Throughout 2018, Sheedah Global Event showcased many projects on Facebook and Instagram, attracting prospects who reached out via direct messages. However, by the end of the year, engagement declined, and competitors continued to grow.
Fortunately, Sheedah recognized that customers wanted more than social media DMs. They needed a dedicated website to view services and pricing, explore structured portfolios, use clear calls to action, browse targeted local SEO landing pages, book services through customized lead capture forms, track user behavior with analytics, and make instant payments seamlessly.
She began questioning how her brand would survive by getting a new website to meet customers’ needs, and which website would be best. After consulting some trusted developers, she had many options.
“WordPress is the best, it covers the essential features to lead sales and gain revenue, more so, Nigerians love it,” some said.
“Haven’t you heard about Wix? It’s flexible to use and own a site,” another person suggested.
“Try Shopify, which is mainly for online stores.
Sheedah Global Event situation is a puzzle for most Nigerian entrepreneurs, each time earnestly striving to take their business online, and perhaps you are facing the same, thinking which website is the best to settle for, either WordPress, Shopify, or Wix?
As an entrepreneur, be clear that any of your decisions can affect:
- The cost of what you will spend now and later
- If your website receives payment in Naira through Flutterwave or Paystack.
- How flexible customers can reach out
- Will the business thrive or collapse?
In this blog guide, you will understand as a Nigerian business owner what you need to learn, unlearn, and relearn concerning these three websites, ranging from their costs, customization, to payment integration and support. It will allow you to make the best decision that genuinely meets the unique objectives and needs of businesses in Nigeria.
What is WordPress?
WordPress is a free content management system powering over 45% of websites worldwide. It embodies every feature, and it is mobile-friendly, powerful, accessible, and strongly protected by an efficient professional network of developers and the international community.
With WordPress, you can build any website, create excellent blogs, own an online store to market, a social network, a membership site, and a community setup. It also powers thousands of eye-catching themes and plugins to strengthen your website and sustain productivity.
Building a website with WordPress gives you the ultimate chance to furnish your brand based on your interest, and it’s free to create with limited offers, which accepts payment in Naira readily with Paystack. Also, WordPress does not require coding.
What is Shopify?
Shopify is a cloud-powered e-commerce solution that equips businesses with everything they need to build and run their own online stores. Its main objective is for business owners running an online store, unlike WordPress, which allows you to build different websites for different purposes.
Shopify helps you quickly build a ready-made store, list products, manage payments, and handle deliveries and customer needs. However, it charges monthly fees for basic and standard features, and its advanced plans may not be feasible for small business owners. Additionally, just like WordPress, Shopify support direct payment processing in Nigeria with the like of Paystack and Flutterwave .
What is Wix?
Wix is mainly used to build a swift website with just a little effort of drag and drop, it is one of the easiest tools to own a website, and you have zero business with coding, it’s a self-made work without a developer. All it requires is choosing a preferred template to design using drag-and-drop, including your text, and your site will be available.
Wix also support direct payment processing in Nigeria with the like of Paystack.
Cost Comparison for Nigerian Businesses Between WordPress, Wix, And Shopify.
WordPress Prices
- Domain: You can own a domain name from 6,000 naira to 40,000 naira, depending on the extension and registrar.
- Hosting: 40,000 naira to 100,000 will provide you with a perfect one and last for a year.
- Themes: You can access free ones, but the premium ones are super okay, with at least 30,000 to 6000 naira for a lifetime.
- Plugins: The premium ranges from 45,000 to 200 naira annually, though most WordPress plugins are free.
- Total set: minimum of 250,000 and above
- Further expenses: affordable and efficient.
Shopify Costs
- Subscriptions are renewed each month.
- Domain. Shopify sells domains for as little as 35,000 .
- Themes/apps. Apps: premium is 40,000 monthly.
- Charges are applied to each transaction using Paystack or Flutterwave.
- Total setup. 400,000 and above
- Prices increases base on our requirement and features.
Wix Expenses
- Subscriptions depend on your registered plans.
- Domain: after a free year of use, you will pay.
- Themes are less effective and available without a subscription.
- Total set-up is 200,000 and above.
- Ongoing process. It could be hard to control.
From the highlighted costs, WordPress emphasises easy use and is inexpensive, with excellent services. As a Nigerian business owner, WordPress should be on your top list.
Note: Prices are subject to change at any time.
WordPress, WIX, Shopify, Customisations, and Flexibilities.
Every business has its aim and objectives to achieve a need, and most website features differ. Some prefer complete control, adding blogs, stores, and a customer booking store.
The customization and flexibility steps allow you to rectify changes in your website’s design, features, and layout.
As a business owner, you should understand how these three websites allow or limit what you have control over. The highlighted content below explains each website’s flexibility and customization.
WordPress
WordPress is superb and powerful. It grants users enough customization, making it easy to change at any moment of choice without coding. WordPress creates thousands of themes and plugins, and has some professional developers to build custom designs. Your site can be unique with a custom design that matches your brand’s identity with flexibility, and you can seek support when needed.
WordPress is ideal for extensive customisation and for an e-commerce store, LMS, or donation. WordPress handles everything smoothly.
Wix
Wix sustains flexibility and customization; its drag-and-drop feature allows users to customize extensively and is user-friendly.
Wix works best for portfolios, small businesses, and personal sites. However, scaling up with advanced features and improved efficiency can be complex—unlike WordPress, which offers flexible, user-friendly customization and endless creative possibilities.
Shopify
Shopify focuses on e-commerce, and it’s effortless, straightforward, and basically like a ready-made store for quick launch without much knowledge of tech or design. However, it has limitations for customizations compared to WordPress, which has excellent themes, runs a blog, and offers service and support.
Local Payment Integration & Business Needs.
Nigerian customers don’t patronize websites that fail to enable fast, reliable, and easy payment methods. Also, suppose your website brand fails to permit local payment for Nigerian customers, e.g., swift transfer, USSD activation, or mobile wallets. In that case, candidly, you are yet to fulfil business needs to generate sales.
Local payment integrations aren’t just optional—they’re essential for boosting sales, building customer trust, and increasing brand visibility. In this context, they’re crucial for unlocking growth and new business opportunities.
1. WordPress: One of the hard-to-find advantages WordPress offers is that it enables local payment integration systems seamlessly through reliable plugins like Flutterwave, Monify, Paystack , and others. These trusted plugins allow Nigerian business owners to receive customer payments through bank transfer, USSD, or debit card.
2. Shopify: This e-commerce platform also supports local payments through Flutterwave and Paystack. Additionally, as a business owner, you can use other payment methods like Stripe—which accepts debit cards—if you meet their signup requirements.
3. Wix: For Nigerian businesses on Wix, Paystack is a widely used payment gateway that enables direct online payments through your website. To integrate it, simply log in to your Wix dashboard, go to “Accept Payments,” and connect your Paystack account. This setup helps you start receiving payments seamlessly from local customers.
SEO And Marketing Capabilities
Building a website for your brand isn’t enough to rank high on Google for potential customers to find you; you need SEO and marketing tools to upskill and get recognised among your competitors. With the proper research, SEO and marketing step in to rank your website high, give excellent visibility on what you offer, and convert customers through blogs, email, and social media content.
Let’s compare how WordPress, Shopify, and Wix work with SEO and choose the best.
1. WordPress. Ranking high on WordPress is very simple and achievable for people to find your business brand using keyword research, with plugins like Yoast SEO and Rank Math. These efficient plugins improve your readability and suggest areas of improvement. Other features include
- Perfect for On-page SEO for all pages structure.
- E-mail marketing tools to connect with buyers.
- Knows who visits with analytics by using Google Analytics.
- Social media integration.
- Sleek call-to-action integration and Live Chats.
- Dynamic page title and meta description
WordPress has the upper hand in SEO, and has an excellent trick in transforming your business marketing, and gives you the support to rank globally, and also enables you to implement any strategy you need
2. Shopify. It’s perfect for smooth online shopping with average SEO, specifically building home, about, and product pages. Shopify lets you edit personal meta tags and URLs, explain/create product images, and generate automatic sitemaps.
What Shopify Offers in Marketing:
- Average blogging content
- Ready-made e-mails by Shopify
- Pop-up lead tools from other apps.
- Facebook, Instagram integration and others.
- Live chat integration
Maintaining Shopify is monthly renewed with a different fee every month depends on the package.
3. Wix. Recently, Wix has also strengthened its SEO power, giving user the ability to further optimize and support to set up page title descriptions, mobile-friendly optimization, and Google indexing. However, even with these features available, Wix SEO are not as efficient enough compare to WordPress.
Wix only offers:
- Wix email marketing
- Social post creator
- blog content
- Minimal landing pages.
- Live chat integration
- etc.
Wix is best for small business owners who aren’t after extensive marketing, just standard tools with SEO.
Community & Support In Nigeria: Where And How To Seek Help Easily.
Irrespective of a website feature’s use, you will sometimes need help to fix an unforeseen situation beyond your control, such as design layout issues, security issues, successful transaction payment, or feature usage problems. For this content, having a lot support makes things easier to rectify.
For a Nigerian business owner, seeking reliable help from a website is essential. Let’s look at how WordPress, Shopify, and Wix support local business owners in Nigeria.
1. WordPress: It offers prompt support through its large, active global community. Users across Nigeria and worldwide can quickly get help by posting questions or issues to the community.
- Professional developers and designers
- Sending supports to a help desk for WordPress community.
- Facebook community.
- Physical meetups and wordcamps.
This means you can reach out anytime you face issues like server problems or little plugin conflicts, with access to a global support network ready to help.
Note: For premium or dedicated support, you’ll need to host with WordPress.com or contact your hosting provider or domain registrar for personalized assistance.
2. Shopify: Shopify also offers support, but it often involves multiple steps and can be slow. You usually communicate through email, live chat, or support tickets, which may take time. Global support teams may not fully understand the Nigerian market.
There are local Shopify experts and freelancers in Nigeria, but their help comes at a cost. Shopify is great for online guides and tutorials, but if you prefer quick phone support, it can be challenging.
3. Wix: Wix is affordable and user-friendly, but when complex issues arise, the solution comes with a cost. The community of Wix developers is small, and they mainly handle basic issues rather than advanced ones that require broader global support.
Conclusion
As a Nigerian business owner aiming for long-term success, your website choice should balance cost-effectiveness, flexibility, local payment integration, and sustainable growth. While Shopify and Wix offer convenience, WordPress stands out by providing the robust support and scalability your brand needs.
If you’re ready to boost your business’s visibility and reputation online in Nigeria, WordPress is the complete solution to help you grow.
