capacity) are not stated; only its feature list appears.
- The 50% offer deadline is stated as 'valid until Thursday 7:00 AM GMT' with no calendar date; Light carried no discount badge in either rendering, so the 'select plans' wording is consistent with Core, Business and Business Elite only.
- No data-center region choice is offered or stated; the hosting page names global data centers powered by Google Cloud, AWS, Fastly and Wix with no per-plan or per-customer selection.
- Google Workspace email is sold through Wix but no price is stated on the captured pages.
- Wix Studio (agencies and freelancers), Enterprise detail pages, Point of Sale, App Market listing prices and domain renewal pricing after the free year were not captured, so this audit covers the website Premium plan ladder only.
- Wix.com - The platform trusted by millions of businesses, Wix.com (checked 2026-11-04)
- Wix Pricing Information | Upgrade to a Premium Plan | Wix.com, Wix.com (checked 2026-11-04)
- Free Web Hosting | Reliable Website Hosting | Wix.com, Wix.com (checked 2026-11-04)
- Wix Help Center, Wix.com (checked 2026-11-04)
Open this comparison in the interactive tool to swap either side for any of the other audited hosts.
One of these companies sells hosting. The other sells a website, and throws the hosting in with it. That single difference explains almost everything on the respective plan menus, and it is the first thing to get straight before any price, feature or guarantee is compared, because the two products only look like competitors from a search box.
SiteGround's pages pitch a managed home for a WordPress site you own: visit-graded tiers, a panel per site, migrations done for you, daily backups. Wix's pages pitch the site itself: build it in the editor, host it on the multi-cloud, upgrade the plan when you need storage or payments. The buyer who knows which of those they want has already decided this pair. The buyer who does not is exactly who this page is for.
The prices, kept in their own currencies
SiteGround's captured prices come from its UK site in pounds, ex VAT, on a prepaid 12-month term: StartUp at a £1.99 first invoice renewing at £13.99, GrowBig £3.99 to £23.99, GoGeek £5.99 to £34.99. Wix's captured prices are in dollars, billed on yearly terms: Light at $9, Core at $16, Business at $25, Business Elite at $119, with an Enterprise tier above them quoted on request.
This page will not rank those against each other. Ranking a pound price against a dollar one means inventing an exchange rate and a VAT treatment this audit holds neither of, and every flat answer you have read elsewhere quietly picked both. Each currency is priced in its own column in the table below, with check dates, and the comparison moves on to the things the pages do state in comparable terms.
Storage and visits, or storage and silence
The grading units differ by philosophy. SiteGround grades by approximate monthly visits, ~10,000 on StartUp through ~400,000 on GoGeek, with unmetered transfer and storage from 10 GB to 100 GB. The visit numbers are stated as approximate, no overage or throttling policy accompanies them, and that is recorded as a gap, not smoothed.
Wix grades by storage, 2 GB on Light through 100 GB on Business, with Business Elite stated as unlimited and no visit meter anywhere on any captured page. A platform that hosts the editor and the site together does not need to sell visits, but it also never states what happens to a very busy site, and the silence is the buyer's to weigh.
The features each menu states
SiteGround's stated bundle is the shared-hosting full English: free SSL, free CDN, free email at your domain, daily backups with on-demand copies from GrowBig, free site migrations by its team, collaborators on every plan and staging from GrowBig up. Wix's stated bundle is the platform pitch: SSL on every site including free ones, a global CDN of 200+ nodes, the drag-and-drop editor with AI generation, ecommerce from Core upward and a 99.99% uptime marketing claim.
Backups deserve their own sentence: SiteGround states them; Wix's pages, pricing to FAQ, never mention them at all. For a platform whose only copy of your site is the platform, that is the gap to ask about before the free tier tempts you.
Moving in, moving on
SiteGround migrates WordPress sites in for free, automatically or with its team, and the site stays live throughout; its UK pages also state a free email migrator. Because what it hosts is WordPress, moving on later is ordinary: any competent host can take the site.
Wix's captured pages state no export path, no database access, no server access and no migration-out tool. Building on the free tier costs nothing but the ads and branding it carries, and removing them is what the first paid tier sells. Neither page lies about any of this; one simply states an exit and the other states none, and the audit records each position verbatim.
Support, in practice and in shape
SiteGround publishes phone, chat and ticket support, 24/7, with priority handling reserved for GoGeek, and no paid escalation tier above that. Wix's captured support funnel is chat-led with call-back-booking, login-gated help and premium care attached to the Business Elite tier. Neither host publishes response-time commitments, and both carry decade-scale satisfaction figures on their own pages, which are vendor claims and nothing more.
Where each one wins
SiteGround for a WordPress site you intend to keep movable, a staging environment stated in writing, email at your domain, migrations done for you and a refund window of 30 days. Wix for the first site that needs to exist by tonight, a real free tier, an editor that does the building, and an ecommerce ladder printed on the plan menu.
The Cloudways vs SiteGround page covers the managed-cloud step up from SiteGround's tiers, and Cloudways vs Wix covers the same step off the Wix platform. The hosting comparison tool sets this pair against any of the fifteen other audited hosts.
FAQ
Is Wix or SiteGround cheaper?
The pages make that unanswerable honestly, so it is not answered with a number. SiteGround's captured prices are in GBP, ex VAT, on 12-month prepay, from a £1.99 first invoice renewing at £13.99. Wix's are in USD, from $9 a month for Light with a free tier beneath. Converting between them would invent an exchange rate this audit does not hold, so the table prices each in its own currency and stops there.
Can I move my site off Wix later?
Not according to anything Wix publishes. Across every captured pricing, hosting and FAQ page there is no stated export or migration-out path, no stated server access and no backups policy, so the honest statement is that Wix's pages describe no way out. SiteGround hosts standard WordPress, which any host can take, and its migrator moves sites in.
Does either include staging?
SiteGround ties staging to its GrowBig tier and above, and its own full feature list muddies that by listing staging without a per-plan split; the boundary is quoted exactly as captured. Wix's captured pages do not mention staging at all.
Which is better for an online store?
Wix names ecommerce explicitly on the plan menu, payments from the Core plan upward with standard and advanced tiers above. SiteGround states a free shopping-cart install and an all-inclusive ecommerce option, but publishes no store-tier ladder; if the plan menu is the deciding artefact, Wix's is the one that answers the question.