What is a better wallet to work through? Xapo?
Neither Coinbase nor Xapo are wallets per se. They're
online wallets, which are basically a bank that you're trusting to store and spend your Bitcoin for you. A proper Bitcoin wallet is one where you control your private keys - these are wallets like Electrum which you download.
You can also deal with hardware wallets like a
TREZOR, and use these with Electrum if you want. I would argue that these are a very safe option for users who are not tech-savvy.
Alternatively you could use Bitcoin Core, which is a full node. This way you're contributing to the security of the whole network. However, it can be resource intensive to run these clients.