5 Reasons Not To Use Wix For Your Website – A Brief Wix Review

Fantastic. Great advice and makes a lot of sense. Thanks!

Makes no sense and is completely self serving. Many businesses are have limited resources available to pay a developer. I have used wordpress and there is quite a learning curve. Unlike many other writers on this topic, the author asserts that Google doesn’t care how fancy the website is. But the viewers do as numerous studies have shown. You get six writers on building a website and you’ll get 25 opinions. Tiresome and a waste of time. People should do what works for them, not for you.

Hi and thanks for taking the time to comment. My comments make perfect sense based on many websites I’ve seen that have been self built. Based on that it’s a fact that site builders, including WordPress page builders, simplify the process of building websites. I never implied that a WordPress website is SEO friendly…it still needs effort to make it so. Easy site creation sounds great, but it hides the things that make a difference to being found, and there’s a bunch of other things outside of your site that are important for most businesses (e.g. Google My Business listings, Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc). It is possible to build a site on site and page builders that are SEO optimised, but most of them aren’t….and I include many many professionally built websites from agencies.

The fact is, a site that’s not optimised (in usability or search) costs you money as it can’t get found or used, or your ad campaign may be costing you more than it needs to (yes, the page content and layout matters for that too). The platform doesn’t matter, its just that platforms like Wix tend to make it easier to be unaware of the details that matter.

This article isn’t really self serving. I don’t build websites any more so I can give independent advice. Sure I help with website briefs and do digital audits, but the numbers in the article are not optimistic, and based on a real client story. That’s why I started with only 1 new enquiry a week from a website as the lowest impact, where I knew the client was swamped after a new site.

Google doesn’t care how fancy a website is. It cares about it being usable, user friendly, and search engine friendly (both technically and in the content).

Of course like everything creative you’ll get many different ideas, that’s why I’m passionate about tracking. Data beats decisions, but I’ve yet to find a self build website where the owner realises what tracking you can have in place. In the last 6 weeks I’ve had 4 clients who have not had any form of analytics on their site, and with another we started tracking phone call clicks. Many of these were as a result of an ad campaign, so the success of the campaign was being under reported, which can lead to bad decisions.

What works for most businesses is getting money, which is the whole point of this article.

[…] hosting your website wherein lies the real issue. Number three and four of Fully Charged Media’s 5 Reasons Not To Use Wix For Your Website  does a great job of explaining why this is problematic. So, to Weebly-Wix or to not Weebly-Wix? […]

All I can say is, playform is of little concern to Google and SEO in general. So long as proper information can be entered by user and read by Google that is.

I know or Wix sites that with natural marketing ( not a single followed backlink) but just a few rounds of ads initially in related websites and mags that quickly achieved 2nd page from page 50 and after a couple of years are on page one towards the top competing with multimillion dollar businesses and websites.

This piece is not factual but opinionated and biased with too many assumptions. I agree with 1st commenter, for some Wix has everything they need, for others it does not, decision needs to made on these righteous factors and budget not on self-serving opinions of web devs who have lost business to Wix. Wix is a little limited in what it allows you to do when compared to wordpress but so what, not every business is going to need all missing things here. Also the limits have more to do with design capabilities than actual function, functionwise wix has come a long long way.

btw my wix blogs and sites score better than this page itself on tools wix says are not supported or fully compatoble with their platform (when we complain of low scores):

In fact, I have done this on every single blog I found dissing wix, and 99% my wix pages outperform these pages on speed and Google scores lol

https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fullychargedmedia.com%2Fonline-presence-fundamentals%2F5-reasons-not-to-use-wix-for-your-website-a-brief-wix-review%2F

Hi Jamsheed. Thanks for your commments. You have clearly used Wix more than me and I’m more than happy to take your insights. I absolutely understand that businesses have different budgets and different requirements, however I still stand by all the points in this article. The majority of businesses that use these types of platforms don’t have any understanding of SEO, the importance of third party businesses listings etc etc, but they are ‘happy’ with their website. Very often that happieness is only a visual happieness. It’s the other stuff that makes you get found, and brings more business.
Sure there are still some businesses that only need a visual reference when people check them out after say a networking conference, and a placeholder is still ok for them.
Happy to take on board your comments about speed, although I can’t remember discussing speed implications on the article. I don’t mind saying my website isn’t the best, but I know it’s not and I understand why. It just hasn’t been my priority.
As per the other comment. This article is not self serving. I don’t build websites. The only self serving part is when I’ve been in the situation (many times) where businesses have had a friend build a website, then the client comes to me to make it more visible….then they wonder why they have to spend more time and/or money. This is where the business owner has been lured into some false situation by someone who doesn’t know that they’re doing.

Oh and of course platform doesn’t matter for Google…at the end of the day as long as it serves content well and it’s correctly structured technically it doesn’t matter. But I’d question when the platform uses things like AJAX and sticks out ugly URLs by default.

sorry but i think you are just angry that wix have impacted your business (i guess you are a developer right?)
but come on , everything is changing in the world you should be prepared and website creating is also not an exception
remember few years ago it was almost impossible for an ordinary person to have an e-commerce website?
but now there are many many easy options
i think wix isn’t neither perfect nor great
i think they are ok but definitely they are moving towards being great if not perfect

Thanks for your comment souren. I’m not ‘angry’ about Wix, nor am I a developer. I have been in the past but mostly on large corporate projects and the odd website here and there. My speciality is ensuring businesses have a cohesive online presence to bring them the best return on investment they can.
I agree with you that the capabilities you can get online today are as close to free as you can get compared to the tens of thousands of dollars the equivalent functionality would have cost not that long ago, and to that extend these platforms should be commended.

My problem with platforms such as Wix is that the majority of business owners don’t know what questions they need to ask, and don’t have the time and capability to understand what makes up a good online presence to be found in the moments that matter online. Nor should they.

Business owners are experts in their business, not digital marketing, SEO, online advertising and everything else that comes into play.

Using platforms such as Wix (and Weebly, Squarespace etc etc) often leads business owners into a false sense of security they have an amazing looking website and there’s nothing else they need to do. More often that not, the details about making that site search friendly, ensuring they have the right presence elsewhere setup (including free things like Google My Business and Yelp etc) are overlooked as the importance of those elements aren’t appreciated. Often owners turn to platforms like this after being burnt by a developer, or wondering why things cost so much.

The last time I used Wix their default URLs were not search friendly, they used AJAX and plenty other things that aren’t great for search engines. Some of those things can be fixed, yes, but more often than not they aren’t…..therefore the cheap ‘online presence’ is costing businesses revenue by not making them as visible as they should be.

Angry with Wix? No. Frustrated by the amount of businesses that wonder why their nice looking ‘pre fab’ website isn’t bringing them business, and can’t track any return on investment? That’s more like it. A lot of the time these platforms make it hard to insert things like Google Tag Manager code and the likes which impacts the ability to track things well.

The same could be said for Facebook, YouTube, WordPress etc. If those platforms charged money to access them, business owners would take time to learn how to optimise them and be a lot better off as a result, and get far more out of the time invested in them.

I found this entire article to be not only assumptive, but downright offensive. Based on your opinion, if someone is not a website developer, how “dare” they even attempt it?! With that mediocre social stance, how do you even get by in the real world?

News flash; people actually ENJOY trying their hand at new experiences…. Graphic and web design being one of them. I’m also not an equestrian, with your logic, it sounds as though you would be outright infuriated if you saw me on top of a horse; how DARE her!!!

I have to agree with the universal consensus here; your anger towards Wix for putting the tools in the “average person’s” hands speaks volumes in this article. You are clearly upset, and your biased overview reminds me of a five year old throwing a temper tantrum; it is abundantly clear to the point that the majority of your readers took notice and have called you out on it.

Wix is a wonderful option for people, such as myself, that are trying to make a better life for themselves. Without this program, I likely would never have A. Been able to learn coding in order to build my own website from scratch or B. Been able to afford to hire someone to do it for me.

What’s the common denominator in both instances? Well, even the most basic, non tech savvy individual can clearly recognize that I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to have my own website; which would essentially make my attempts at entrepreneurship merely futile.

Try looking outside your own privileged world for two minutes… Maybe then you might wake up and realize that the majority most often do have have the financial means to procure a website for their business as you have so ill advised.

But hey! Way to go in making your readers feel like inadequate pieces of s*!t for trying their hand at something new! Bravo.

Btw, I have met you several times in real life, and I must say that I am shockingly appalled by this article; I sincerely never expected something like this from you.

I have been a wix user since they first released. I can tell you that Darren is 200% RIGHT. The above comments are more than likely from wix employees themselves! When your site that you have personally invested all your money and knowledge into ranks #1 (NOT BC OF ANYTHING WIX DID) then tanks overnight something is wrong. Even worse, when you confront wix about said issues and you get numerous replies stating that it’s not wix or your site and that they “guarantee” Google is able to see and crawl your site, only to see Google release a statement that in fact they were NOT ABLE to is just insulting.
There is also the issue of page speed. Wix REPEATEDLY states their sites are not slow, that it’s how you are using the site (basically our fault for using too many images etc). The plain and simple fact is THEY tell you not to alter the image and they will display it appropriately. Then when questioned about a page speed test you get the reply “use xyz speed test as it is more compatible with Wix”! Why in the hell should I listen to some company that YOU pay to tell me my page is fine when GOOGLE says it is not! It’s BS. Wix is like Groupon. You may get clients bUT they will ALWAYS BE cheap and ready for the next “discount” from someone else.

Darren, you are completely right and I felt the need to shut those wix employees up! Thank you for your post and hopefully more people will find out about wix and their deceptive practices before they have to start over like I did.

Hi Amber, Thanks for your comments.
I absolutely agree people should enjoy trying new things, even women riding horses. I’m not sure where you got that connection from, horses are amazing animals.
You’ve taken the points raised in this post way too personally. I love that technology empowers everyone and allows “the average person”, as you called them, to do things not possible before.
Like everything though, there are trade offs and compromises. The whole point of this article is to realise the trade off you may be making by using platforms like this, without investing in the right knowledge to understand how your online presence works. In every circumstance where Wix has been used, the site’s haven’t been optimised and that can quickly cost businesses in lost opportunities. Often this is more than the initial investment would have reaped them. Note – I never said they COULDN’T be optimised, just that you have to know what you’re doing.
This is no different from me going to the local racing track, and being driven around in a top end McLaren race car. Would it frustrate me I wasn’t driving it? Sure. Would the experience be the same if I was driving it? Absolutely not, it would have taken me much longer to drive round the circuit as I wouldn’t know how to control the car like the professional race driver did.
If you don’t have the option of getting a professional to build your site, then that’s understandable. Make the most of what you have as I can tell you are even reading articles like this.
But just because you can make a pretty website doesn’t mean it’s going to get found and work for you. Every serious web person will say the same thing if they know what they are talking about.
A friend (a web developer) recently called me to ask about doing some work for a client who they have built a Wix website for. They were professionals but the same thing happened. Their SEO was appalling, and that costs in website visibility unless you are willing to pay for traffic, and even then it will cost you more.
So go for your life with Wix and optimise it as best you can. When you get some more money, use the money saved on website development on advertising or goods. Best of luck with your entrepreneurship.
PS : Apologies but I can’t remember meeting you in real life and I’ve no idea where I would have based on your email address. If you had met me and heard me talk about digital marketing you’d know I give honest advice.

Hi and thanks for your comments. It’s very refreshing to get comments from someone who has been through the experience, rather than people just thinking I hate Wix for the sake of it.
The problem you mentioned re: Google indexing did happen but I believe that’s resolved now. Your image size issue is a real one, but it would affect any platform. I was just working with a developer on a site, and there were 600Kb images on it that could have been 30Kb. It doesn’t take many of them to to slow down your site considerably.
Best of luck with the site migration if that’s the option you are taking.

Hello,
first of all thank you for your advice. It really makes sense.
However, I am one of those people who never coded before to do a website. I tried last year to use namecheap host, and it was so hard. I was not able to create a site that looks the way I wanted it to be. It was horrible experiment for me. I was not able to find exactly where I should go or how I can easily do a site.
However wix can help beginners. It is easy to do a website for those who have no experience in coding.

I want your advice please, is there any place that I can make a website that is user friendly like wix? Other than wordpress (its expensive).

Thank you,
Asmaa

Wix is ideal for this, but you have to be aware of whether it’s user friendly for the business user (you), Google, or the end user (customer). If budget is that big of an issue, then it’s hard to get good options, but there are plenty website builders out there including the likes of Squarespace. WordPress’s main cost if you are doing it yourself is the learning curve, but every platform will have that in your scenario. Like everything else it’s about making the best compromise between the investment in learning, the cost of your time versus someone else doing it, and the balance between how picky you are with layout and if you are happy to sacrifice some of that for ease of implementation. You’ll find lots of ’20 minute wordpress install’ tutorials, but then the biggest element is deciding on a user friendly, non bloated wordpress theme. Studiopress has been around for a long time and they have just launched a more ‘DIY’ WordPress platform using their renowned themes. You can find more information here : https://www.studiopress.com/ That may be an option if you like one of their themes, and will take care of hosting, a secure site and more.

Hi Darren, thanks for the article!
I’ve been dealing with a number of clients myself recently who have either started with Wix only to find themselves running into some of the problems that you’ve detailed, or are about to start with Wix and I’m trying to convince them not to.

I think the confusion – and all the (a little too) angry comments on the page – comes not only from the platform itself, but from the presumption that, like you said, a website is just a brochure that’s displayed online. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to explain that a website is more than that.

Thanks for the article.

Darren, I just want to say I am proud of you for leaving up dissenting opinions. You are a true professional.

I am currently using Wix for my first website. I am quickly finding out the limitations. What I thought were some obvious features are missing – such as a text box that expands or contracts when you click on the little arrow. I am hoping Wix will implement more tools, fast!

Thanks for taking the time to comment. I’m sure they’ll keep making changes and improving.

Thanks for commenting. Yes it is part of the problem. In my talks I often advise people not to approach a digital agency with the solutions they want (a website / search engine optimisation / online advertising), but to approach them with the goals they are trying to achieve (more sales / more direct business / beat online travel agents). Selling a website is quite easy. Selling a functional online presence is harder, but far more beneficial to everyone involved.

I usually don’t commit on stuff but I couldn’t agree more with you CDJ. Your first line about sums it up.

Thanks for taking the time to comment. If you think this article makes no sense and is self serving, I’m sorry it didn’t help you. All I’m doing is trying to educate users about the potential costs of building a site without knowing what makes it work in the eyes of search engines. If WIX or a site builder is the only option to you, go for it – it’s serving your purpose and that’s great. Better something than nothing, just please take some time to learn the basics of search engine optimisation so that something can work a bit better for you.

I’ve worked on a few Wix sites with clients and I actually find their SEO options weren’t so bad as long as you spent some time investing in it.

The main problems occur when you attempt to do anything outside the “expected” user flows such as adding your own tracking or marketing software layers on top. Unless you are paying or using their preferred platforms you can quickly find yourself out of luck. At times like this something that would be a 2 minute job on a platform you control can quickly become a 2 hour or even impossible job as you attempt to work around the limitations the platform imposes on you.

Thanks for taking the time to comment. Yup the SEO options are reasonable, but like you said when building using platforms like these as a business user, you have to find out about these things. With the site looking nice, as you’re aware that’s not the job done if you want it to perform well.
The main intention with this article was to say when using platforms like Wix, be aware of the non visual things you should know, and understand the limitations of DIY (or the platform).

I’d appreciate if you can reply to this. I only wanted to make a small website for fun, nothing business related. I figured I’d use Wix since it’s free. However, if for some reason in the future I wanted to change hosts, is that possible? And how much would that cost or how much effort does that require? And, it’s just a small site.

Hi, If it’s not business related Wix may suit you fine. WordPress is a free platform too though, you just need cheap hosting, and most have fast WordPress installs. There are tons of themes you can install from within wordpress, and that will have you in as good a state as wix. For this scenario though, Wix will prevent you having to be worried about updates, plugin updates etc. Look for a “How to install WordPress” guide to find a decent answer (e.g. How To Install WordPress However…you’re already asking about changing hosts so you are thinking abou the future. It is not possible to change hosts with Wix. They are your content management system, and your host. You can move a WordPress install from one host to another, but you can’t do that with Wix, and it’s hard to migrate the content to another platform (unless something has came out to do this – it’s been a long time since I’ve looked to be honest). For a WordPress Host, you could try Siteground. They only start at $3.95 per month, and are more professional than the pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap hosts. They also have a fast WordPress installation guide. You’d probably want a domain name as well. I hope that helps a bit.

Hi fullycharged after creating more then 35 premium Wix websites I am here to share my experience and opinion about Wix. I will drop the links of my website below.
“A guy called me one day and abused me and he was threatening me he was very angry “LOL.” I wasn’t scared though . I found out he was a website developer by his number. He was angry on me because I was designing a website http://www.geoasiatravel.com and he was suppose to get this work and I took his business . it was a big project.
Similarly I see most of the website developer and digital marketing experts are the ones to speak about or speak against Wix. I am not saying you are one but this is the fact. How many so called web designers would have loss their work to wix. I am happy.
In 2011, I needed a website and seek for help and it costs me 45000 INR approximately $1000. And believe me as a tech savvy person or I was misled by the designer and he had me pay that much money on some shitty website nowhere to be found on google. And interestingly he was considered one good renowned web designer and he did lots of websites those days ripping as many people as he can.
And today I have become a UI/UX designer and I started making websites for money. I charge around $180 annually and my clients are increasingly growing . why would they come to me if there are not found on google .
Check my websites and you yourself check on google and it is not shitty platform .

http://www.geoasiatravel.com

http://www.gatpoadventure.com

http://www.thebuddhacamp.com

http://www.thetakshoshotel.com

All of these websites are created using wix.

Thanks a lot for your comments, and a nice way to get backlinks to your sites ;-) I only looked at the geoasiatravel.com website briefly. Those sites are nice to look at, BUT… on a couple of the services pages (so I presume the rest), you have a very basic

[…] Wix / Weebly / Squarespace and other site builders are a feasible option, but read this article of mine before asking should you use Wix for your website. […]

I used WordPress for 6 years. It was an awful experience. I spent more time cleaning up messes created by developers than I did A/B testing my site and creating content. I also had plenty of trouble with speed, even from expensive hosting platforms specifically for WordPress sites. It was always slow and made me lose customers. The difficulty in building web pages how I wanted also resulted in lower quality pages, even if the content was great. Developers like you are wrong about the superiority of WordPress. It’s an expensive, glitchy pain in the ass. Wix is awesome. It allows me to just create, which has led to more sales and better page ranks. Load times are way faster than any WordPress site I created, and bugs are cleaned up for me without asking. The one downside to Wix is the extra time you have to spend optimizing for mobile and SEO on the backend, but guess what? WordPress never did this automatically either. In fact, where it was automated it was the same effect over and over.

Hi Stephen, thanks for taking the time to comment. That’s great you’ve had a good experience with Wix. I’m not saying WordPress is the best platform ever. Sure you get bad developers and bad hosts as well, but there are options to improve it. Change hosts, tweak settings, change caching, optimise the site. Poor practices can always make a site slow, regardless of platform. You sound a lot more educated in elements of digital marketing than (in my experience) most Wix users, so you can see behind just the drag and drop features. Wix does have SEO features – I never said it didn’t, but many users aren’t even aware of the importance of this, and don’t tkae time to understand them, which is the premise of the article – learn about the platforms and the features that make them work, don’t just drag and drop a pretty looking site and expect it to rank. Worst of all there are also web shops that use Wix that don’t understand this either – it wouldn’t matter what platform they used either. You mentioned automated SEO on WordPress – of course the settings will make a difference too. I see plenty of sites with poor SEO settings, again, regardless of platform. If you take time to override these per page, or have good page titles and structure, of course it will make a difference.
Thanks again and best of luck.

Felt the need to reply after reading so many ridiculous comments (mainly the first ones)… As others have said, definitely Wix employees! They don’t even make sense.

Anyway. Thanks for writing about this, clients often don’t seem to understand how much does into web design; especially if they’ve had some small success on their own.

We had a client a long time ago. They hired us to build them a new website and from day one they put themselves in the position of SEO experts. Why? Because they had managed to get their old website to rank first for a keyword that absolutely no one was searching for.

As someone who has worked with hundreds of business owners, there are a lot of them out there who are doing real damage to their businesses by not investing into their online presence properly.

At the end of the day business owners have to decide whether they want a website that generates absolutely nothing, £100, £1k or £10k in sales/leads per month. If it’s anything but the first two then you shouldn’t be doing it yourself unless you know what you’re doing.

Wix has its place, but it’s not for larger, serious businesses.

Also, a good quote (forgotten the author)…
“If you it’s expensive to hire a professional, wait until you hire an amatuer.”

Darren, loved your example of opportunity cost. Good read overall.

Thanks for taking the time to send in your feedback – I’ve included it to balance the comments out a bit :-)
For everyone’s note – there’s no comment I’ve received for this article that hasn’t been published so you can get a balanced opinion.

I personally don’t use WIX for anything serious, but it has improved. There is a SEO checklist you can finish to make your website SEO friendly. It works and I was able to verify my ownership of the the site using Google Webmaster. My webpage works perfectly and it actually pops up when you search for it with any search engine, on any device. I think you should give another chance.
My site pops up using the tags I created for it. The problem with WIX I believe is that is doesn’t make it aware to users, that you have to take extra steps to make your site searchable.

I just wanted to point that out because I’ve had the same issue, I noticed right away that no one can google for my sites. Now, I’ve fixed the issue and it works. BTW I’m 16 and I just made it to upload blog posts for Sims after seeing other simmers use it or to make layouts for IMVU. It was completely free and I didn’t have much to do but verify some info for google before I started to get a little traffic. I hadn’t had long.

Thanks for taking the time to comment. Your post sums it up well. You have taken the time to learn what makes your site show up in search engines and have implemented it as it wasn’t being found initially. This is the step that’s often overlooked when seeing a nice looking Wix site but yes the capabilities are there. A good tip is if you really are going to stick to Wix (or any web platform, WordPress included), and are basing your site on a template or theme, ensure that theme has a good layout for search engine optimisation. e.g. One Heading 1 that can be easily changed, then different areas for Heading 2’s etc. Sometimes templates have a tendency to have these H1s as the main text on a page – e.g. over a main image. Sometimes you want that text to say something like “The Fastest Coffees In MyTown”, but the SEO heading you want further down the page is “MyTown’s Best Coffee”. When these headings are misused by themes it’s hard to change the text without your site reading like a site stuffed with keywords.
Congrats on your site.

Hey
Wow, lots of extreme bias in the comments here! Just wanted to weigh in real quick with my experience. Firstly, depending on business needs, Wix can be a really good platform to set up on, due to its ease of use and great layouts. The code on the back-end is a lot smoother now than it was a couple years back, but still has a lot to do. I found that if you use their ADI to build then enhance on that, websites maintain great functionality. Alt texts, metas, headings, and building backlinks will get your site on page 1 with Wix (for reasonable keywords).

I’ve used shopify, squarespace, wordpress, and wix to build websites, and unless there’s something very specific a business needs, I usually stay away from wordpress.

To be honest, saying using wix is going to cost you 316,435 dollars or whatever ridiculous number was up there is quite far from the truth. But I do understand the power of click-bait and leveraging human psychology. You made some nice points there anyway.

Thanks for your comments and it’s great you have had a good experience with Wix. The number isn’t clickbait and is very clearly worked out in the article – with a pessimistic and optimistic view of the numbers over a 3-4 year period. The $316k is at the high end but I still don’t think it’s unrealistic based on the numbers, and certainly not based on the real life example I was basing the article on.
As you said Wix can be a good platform if you spend the time learning how to implement the SEO elements. The reality is many business owners who jump on the platform don’t, and that’s where it starts to cost you more money. This is more biased towards ‘build your own’ platforms as the apparent ease of getting something up there gives a faster impression of you having a great website. As you know based on your experience, what a user sees, and what a search engine sees is quite different.
Whilst there are many platforms out there you do get a lot of add ons for WordPress that can extend functionality with very low cost, but like every platform you have to implement with knowledge so you don’t end up with bloat, or use some poor performing, buggy plugin written by some kid in a bedroom (although some of them are great developers too!). No doubt about it, there are a lot of bad WordPress sites out there too!

Hi Darren,
I’ve been hard coding a couple of websites for societies for 20 years and often thought I should update to CMS or something like Wix. Having read your totally rational comments and the over angry responses, I suspect I should leave well alone. Frankly I can’t be arsed to endure the learning curve of something like WordPress or Drupal. As I said, they are for societies not businesses so SEO doesn’t matter but your comments are highly relevant.
Thanks for the article, I’ll stick to html and css.

Thanks for your comment. If you have skills to do HTML and CSS by hand fair play to you but you’d probably get a long more bang for your buck (and time) with a content management system, and will be able to add in a lot of extra functionality fast when you get to that point. A base WordPress install with a good theme will get you a long way there, as long as you keep the SEO elements in mind (even though you say SEO isn’t as important as you already have the societies’ audience).

Totally agree with you. WIX is good to start with but after a while you will start hitting so many issues you just want to cry. Issues like posts sharing on social media WIX forces you to use their goo.gl shortener which creates multiple redirect, in turn the posts won’t open on iOS Facebook app (new version as on Aug2017.)
They also have regular outages. I keep seeing my site down even casually browsing, then I installed kingdom and track the outages, you will be surprised how often your site goes down, even if for a short while.
Their support is also terrible, their staff doesn’t know what they are talking about. My site didn’t load on a old (2015) android mobile and their staff gave me incorrect advice. Nearly got me updating my domain Nameserver record when it had nothing to do with it. It turned out that WIX is not supported on older version of android below v7.0. This is pretty ridiculous. Luckily I did not touch my hosting as their incorrectly advised otherwise all my sub-domains, email setup etc would have got unmapped.

They also won’t let you know reason for outages etc too because they host everything for you, you are always in the dark. Basically people saying in this day and age you do not have resources to host yourself..is a bit ignorant in my opinion. You obviously don’t know how to do it so simplest is for you to say it does not make sense. Good luck to you then when (if) your business picks up and you run into during WIX issues.

Great article although there is no mention of file sizes of wix webpages. I’m using https://tools.pingdom.com to see the file size of my webpage and I can see a breakdown of the webpage and most notably the script size. And the script size is huge hence why my website is taking 5 or 6 seconds to load because it’s 1.5mb big. I even removed the images.

This is the breakdown I got.
Script 75.1 % 1.16 MB
Other 17.9 % 283.89 KB
Image 5.1 % 80.46 KB
CSS 1.1 % 18.12 KB
HTML 0.8 % 12.56 KB
Total 100.00 % 1.55 MB

This took 4.7 seconds to load.

The thing is I have already paid for 12 month subsciption with Wix and it wasn’t cheap. But I have been testing wix example webpages and they all seem large in size and the script element is dispropionately large.

Can someone advise? Am I doing something wrong?

Thank you

Daniel

This is a great article. The web has empowered a lot of people to make websites. But that doesn’t they’re doing it the right way or creating them in a way that’s actually going to move the needle for their businesses.

I built my first website back in the mid ’90s. Since, it’s gotten much easier to create a website but just because you can have something on the website, doesn’t mean it’s appropriate. It’s always been a battle of educating business owners on things that matter to them vs things that are popular (if you take a circle of each and overlap them, in the center of that Venn diagram is the sweet spot).

I recall that parallax effect that got really popular a few years ago was a good example. Flash over substance. Instead of creating great content, business owners wanted “that”. I see the same garbage with themes like Divi. The same patterns get repeated over and over again.

That said, the CMS is what you make it of it. People like Darren might find a lot of value in a CMS like Craft. As someone who’s built sites for clients over the years, WP has delved into the “site builder” style category. It also does a lot of things “its way”. The way I think about a CMS is it’s simply an interface to a big database. How you pull out that data is up to the system and your capabilities as a designer/developer.

Unlike WordPress or Drupal, you code up the site you want and then let the CMS render out the content the way you want it, where you want it. The front end is up to you. You basically insert fields where you want the website content to go.

If you do it right, you can even create reusable content blocks (such as pull quote, heading, image) that let you mix and match. (Things like Beaver Builder get you close in WP Land too but again more complexity and now as a developer you increase the amount of dependencies/vendors you rely on for support.)

Thanks for taking the time to comment. I’ve never heard of Craft – looks interesting. I guess going down that road becomes another compromise – nice clean code and design versus an ecosystem of plugins (good and bad ;->) for a platform like WordPress. Like you said though – the content management just serves content – it’s how it’s used, tweaked and configured that will make the difference.

Thanks for commenting. I can’t help with speeding up Wix sites but I assume that’s one area where you’re probably pretty locked in. I’m not sure if you can use content delivery networks like Cloudflare with them. In saying that and in light of some of the comments saying the article is biased – my site is far from the best in terms of performance! It’s like the builder’s house – too busy working on client work. At least I’m aware of it though and am chipping away. If it makes you feel better, Google say conversions drop significantly after a 3 second load, but I see plenty of new expensive sites being built that take way longer than the times you talk about.

What a great article! Absolutely love it, and hate Wix and to be honest, the whole “freemium” thing with a passion.

They lure people in, and disrespect their time by slapping on charges when they try to do anything effective.

>>> Google translate traduira en anglais ;-)
J’ai testé Weebly, Wix et Jimdo depuis leur début et il y a trois mois, j’ai testé Squarespace. J’ai testé également WordPress avec Artisteer, DIVI, et bien d’autres plugin et je me suis dit que lorsque je trouverai les fonctionnalités et facilités de Jimdo sur WordPress, je retentrai l’expérience. (Cela commence à venir > tout en “frontend”)… Mais vous avez raison, un site qui veut être plus qu’une brochure demande du travail, pas beaucoup mais essentiel si on veut être référencé. Je maintiens un site pour un atelier d’ébénisterie et salon de thé local pour des amis et c’est parce que je fais attention aux aspects du référencement que le site attire du monde et certaines personnes font plus de 100 km pour suivre des cours grâce à ce référencement. (Mon site personnel est une occupation ;-) > Ils ont une moyenne de 300 vues/mois et 600 pages consultées/mois… – C’est presqu’une brochure mais plus vivant qu’une brochure ;-)

A client of mine moved to Wix and their Adwords campaigns’ impressions dropped like a stone. The reason was that Google now rated all their pages as poor quality. That’s the kind of technical problem people won’t foresee when they start using something like Wix.

I’ve had the dismal experience of copy+pasting content from Wix to a replacement WordPress site. It’s then you realise how horrible Wix’s outputted code is.

Yes it makes it easy to have an online presence. But so did GeoCities and MySpace and this is just as bad.

Anyone considering Wix, try Squarespace or WordPress.com instead. Please!

A lot of baloney. Fix is awesome. I have built over 60 sites it. They make SEO very easy. This is just an attempt to get you the public to keep paying web designers.

This article is nonsense. Self serving to keep the public using over priced web designers. Wix SEO is so easy it isn’t funny.

Thanks for your contribution. As I’ve said before I don’t build websites. Yes Wix has SEO but in my experience the majority of people who use it don’t appreciate the intricacies of SEO, and you’re obviously not one of them as you have some knowledge, so well done.

Not at all. I’d rather businesses get cost effective websites so they they can spread their budget into other marketing elements. There’s nothing worse than seeing an online budget completely spent on a website that doesn’t perform, with no budget left for other areas like advertising or training….as long as that website is built effectively and not just an expensive brochure no-one can find.

I recently attended a conference where Mark Wright (2015 Apprentice winner) was the speaker on digital marketing. He was also of the opinion that Wax may give you beautiful website but Google can’t find it and that may have been costing you lot of business.

I was happy with WIX until I was pushed by several mails to pay a yearly fee which I thought was a way to reduce the monthly cost of 18 euros. Then I discovered I was charged not only 18 euros monthly, but also 476.32 euros and also 47.98 euros !! I wanted to cancel all this and keep the 18 euros only. Looks like I have been swindled and I do not like this.
If WIX do not pay me back these new costs which are NOT wanted, I will know I have been crooked !

Since writing this post there has been huge improvements in SEO for wixsite. Maybe you should update this post?

Thanks good to know, but one of my aims of this post is to let people now if they are going to use ‘easy’ web builder platforms, learn how to use the SEO features and know why they’re important, otherwise your website may be a waste of time if it’s can’t be found (and yes, before someone says, this could be said for any platform including WordPress, but in my experience there’s a higher percentage of business owners using platforms like Wix without investing in the knowledge. There’s also a lot of WordPress ‘developers’ who don’t either though!).

Thank you for such an extensive post – it’s rare to find a succinct yet extremely informative post urging users to expand beyond Wix. I am quite new to the website building game, and have been using Wix for eCommerce because it is simply SO easy. However, I am aware of its limitations and messy back-end coding, so have been starting to mess with SquareSpace. I have limited coding skills but an eye for design, so SS is bearable. What website builders (besides WordPress) are you in favor for? For eCommerce? Not sure if you have a separate written article for that, but would love to know.

Thanks for your comments. There are a few builders out there but I couldn’t comment too extensively as I haven’t used them all. For WordPress, good recommended page builders include Elementor and Divi. For ecommerce specifically, I’d start with the premise you should use Shopify until you get a reason not to. Sure there will be reasons to use something else, and it depends on the scale of your operation, but Shopify is so well integrated to Analytics, tracking and Facebook pixels, and you get so much functionality in there for ecommerce and a plethora of apps to add functionality. You are a bit tied into their themes and coding if you want to customise things, but you could argue that about any theme you use.
However, there are some elements of Shopify for SEO etc I don’t like. e.g. you have to have your URL with /pages/mypagename – there’s no way I know of to get rid of the /pages/ element and the same goes for /collections/ when you are looking at related products. Why they haven’t addressed this I don’t know! I have a Shopify article in me somewhere…just need the time to write it!

Hi Darren
I have been in sales and marketing all of my life, and
what you are saying is absolutely correct, and also I have to say, when you use a pre fab like wix. Your getting exactly that. Like a pre-fab home. It looks like everyone else’s website. You don’t have too many options, the scary thing about the pre fab so to speak is when you are doing branding for your company, your website should be a part of your branding, and can be identified with your company name and logo. I see so many websites out there that look the same. This currently ruins the branding of your company. Not only this your website, and your online advertising should also match your appearance in the real world not only your virtual world, and a company needs to do both. After all its about name recognition of the company! Such as Mcdonalds big arches. I am sure Mcdonalds online advertising arcs look the same on paper advertising. Or lets say wixs has a picture of a nice dimmed lighted pitcher of beer with glasses of beer. The problem is every bar in town is using that same picture on their website! Really! Wow, there goes your brand looking like everyone else! I saw a local social media company here in the Osceola wi that did a website for a local business here, at the time I was working in online marketing. I saw a bar/restaurant go from the top in their location of the google search criteria right down almost to the bottom because the website was unprofessionally down with a wix pre fab site. The thing about the pre fab website. Every body can build one, but you may be damaging your companies online presence instead of helping it. Unless you take the time to understand googles algorithms. So I totally agree with what you are saying. But also I might suggest that anyone that does online marketing and websites, and local search also should understand that its also important to be in the real world advertising, such as magazines, newspapers, and the virtual online presence as well. Key to branding and name recognition is about recognizing the company by the company be unique and standing out!

Hi, thanks for sharing all this info. I am a Six user and I am trying to better positioning my site, so I started applying Structured Data (rich snippets) to it. What i realized is that six doesn’t let Google Tag manager to operate on your fix site. I am not such a very tech savvy but for what I understand I can’t apply this important feature. Am I wrong? Is anybody willing to give some advice on my site http://www.casaltaccone.com?
I do thank you in advance. Giacomo

Some one is salty they lost business to Wix. I know several web developers with this same mentality. I mean I don’t blame you for being salty. A competitor came in and did what you do but made it easy and affordable for the every man. Times change. Technology changes. People get smarter. This is how the world is going. Now if your building a reaaally big website with hundreds or thousands of pages like an online store then yes I would say get your self a professional web developer. BUT not every one needs a PRO web dev that charges hundreds of dollars for a website for their photography, home craft sales, ect. business. We just don’t need you guys anymore. I can go build a beautiful photography website right now for about $130. There is also NO wait time for changes and NO extra charge for changes. I make the change and hit “Publish”. Boom done. That’s it. No wait time No extra charge for changes. You are just going to have to accept the fact that most people don’t need you anymore.

What do you mean by Six? It looks like this site is in Wix.By doing a quick search it doesn’t look like GTM can be installed on Wix easily as you need access to the HEAD and BODY section. Happy to be proven wrong with this though. If this is still the case, it’s a good example of some of the limitations you can hit. There’s also lots of Structured Data plugins for WordPress as well. Other content management systems suffer from this lack of extendability without web developers – I’m not saying WordPress is the absolute best platform in the world.

Hi thanks a lot for your time to reply. Salty…I like the terminology but you’re quite a bit from the truth. The reason I get ‘salty’ is when business owners get a raw deal and don’t have their expectations set, or expect too much from digital with too little an investment or understanding.

You’re right, not everyone needs a professionally developed website. But if you are a photographer who wants to get found, or you are a home craft business who goes to local markets, then hope people will find you afterwards, you may well find your £130 investment doesn’t give you what you want.
Classic example…someone from an automobile workshop called me this week saying they had a website developed but they couldn’t be found.

Not even for their brand name!

They were charged approx $500 (approx £300) for it by an agency.

The agency – trust me this is a real story – built it in Wix.

They didn’t even bother changing the default social media icons. The email wasn’t clickable, nor was the phone number. The website was a single page website. There’s no way that would get ranked compared to competitors.
Remember, this was from an agency (to be honest web site design isn’t their strong point but the customer obviously had an expectation!).
All the essentials were overlooked – absolute basic Search Engine Optimisation 101, nothing to do with business listings, no Google Analytics on the site.

Now that’s what makes me salty. Sure, if you just want a brochure to send out via email go ahead. If you build a kick ass website using Wix and have everything you need, that’s awesome. If you throw something up and want it to be found, make your business look credible, and you don’t understand all the other stuff, you’ve probably short-changed yourself, and limited the income of your business…without realising.

With all due respect, you may totally have this nailed, but your argument is the same as many customers I meet, or stories I hear, who define the type of business people who absolutely need a digital marketer’s help. Like I’ve said before I don’t build websites so I haven’t lost business to Wix, but I have helped a lot of people who have been caught short when building sites without realising the bigger picture. Just remember your website is only one part of your online presence for about 99% of businesses.

Despite this article, I’m all for platforms that make websites easier or more cost effective, as long as the users understand if it’s *really* meeting their requirements.

Businesses don’t have a requirement for a website – they have a requirement for sales or building a reputation, so I do get salty when I hear “I’ve built a website and it can’t be found”.

Hi Dazza,

I think it may be time to close the comments as it was more than 3.5 years ago that you wrote this article. I would have agreed with your post back then.

Wix, other website builders and website designer software have all grown up now.

WordPress is irrelevant to small business as the market is moving so quickly at every level. A small business using WordPress is like using an articulated truck to deliver a single letter across the city when a bike would be much more appropriate.

The agile bike is what the market wanted. No matter how much you shout online about why a truck is better than a bike, you have to realise that the market has moved. People just want a bike. This is revolutionary!

PS: I like horses too. I also like my car. There are times when I would much prefer a horse and others my car. As they say, horses for courses.

I create almost all of my websites in wix for my small business clients. I’ve been creating websites using various platforms over the years. I am a graphic designer and also was a computer programmer and a technology marketer. I’ve used word press, Godaddy website builder, square space, weebly, volusion. WIX has been by far, the best platform to build a website at a reasonable price. Takes me less time to create a website that’s beautiful for all my clients and they don’t have to break the bank. All of them rank on page one of google. All you do is follow WIX’s SEO guides, set your business up on google with an address and you are good to go. Add social media advertising and posting to point to your website and I have found that as the greatest recipe for success on people finding your business/website. WIX does have very easy google analytics integration. This article feels bit outdated.

I have to respectfully disagree with your analysis on WIX. I find WordPress requires too much maintenance for a website and requires too much technical expertise for my clients. In the future, less and less technical expertise will be required to create great websites that help grow your business.

I agree with Darren. I find it is very easy for me to create a website with Wix, however the function is not up to speed. For example, I can strip the page down to just the Wix elements and it still take 5 seconds to load on a desktop. Which would not be a problem for me IF there was some indication around 1-2 second point that the site was actively loading. With the exception of the spinning element in url, the page remains white until after the 5 second mark. Way too long to wait without knowing if you are really connecting. Sad, because once the site is loaded, navigation is pretty quick – it’s just that first connection that sucks, and that’s the connection that matters most.

There are some great points made in this post.

I think many people miss the point in these “Are WIX good or bad” discussions. People say that developers are just bitter because WIX are taking away their business, but this isn’t 100% true.

If a business is putting a site online JUST to have a site, and because WIX is cheap and quick. And because everyone else has a site… This is the wrong approach. You’re setting your site up for failure.

A website should have a goal and a purpose, and just because WIX allows “anyone to put a site online”, doesn’t mean it will be good or serve its purpose as well as it should.

I own a camera and can take photos, but I wouldn’t call myself a photographer!

People (including WIX) were saying how much it’s SEO had improved lately. So I visited some sites I knew had been using it. What I discovered was that many of these sites had abandoned WIX in favour of WordPress. This speaks volumes!

The problem is that a lot of people don’t get it. Their mentality is “I have a site online and am paying next to nothing. I’m good”.

One client who I pulled off WIX didn’t think the site needed to be changed. “It’s fine though isn’t it? Doesn’t need to be changed. There’s a nice photo, the phone numbers there if people want to call… It’s all good, no?”

The site looked like it was made using Microsoft frontpage about 15 years ago. Yes, it needed to be changed!

Now the site ranks #2 for one of it’s target key phrases, page 1 for a number of others, and represents the company much better. And more importantly, its making them money!

I think the WIX reviews speak volumes about the service, and why people might want to reconsider!

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/www.wix.com

Thanks for taking the time… very well put and exactly the same scenario I see a lot. Some of us really do care about the results and get frustrated when we see bad practices going on – even if they are not clients!

Thanks for taking the time to write a comment. Your post summarises it quite well – you can SEO a WIX site if you know what you’re doing, but most don’t take the time. And I totally agree there will be less technical expertise required. Websites are already becoming more like commoodities, but almost too much for some people as they see a shiny object, without thinking about the functionality. Making things easier is great if it’s implemented well, and it leaves more time and money to optimise the elements that work – business listings, advertising, social, analytics, etc.

Yes it’s all about finding the best tool to meet your needs. Most content management systems will give you more functionality than you need. The biggest issue with a self hosted content management system is the need to keep it updated but that goes for any software outside of self managed ones like squarespace, wix, etc. How many times do you update Word or your operating system…or maintain your house?
To say WordPress is irrelevant to small business, with all due respect, is crazy. Due to the ecosystem it gives you lots of growth an add on options which are very cost effective without being locked in to any hosting or developer. Is it the best? Maybe not,its all about your needs.

Wix offers lots of great features, but their support is terrible.

Simply not true. My page appears in the first Google page with my key words and I’ve got a Wix website, you just need to know how to use it.

No where did I say you can’t rank Wix websites, as you said, you need to make an investment in learning to know how you use it and I give some suggestions in the article.

“You need to consider how your content is going to be structured, what image sizes you upload, what page titles you will use, the header text for each page, the calls to action that appear in search engine results (SERPs) as well as conversion optimisation. As well as that you need to ensure you have implemented some online tracking so you know how it’s performing, and set up essential Google tools to get insights from your website that may drive your marketing decisions.”

Not related to your comment but I’m glad I get a mix of opinions in these comments. The aim of the article is as much to get people to find out how to use it properly – it’s not intended to be Wix bashing, and I’m not a disgruntled developer like an email to me said today. I just care about getting businesses online and *working well* instead of having an attitude of “I can built my website in 5 minutes and I’m done”.

This might be an old post, but it still holds true. For those people that think they can build a website in Wix for a few hundred bucks and be on google’s homepage for competitive phrases are deluding themselves. If they say they have I call it BS. We’re not talking about one man bands that get all their business word of mouth and don’t want/need to change, but as you say – building an effective, robust and secure site isn’t ‘easy’. I’ve seen many many ugly, out of date, slow, invisable and hacked sites that are proof of this!

You don’t need to know anything about coding in any way with any web host. Wix too. However the point is that basically Wix holds you as a prisoner related to your content being to the Wix platform
I would suggest you to get a host and install WordPress (no it’s not WordPress.com the ugly expensive service operated by Automattic) and it’ll be a piece of cake to create a stunning website with the pre-made themes, while still having control of your content
it’s possible to install WordPress with one click if you have a host with a script installer eg Softaculous or Fantastico
or just follow the instructions on wordpress.org the real true website of wordpress

Re “I have been a wix user since they first released.”
Deepite of being sooooo baaaadd?
Why? Someone holds a gun to your head?

Bullshit,
My website is in the top on google and it has just 27 days.
Wix have wix seo and is a good tool.
I know about everything i can use in wix and with about 350 pound i have my website for 2 years.
So stop bullshitting and talk about wix in more good ways.
Everybody can make a website with wix in the begining.
Of course you can’t make a website with wix wich require register of members and pay for membership, or contribute to one bussiness from where he can earn more. This is imposible on wix.
But is ok to promote your business in the begining until you will reach a high level.
After you can migrate your wix site to another server and continue to optimize and make new changes, where on wix was impossible.

I’ve been online with business almost since the internet began. I have paid developers, built them myself and used most of the major and some of the minor hosted websites. Business people who are starting out and not familiar with websites are wasting their time on most developers. Better to use a template with a hosted site and promote your business on your own.

If you have some worthwhile and are creative you will earn more money and possibly want to look at other options down the road. Most developers I have worked with, even those with good ratings are full of themselves, give crappy service and charge you for everything like a lawyer.

My experience is their sites are not as functional as many hosted services including Wix because they make some of the income of out of the service itself. The last thing a business person wants to concern themselves with when opening businesses is another personality to contend with trying to get more out of their pocket.

Wix had some major limitations in the past and they are still far from perfect, but the sites look good, the SEO is better, and they are affordable. Their customer service rots, but they will handle issues with you for free. Big Commerce has the worst customer service of all. Their sites are also the most limited if you use their cartoonish templates.

If you purely want to sell goods, Shopify does the best job. Especially if you want to drop ship. I own a few businesses. One of them is a commercial insurance agency. I know what good service is and the vast majority of web developers have no clue in that area. The other thing, many don’t stay in the business.

If you get a good one that is reasonable, (if you have the budget) they can do wonders…but you are going to pay big time. In my view, the money is better spent on more creative advertisement and promotion. Your article is well written. I agree on a few points, but I think Wix is fine for most small businesses.

Yes is totally true wix is very expensive when you loss customers due the bad experience with your website, as slow on mobile version, sometimes the content is not available to see it and so on.

i think you are making this because you are poor and jealous

Thank you for this article – i find it strange how heated many of the comments are, but as an artist who is just starting the process of starting a blog, I really appreciated your breakdown. I have spent a lot of time designing my blog on WIX and I DO really like the look of it, but I haven’t yet paid for any of their packages because I am trying to start well and make a good long term decision. Your article has pushed me to continue researching before I commit. I am a little hesitant when it comes to WordPress as I find it more challenging, but your article helped me realize that I don’t understand WiX any more than Word Press, its just easier to drag around page elements and make it look pretty. Thanks for the reminder that building an online presence is much more than just making a pretty website.

Thanks for the balanced reply and taking the time. There’s pros and cons of every scenario, but yes it’s wise to stop and have a think before rushing in. One downside about WordPress is there are constant updates but you can engage companies to take care of that for you at very reasonable costs. What people forget is this is not different to having a Microsoft Office subscription though, just a few things to think about in terms of compatability. If you pick established website extensions this isn’t an issue very often.

Thanks do much for taking the time to reply and you have some great points. I think the thing is most business owners approach web developers with a solution in mind already – a website. Whilst I can’t argue a website is key to most businesses nowadays, it’s is only one part of the puzzle, and most developers are not marketers, or even SEO people. The amount of businesses who have approached me after getting a website and paying for it, then saying “it can’t be found” is depressing. By that time expecations have already been set, and perhaps the website in place is harder to modify. I had someone who had a $500 website added onto some branding. It was cheap, but it was a complete waste of money as it wasn’t even found on a branded search, and still had default social media buttons linking to facebook, not even the businesses facebook page.
I agree re: Shopify… when starting on ecommerce I’d use that as your solution until proven otherwise. I saved a business about $15k in development costs by mentioning that, which can now be spent on advertising, or tweaking. Their solution probably isn’t as good as a specialist solution, but its a great place to start….but it also gives them budget (if they take advice) to set up remarketing, tracking, email automation etc etc.

This isn’t bullshit, it’s about trying to make people realise there’s more than just a website to consider. That’s great you’ve invested the time to learn how to SEO your WIX website – many people don’t. Re: migrating a WIX site I think you’ll find that’s often a rebuild to another platform rather than a migration, but there may be tools available for that now since this article was written.

I’m not poor, and I’m definitely not jealous. If you’ve managed to build a site using a platform like Wix and you’ve invested the time to learn about SEO, business listings, remarketing etc then I’m super happy for you.

Some great points but people will have to be aware that by just doing this, they could end up in the same boat as building a Wix site – they need to learn the basics of SEO and an online presence. An “SEO Friendly” theme isn’t always, and it still takes time to put in the right meta data, structure the site appropriately etc.
Boom – for everyone saying I’m anti Wix and full of it, here I am saying you can fall into the same trap using WordPress.

Thank you! I’ll also stick my hand up and say my site is far from perfect too, but at least I know the majority of it’s deficiencies…I’m too busy advising clients what to do ironically.

So you use Wix to build websites and still call yourself a “UI/UX designer”? And you’re charging people to build their websites with Wix? Seriously? I hope you’re being honest with them about the fact you’re charging them for something they could just do themselves. And they’re in for a very unpleasant surprise if they ever want to transfer their websites elsewhere.
I checked all the sites you listed. One no longer exists and the rest are slow to load and they all look the same. Yes, individually they look nice, but the slow loading and the similar look and structure are a big turnoff.
I have a client who used Wix and now wants to migrate to another platform. Darren is correct that it’s pretty much impossible. This is a HUGE minus in my book. I want to be able to move my website or change its look without having to re-create absolutely everything. I’ve migrated large (non-Wix) sites from one host to another myself and it was quite painless, but with Wix it is just awful, especially if the site is more than just a few pages.
Sorry, but I’m with Darren on this. Wix sucks.

Thank you for all this info. I found this page due to searching for reasons to convince a potential client not to use Wix. I only used it once a couple of years ago and found it absolutely terrible to use, frustrating and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. Infact I’d rather turn down the work. WordPress all the way for me!

Most people who use stuff like Weebly and Wix aren’t looking for the super best website anyway. People who use Weebly and Wix don’t have money to pay someone to make a slightly better website.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzdZOYr1718
How to add Google Tag Manager code to my Wix website
https://goo.gl/vUpqWi

Hi Darren,

I do not use Wix for business (rather for a wedding website), but I completely agree with your article. Not being a web-designer, my options were fairly limited, I needed to design a bi-lingual website. I ultimately used Wix because you *can* technically build a multi-lingual website as a non-web designer – however – the structure is so incredibly rigid and still has several performance issues. Getting my site to actually work meant several hours creating weird workarounds that don’t actually function all that well. In the end, my site is up and running in 2 languages. After my experience with the site, if I were to recreate my site, I probably wouldn’t go with Wix.

As mentioned in your article, there are several small business owners who find these kinds of sites attractive due to the fact that they might be able to create them in their spare time and find the freemium structure feasible for their budget. Given that Wix isn’t the best option, what might you recommend (something that can be simple to start and grow/be adapted along with the business).

Hi Craig, I have been wondering about the performance of my wix website for some time. I built my website myself with not much knowledge about structure and SEO. The website has been running for several years, has a lot of relevant content, great images, videos, internal links, blog, my own SEO etc, etc. I also contracted an SEO team. Furthermore I am very active on google+ and Facebook – all linking back to my website. Yet with my main keywords I do not move in ranking, at least not up. I have now been told after 11/2 years of SEO that my website has an excessive “back of house” coding, which in wix, can not be changed. The solution is supposed to be to move to another website builder. What do you think?

Well, so far I’ve been trying to design a website with Wix and let’s say that the non-developer I am is missing Geocities.

Wix is not as simple as it looked. Honestly, I’m not trying to do something fancy yet I’m frustrated at every turn with their ADI tool. I could move to the editor but I really don’t find the interface straightforward. For example, why oh why do I have to go to the editor to add, among other things, features like the mandatory cookies tracking text required by the EU legislation, a “back to the top button”, only to be told that those changes will only be saved in the editor screen but won’t be available when I would go back to the ADI interface.

The users of my website will also be from non-English speaking countries so I need a multilingual website. With Wix, this means I have to duplicate my website and then translate all my pages. I’m exhausted, I keep reporting the launching date of the site. I wish I read your post before starting designing my pages with WIX AND purchasing a one-year premium subscription.

Like I said, I miss Geocities: it was the fall of 2001 and with a simple booklet about the basics of HTML, I managed in less than 2 months to launch a complete website. With WIX, I just feel like an idiot.

I’m late to the conversation but, this is a good article. I am a spa owner who uses Wix and it has improved since this article in extra options. What I appreciate about this article is that it encourages the web builder to approach these build-your-own sites with the mind-set that more work is needed, even though it feels very user friendly on the design side. I took extra SEO courses to understand visibility, ranking, how to tag my websites pages & images so Google can recognize & properly file the images being used. I also learned that I need to do something on that website at the end of almost every day, like blogging or editing, to make sure Google sees my website as active. … I would only suggest adding clearer instructions to help readers learn what to DO. Otherwise, good job!

the most self promoting rubbish ive read on the internet, so if i use wix with no experience in seo ill have a lower ranking than any other platform with no experience, rubbish mate. if people had money to spend theyd hire a specialist not use wix. this article was the biggest waste of time this week. thank you for your misinformation

I’ve recently taken over a half-finished Wix site and I have to say, I would tell anyone contemplating Wix to run away, as fast as possible. I am tearing my hair out.

There are so many things about Wix that are primitive. Let’s look at just one – menus. On a Wix site, you can add as many menus as you like – but they must ALL be EXACTLY the same. Looking at this website, you have three menus in your footer alone! The only way to make those menus on Wix is to add three container boxes, then manually add a line of linked text for each header and menu item.

But the biggest problem is load time. As you know, site speed is crucial if you want to rank on Google. On the front page of my site, I’ve compressed the images, removed all animations and special effects and cut the content to a minimum, yet the site still loads slower than 65% of all websites.

Thanks for the article. I agree with you that wix is a quick solution for a pretty website, but have tons of limitations. SEO, App browser support, Rich Pin support…all these considered basic capability are not available! I am thinking of switching for sure. What’s your recommendation for a website builder and host? I know of wordpress/siteground? Is that the only option?

Thanks!

I am late to the party. However, it is my understanding that Darren wants you to be aware of potential pitfalls you may encounter while using WIX. More importantly, pitfalls you may or may not be aware of. (some dick head comments)

From a technician’s perspective, organizations that demand that they host your DNS records leave me cold. This fails from a number of perspectives, such as real world redundancy and flexibility. Plus, the only person that can update records w a WIX site is the Owner. Many owners–including web developers–do not have a true grip on DNS, Domain Registration, etc.
WIX appears to be the “shiny bauble” that looks good on the surface, yet dig a bit…

Hi, erm, Anonymous… sorry it’s not self promoting as I don’t build websites just now and haven’t for a long time. Just to touch on a couple of points. I get it, not everyone has a decent budget, but more often than not, when I see budgets limited for building an online presence, it often costs more in the long run due to lack of visibility. This isn’t just around the website, it’s about awareness of other moments that matter to your customer – e.g. Google My Business properly setup etc. It often costs more in the long run, or you do the site twice – i.e. a second time later on. It’s the lost opportunity cost that’s the invisible cost. And yes, if you use Wix or any other platform with no experience of SEO it’s going to perform worse. It would be like me building a house…I’d manage to get shelter, but it wouldn’t last and it would be an uncomfy place to stay.

Thanks for taking the time to comment. I’d love to enhance this article with more pointers in another article, but time isn’t available for me to do that at the moment, but you’ve touched on both sides of my points very well so thank you.

Geocities….Love it!

Whichever platform you are on, knowing what else affects it, and learning some of that will also help. You can tweak your Wix SEO settings, or you can move to another platform that has more control, depending on your budget. To be fair some website themes (e.g. WordPress and others) have a lot of ‘code bloat’ too so you have to do some research. The names of some common web builders for WordPress escape me just now but Elementor is one that comes up as effective and not too bloated. Divi is another builder which is very popular, but not sure how excessive the coding is. You can also tweak speed using content delivery networks such as cloudflare, but address any issues on your site first. You couldn’t use this with Wix though I’m sure.

Sorry for the slow response – I’ve been overseas at conferences. If you want to grow and adapt I’d always recommend WordPress as a good starting point, and using a popular theme that doesn’t have toooo many features. You could also try a platform like WebFlow or Squarespace. I’ve not used these though so not sure how much better off you are than Wix.

Thanks. I haven’t watched that video, but it does say temporary solution in the title….

Thats a fair enough point, but I’d also consider the lost opportunity cost with the saved budget. Appreciate money doesn’t fall off trees though.

Divi is popular on WordPress but not sure if it’s bloated. Elementor is a theme that often gets mentioned as well. I’ll have to dig out some others. Siteground comes recommended not from just me but others. I think Liquid Web, A2 hosting and WP Engine (mixed feedback) are often recommended too.

what is your e-mail I would like to talk to you about working on a wix website for me.

I agree, WIX “the corporate Walmart for websites” is getting pretty sickening lately to say the least. I am a freelance front end developer and I build websites, mobile apps, and desktop apps for various clients and I have had to explain every single one of these points to so many clients in the past. “Wix” doesn’t care about the customer or their actual business needs.

Hi Darren,

I agree with you 100%. Wix is horrible and will always be and I am a professional web developer. I have an article on how to build a website and sort of go off on Wix, Weebly etc… funny I found this article and point to it for backup lol.

Thanks for sharing, I couldn’t agree more. If interested in my article – https://fencepencil.com/articles/build-a-website/

-Shawn

I’m beyond angry at the site of WIX. I’m a web developer who has been working for 11 years. Wix will never rank in the search engines, it’s a joke on how junky the quality is. You will never show up on Bing, Yahoo or Google. The website will be awful and look the same as every other WIX site. I hate wix. They should be banned from the internet. The only thing I would ever see using wix for is a non-business which never wants to make it anywhere. Wix is the worst thing you could ever spend time on. 11 years as a front-end developer PSD to WP. I have had to clean up the mess these false web builders leave with my customers. You suck WIX! No one likes you and we all want you gone. You are not web developers, you are con artist. Google does not like you and as a result, no one should ever use you.

That is BS. I am a web developer and WIX is one of the greatest applications for websites. I have built many in there and all are very high in SEO with Wix SEO features (free) and your examples are totally out of sense.

Im sick of these ‘intuitive’ CMS things. Either im slow or they lie about the learning curve. You ish, get the hang of one, then some plugin or upgrade comes along and you have unlearn or remember that this one is different, oh and this one works differently too. And this plugin does this, which messes this up…

Half the time these ‘eazy website creators’ only work properly if you use the template exactly and make no customizations.

I really hate where the web has gone in the last 10 years. There are so many frameworks out there, all of them claiming to be the best and they all lie. They all do things differently so learning one doesn’t mean you can work with another one. The documentation is written by people who don’t know how to write documentation. There is a lot of ‘assumed knowledge’ that they leave out and are not consistent with terminology.

So many plugins do the same thing, but do it so differently, there are no best practices or industry standards that are adhered to. It’s pretty much a crap shoot if you get a plug in that you can figure out and doesn’t mess something else up.

its always fun to see a long time developer bash a platform that anyone can use.

I’m not bashing it – I’m bashing how many people are lead to believe they have a fully functioning website without the basic elements for SEO and tracking, with no knowledge. I see this all the time when businesses are lead into a false sense of belief. By all means if you learn and know about all these elements, and getting found in the moments that matter, you can have a fully functioning site. There’s a few people who have messaged me as a result of this article to look at their WIX websites. Its not something I’d normally do, but none of them had basic SEO or tracking.

There’s a lot of great plugins, and a lot of poor ones. Stick with the major ones and you’re usually OK. Agree it’s a minefield out there though. Webflow is a platform that gets good reviews – still all contained on their platform though. I’ve never used it.

I respectfully disagree. These examples are real. You are obviously the exception as you have invested time to learn – most people using platforms like this don’t, including many agencies who use it.

Harsh, but for the sake of balance I’ll publish it :-) I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I agree with your point.

Love your comment – there’s a lot of “juicy” commments on this article :-) Thanks for the share.

You’re brave openly admitting to being a developer on these comments…. you’ll be accused of being self serving, etc etc…. I agree though.

Thanks, but it’s probably not the best fit. Although as others have said, you can have a fully functioning wix site if you learn other elements of search marketing, this is probably one I’ll pass (also just to see this article isn’t entirely self serving). Thanks for your interest though.

Agree / disagree. My first few websites were built line by line using manual html coding; then I built a Drupal site. Next one was WordPress. Now I’m doing a Wix site (2nd one). Why?

Life is short.

The websites I’m working on are not specifically revenue-generating websites, we are not selling anything on them, and we are not relying on high search engine rankings to bring our site and our name in front of customers. Our industry does not work that way.

That being said, Wix seemingly provides me the ability to generate a website in less time and at lower cost than many other alternatives. A statement like “Google doesn’t really care if your button looks nice, or your image is stunning,” is undoubtedly true, but it’s like saying “the shareholders don’t care whether you’re selling widgets or gizmos, or whether your stores are marvels of green, sustainable architecture and design, they care about the revenue.” Also true, but annoying, irritating, and possibly counterproductive.

Some websites are there to show that the company is a real, professional enterprise, and it ~must~ look right in order to convey that. The google ranking consideration is frankly not a big deal, or not so big a deal that it would move me in one architecture direction or another.

I do hesitate because of the voluminous code and the impossibility of moving the site to another host, but that’s something we’ll just have to deal with.

I find WIX EXTREMELY unfriendly to use. I AM NOT a computer person, but I have my own business that I am trying to find a website builder.. I have questions and NO WAY of contacting WIX to see what they have to offer or to talk to me.. And NO I want to talk to them, but there is nowhere to even ask them to call you back.. It just has over 100 items to choose from and nothing to help

I agree I used Wix once and will NEVER use them again, you can never reach anyone by phone horrible service.

Hi,
I am a 16-year-old random high school kid who loves anime and just decided to create a website with Wix. It took me about 4 hours to understand how does the entire SEO thing work, and there are many bugs about it. But it looks excellent, and I am getting about 80 views a day even though the website has only been up for two weeks. I could find my website on the search engine if I try, it is not too far down on the list, and the search title thing makes sense and has a connection to my site. For my experience right now I think Wix is doing ok with me, mainly because I only upload blog and rarely changes the template, so I don’t know if that is why people are getting angry at Wix. I have never used WordPress before(too much money ) but from what I see I don’t think it is too much different from Wix. I don’t know if anyone can take a 16-year-old web creator who only created his web two weeks ago, but I think it is ok for a website creating the tool,
and also I am not American born so my English might suck :)

Actually this article makes little sense at all. The problems the author cites are user failures, not problems with Wix. He’s saying non-devs don’t know how to optimize Wix, not that Wix can’t be optimized. His advice to use a platform like WordPress makes even less sense than his criticism of Wix, since if you don’t know how to optimize a basic website on an “easy” platform like Wix, you sure aren’t going to know how to do it on a complex platform like WordPress. Wix is fine, it’s your content and back end that will make or break your website.

I inherited a Wix site and was told to overhaul it. I know nothing about websites or coding, so it’s taken me almost 3 years to finish it, but we’re a public library in a rural area and just plain can’t afford to find someone to do it. I only got it because I’m the youngest and the assumption was that I know the most about computers so I should take over. I had a couple bumps along the way, like not being able to use my accessibility tool, but the kicker was today when I finally published the new site and discovered that it doesn’t fit smaller screens. All the monitors in our building aren’t even the same size, and all this time I’ve been working on the widest one! It’s huge and not resizing to match other screens. All Wix had was a tool for testing the site on other resolutions (which I didn’t even know was a problem I should be looking out for), and no answers in their (always entirely worthless) help center. I’ve emailed them, but I know they’re just going to write back that I have to do it all over again. I can’t handle it but I don’t know what else to do. I’ve taken classes but coding just doesn’t make sense to me, and I can’t find anything else that doesn’t require at least a little of it. If they’re marketing toward people without experience, they should anticipate and guide users through this obvious problem, and many others that newbies don’t even know they will have.

Thanks for your comments. What I’m trying to get across is these platforms appear to make it “too easy” to build a site, therefore you don’t realise about the other stuff. To an extent, if you go to the other platforms, you’ll probably have a better chance of realising this stuff is complicated to do it well, so you’ll invest a bit more time learning. I’ve never said you cannot SEO a Wix website…it’s more that it leads you into a false sense of security. I can design brochures. They’ll look like crap though. I’m not a trained designer. Same principles here. Have I ever used tools like Canva to design stuff? Yes I have, but I’ve done that with a total understanding that I’m not doing it well, but I’m meeting a short term requirement. Many people who build sites with platforms like this wonder what the hell you’re talking about when you try to explain all the elements that make up a good online presence. That’s usually the parts that will bring in the revenue, but they’ve been lead into a false sense of security. Sure if you invest the time you can use Wix well. There will still be restrictions on what you can do and own though.

Wix user here. I can honestly say that my Wix website doesn’t generate any business for me, and I’ve had it for years. I’ve just always assumed websites are a waste of time, but you have to have one. When I do a search on some of my pages, they are nowhere to be seen in google results. The only time I do come up is when someone searches for my profession, in my small town. But very few of my pages show up, just the homepage and the about us page, and they are not listed together on Google, but separate. So far Wix has been a total waste of money. I’m probably somewhat guilty, as I don’t spend much time developing it. Thanks for the article.

Thanks for taking the time to reply. There’s a good chance your issues may be as much about on site and local search engine optimisation as much as it is WIX.

Thanks, great article. I have used Wix for several websites for other people (not a developer or professional, just helping people who wanted a website and wanted to use Wix). I hated it. It is easy to get your head around but goddamn it’s frustrating. It’s slow, clunky, limited and expensive compared to a wordpress site (use wordpress.org NOT .com) if you shop around for hosting (Laughing Squid and TSO are great) it doesn’t cost a great deal. And the apps in Wix are very basic in their free form, you have to pay for any increase in functionality through apps. And the basic versions aren’t good enough, you’ll want the paid versions!

I use WordPress for my own circus skills website, http://www.spinsonic.uk ;)

WordPress is cheap, its flexible, there’s a ton of support online and free plugins for loads of things, even e commerce. With Wix, if there’s something you need your website to do that it doesn’t support tough luck. Or pay to upgrade your plan to an e commerce plan if find you need a shop. With WordPress, you can get a free plug in.

I don’t really get why people are bashing you Darren, they’ve got to be Wix employees. Doesn’t come across like you’re self promoting or Wix bashing. I would never recommend Wix to anyone for a business website.

Wix support is frustrating. Can’t talk on the phone, they point you to online help articles. With my other hosting providers nothing was too much trouble, support via email or phone, and they sorted out any problems mostly due to my inexperience so quickly.

Also once you’ve got a website with Wix, to move to another host you have to recreate your entire website from scratch. They won’t let you migrate anything across. When I changed hosting provider for my wordpress site, it was done quickly and easily for free by the hosting company with no issues.

I tried out Weebly too and that was worse than Wix. WordPress all the way for me. I’m also not v techy so if I can cope with WordPress most people can!

So I purchased a Wix premium plan and I am trying to get an email for the domain I purchased and the cost is same as the premium plan. That’s stupid.

Look at Google GSuite for your email. It will decouple your email from your website hosting which is always a good thing. If you move your web host or platform in the future you’ll be able to retain all the emails and not have to worry about migrating them. You will have to change some of your domain settings.
You can get 20% off your first year and a 14 day trial using the following link https://goo.gl/TV0tp1

Seems to me you are a bit of a hater Craig. Wix offers afgordable options to people whom can.t afford 100$/hr charges for what is effectiveley a facebook page for the business.

Not only that but wix gives IT illiterate people a chance to understand why pay a developer.

That 10k/year loss conclussion is really a pathethic wishfull thinking math exercise, that represents zero real world value to small businesses.

I could pick on your poor excuse of an ‘informative article’ more, but I.m sure most people know better than to read past your first paragraph.

WiX and many other Google options are presented in such a manner that one unadvertedly falls into them. Most of the time this happens because one cannot move out of the “offer screen” unless clicking in the only option available.

And also, Google makes it impossible to complain or to find a simple way to pull out of these traps. Is there a way to talk to a human being in Google.

A very unsatisfied Google user, an enterprise that started providing useful products but is now apparently trying to force a multitude of unneeded new products.

So what do I do if I already have a wix website (hosted elsewhere, but designed with wix), that I want to upgrade? Unfortunately the person who had my job before me didn’t read your article, so I got stuck with a wix site that I now have to find a way to deal with and it needs A LOT of work. I actually can’t even login to the wix account to do any updates there and wix has no customer service to speak of.

I enjoyed this read and agree with the arguments for and against Wix. Sometimes you have budget, experts and time. Sometimes you need something pretty, cheap and cheerful. What you might lose in SEO with Wix, you might gain in speed to market. I think Wix has its place, even in a business environment (i just spent several hours pounding out a site for a live event I need to market) – and off the shelf, it has all the tools and apps I need – from templates, to online registration tools. That being said, if I had my druthers, I’d hire a great web developer and do it that way. It’s just not a viable option at the moment.

Thanks anonymous… most tools have their place so if Wix really is your solution after reading all the pros and cons, best of luck to you. I’m not a hater, I just want people to use the platforms with their eyes open of the potential downsides. As I’ve said many times, if you use it correctly and learn search engine optimisation, and you’re aware of the restrictions then go for it.

I know it can be hard to find support but if you persevere with certain elements of Google you can often find someone. They are not always great but the likes of Google My Business support can be extremely helpful if you get the right person.

Bullshit. WIX is ok, but right now they are down

I suspect this artical is not for what you call serious buisness, (who are looking to generate £10k in one month). Of course a company/corporation or what ever of that size is not going to go, ‘come on lads, we can do this on the cheap, Wix is the way for us’! Slight odd way of looking at serious = pound signs any way, but I guess your not the only one who see’s life by the Dollar.

Thanks for sharing the downside of wix! I should have read this before I signed up for their yearly plan last year and spent a week doing up the content and layout. I’m not a developer but I have hired developers a few years ago on another biz and that went well.
Putting aside the problem on google search, they have put me on a recurring yearly subscription plan that I did not sign up to. My website developer for the other education business would ask me every year whether I would like to renew my services.

It’s not the case for WIX! Not an invoice nor email notification was sent out when they charged my bank account for the yearly subscription fees. I’m asking them to stop the yearly subscription plan which is starting next week and can’t find anywhere to contact them. They could be doing this to all the small businesses who didn’t notice they were being charged continually though their website was not serving them at all.

That’s a lot of money, and that’s why there are all these haters being so negative about your post! They are probably designing website with WIX for their small business clients quickly and just letting their clients be charged continually by WIX yearly without real delivering value.

WOW!

Brilliant article. Would you mind if i quoted those tweets in a blog post (and backlink to you)

The comments are even more brilliant!
Definitely the Wix PR team posting comments.
Guys just chill, he is not angry at Wix.
He does not mind if hobbyist start ups are building their own website.

What he is concerned about is that developers are charging their clients for “pre-fab” websites hosted on platforms like wix.
The opportunity cost of these being that you could lose out on potential business.

You kind of have to ask yourself, what is the purpose of the website?
Is it just a pretty landing page.
Is it a blog of knowledge and great content?
Is it a secure online shop?
Is it meant to generate 90% of business leads through search engines?

And then also factor in your budget.

Nobody said you cannot use a wix site. Just have to be realistic about what your expectations will be.

Dude, Wix Works well and fine. Just search how to do it IN the website and they give you EVERYTHING, STEP BY STEP. Google reads it perfectly. Google Likes the speed. Just build your h1 h2 h3 right and you have no problem. Use short and long tail keyword. Oh hey, where did I learned that. Udemy. Easy peazy. Wix is fine and again. You are on internet. You can find anything in seconds. You a fool for that.

What a great article. I am a Front End Web Developer and have worked on hundreds of websites over the last 12 years. Like you, I have seen, and experienced many of the pitfalls and growing pains of the web in general.

Some clients have asked me, “Why don’t I just use Wix?” …I have tried to explain the reasons Wix is a bad idea, but you have articulated it in a way that makes a whole lot more sense. Some clients hire graphic designers who draw pictures of websites but they are completely riddled with fundamental design flaws. I had to tell one client who has his own graphic designer masquerading as a web designer, “A graphic designer drawing pictures of websites is no more a ‘Web Designer’ than if he were drawing pictures of cars and telling you he is an automotive engineer.” (I had to be harsh.)

Sure, go for it and thanks for taking the time out to comment.

Love that last quote! So true!

It does if you take time to learn it. Most people don’t.

They sound great then?? All website can be down at some point I guess.

This is really intended at business owners who think platforms like this will save them money, but they don’t learn about digital marketing properly to make it work, but yes there are developers like that. There’s “cowboys” in every industry. I was aware of someone who got their site built for $500 from a branding agency. It was a complete waste of money. One page website, default Facebook links were still just linking to Facebook, and it couldn’t be found even for a branded search. It was a complete waste of money as an add on to some sign writing work.
The big problem is, the potential client thought they had a website, and then thought the costs to “fix” it were too much as they had their expectations set up incorrectly, and in a very misleading way.

Hi Craig,
I agree with you in everything you have said, Wix is terrible. From an SEO perspective, it makes everything a mess and a lot harder, that is why I avoid it and advise everyone else to do the same.
Furthermore, it limits you a lot, and as you point out, it ends up being a lot more expensive than expected. A good WP installation will always be more useful, powerful and bring you more results than Wix.

Thanks for the article! One of my biggest problems with wix is the very long loading time. Just check the loading time before you publish. Not normal. Full of Java Script.

Makes sense if you create 200 websites a year, then it’s a cost.
But for a business needing a corporate website in 2018 it’s just worthless to hire a developer to take care of it.
With Wix any experienced web-merchandiser can create a pretty nice website.
My company is pure IT but we did not even bother put a dev on corporate website, our merchandisers can handle 90% of it, and when there’s an issue, Wix now allows devs to step in and amend code if needed.

Hi Darren,

This advice sounds more pertinent for people who have no experience with website copy, SEO marketing, or maintaining their web presence. If this is not the case do you have any recommendations for people working at an advanced capacity? What site-builders or site-building services should we be utilizing to boost our Google-visibility and ensure we aren’t being overly and unnecessarily billed? Do you have solutions?

Anyone that has used Wix and has the slightest technical background, will understand that it is a simple tool made for getting a pretty site up and running easily and quickly, but is currently not suitable for serious business. Wix targets mass-market, not business in the literal sense. While your Wix website fails, there are always 10 more right behind you starting to utilise Wix for building their dreams, and so the cycle goes on.
Wix allows users to request new features. They do this to stem complaints from the fact Wix is missing a lot of simple and fundamental functionality which you can even find in free opensource solutions. These missing functions are real limitations for a lot of businesses, not simply nice-to-haves, and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. Oh, and by the way, being able to request new functionality, doesn’t mean you’ll get it. The request list is very long and in a lot of cases, very old.
Another thing to consider is page loading speed. With the Wix automation, a very simple page can end up requesting resources from a myriad of different places where Wix stores things. I have witnessed homepages with 300 requests, whereas something constructed manually could achieve the same result with a 10th of the requests.
Then there is the issue of what those requests are pulling on. As an example, with the Wix Store you can place a Cart icon on your homepage. That call request, though, can take 10 seconds to process, alone. Goodbye users who can’t be bothered to wait for things to load.
If you want a real-world example of how Wix came together and how it hasn’t changed since, take a look at their data structures. Download one of their tables to CSV, and you will find none of the DB principles you would expect, but rather find data structures you would expect from someone who doesn’t have a clue. It really is hodgepodge of stuff that started out very small, and came together in a non-structured way, and remains so. If you built something along the lines of Wix for a customer, they would very quickly realise you don’t understand the basics – no standards whatsoever.
I am currently slowly unpicking a Wix website, to understand where all the bottlenecks are and how I can make it usable. It is not fun.
Then there is the cost. Is Wix really free? You see that question all the time. Well, if you want to be able to sell anything, no it’s not, and the price only keeps going up for just about any functionality you want to add.
I think the point the author is making and which is being overlooked, is, yes, Wix is a good solution for those that do not have the technical skills to build a website, but be aware, making something look good doesn’t mean it works well or will encourage users to buy, or even attract them in the first place. The chassis and body on a Ferrari F1 car looks beautiful and with those looks, it can only be very fast, right? Well, if you are not racing car savvy, you may want to get some advice on the power train, brakes, aerodynamics and so on.
Based on experience, I couldn’t recommend Wix to serious businesses. I think it’s great for a personal website and so on, but if you want to build a successful business, then you have to go with at least the Shopify’s of this world (although I have no experience of Shopify, other than that it seems to provide all the functionality I can’t get on Wix).

This is clearly bias, and arrogant of the author. It’s a slam against WIX and nothing more. Wix is a premier platform. If it was the sham the Darren Craig says it is, it wwouldn’t be as widely popular as it is. I use WIX and I’m laughing all the way to the bank. Please give my regards to your 1 man fan club, Mr. Craig.

No one should ever use Wix in my opinion. Rarely does it work well, and I spent an entire day trying to make it work, writing my copy – stupidly thinking that the site would save my work- I came back the next day to find that not only did I lose all my copy, the whole site is corrupted. Wix is the worst thing you can do to your business. Go ahead and try it. But don’t for a minute rely on it working the way you expected. And to top it off there is absolutely no way you are going to get a hold of someone at Wix to resolve anything – that’s wishful thinking. You are warned!! Do yourself a favor and go use a site with integrity. These people will give you the worst customer experience of your life.

Hi, can you give me your opinion of the Homestead sitebuilder? I have been using them since they’ve been available. People seem to hate it, but I love the sitebuilder and rank high using my SEO skills. Usually on the first page, within the top three results on Google.

Couldn’t agree more w/ this article. I use Wix and likely will continue to do so for another couple months… but that’s only due to 1) lack of $$ to outsource a web developer to build me a WordPress site and 2) lack of time to dedicate to the project.

While I was initially all on board w/ the DIY idea, the TIME (TIME, TIME AND MORE TIME) spent designing the website has cost WAAAAY beyond what I would have spent for a good wordpress site (I also upload blogs… holy cow, what a nightmare… time suck).

I’ve “seen the light.” WordPress and hire a professional.

Thanks for taking the time to put down so much commentary! Really appreciate it. For info, Shopify is great, but it also has some slight things I’d tweak for SEO like their URL structure. I haven’t used it tons though.
Your second last paragraph sums up my intention well so appreciate it, but I’ll add some comments from the haters too to show I’m not biased ;-)

I’d disagree with this but it all depends on whats on the site and how important the functionality is. If its the best fit solution for it, then fair enough. A pretty nice website and a functional one are often very different, even from experienced web developers. Most web developers aren’t marketers or SEO people, and that’s where the problem lies.

This is a great example of the difference between a nice site, and a well made one, regardless of platform. And yes, my site has loads of things to improve on as well ;-)

I don’t have any solutions off the top of my head. I don’t use builders, and despite some of the ‘self serving’ comments I don’t build a lot of websites, I’m more into working alongside businesses during the build to ensure it’s done properly. I’ve heard good things about webflow, but never used it so can’t comment on functionality or SEO etc.

Thanks for you comment, from a wixmail email address. I don’t ever say it’s a sham, I say get some education and don’t kid yourself that you’re a builder just because you can build a seat out of a pallet. Sure it may be the right solution for some, but I woudn’t recommend it. Sugar and tobacco are popular, but the impact its having on the world is shocking. Just because something’s popular doesn’t mean its for everyone. If it’s worked for you great, but could your site be even better and you be taking more to the bank? Maybe, maybe not.

I’m not familiar with it, but if I can’t find info on it pretty quickly online I may make an unfair judgement. Without reading them, the reviews don’t look great on the search results. I tend to shy away from anything that says “build your free website here”. It can give a false sense of security to the unaware, but if it works for you then great…but how expandable is it etc etc.?

Hi Darren,

Do you feel the same way about Square Space? We are trying to decide between the 2. Thanks!

Sorry guy. I appreciate your concern for the limited knowledge of the average person when it comes to SEO. However, I have been building client websites on Wix for two years. I am not a Wix employee but a seasoned marketer. I will tell you why every last one of my clients is 100% satisfied and glad this is the platform I recommended.

We agree that the average person doesn’t understand the concept of SEO. They don’t understand it on Wix and they don’t understand it on WordPress either. What I have experienced is that the same people who didn’t know SEO on any platform are the same people who tried to build their own website on WordPress and failed miserably. But now they have two problems:
1. Their website doesn’t show up in a search
2. They communicate the URL by word of mouth so the few people who do go (loyal customers) see one of the most hideous websites on the planet. Have you ever seen a custom website built on WordPress by an amateur? It is a bloodbath. These people are scratching their heads trying to understand what went wrong after they invested an unbelievable amount of time into trying to learn WordPress only to have a site that reflects poorly on them as a business. At least Wix will offer them a step by step guide and very easy to use templates that plug and play.

Most DIY’ers eventually figure it out and seek out some help. When they find their way to me, I have to either (a) fix a few things wrong with their site, tag, and optimize it, connect the domain and let them have it back because they can quite easily manage it themselves or (b) start over from scratch because they either did a DIY on WordPress or had someone else do it and have no idea what to do when the inevitable changes come around. You’re right – they can’t transfer the data to Wix – only another WP site. That’s true for any platform.

The real beauty for these small businesses is that I can do them on Wix for a fraction of the cost of building a custom WP site. So they pay less and can manage it themselves. What’s wrong with that?

I think what I hear bothering you most is that Wix advertises that it’s free and easy. It is free to build a site there. Plenty of people do and put up with the ads and the lack of a domain name. (Nothing is ever really free … most people know that.) Easy is also accurate when they follow the very simple instructions and stick with the template. When they go off the reservation and customize, they’re choosing to take on the extra time. Why? Because they’re having fun. I have been a marketer for 15 years and have evangelized that marketing is more than the lipstick to everyone I meet. But I still meet plenty of people with misconceptions who want to play with the pretty fonts, pictures and (shudder) clip art. So I don’t argue and let them play until they’re bored and find something else to do. They come out of it with a newfound respect.

But I have no problems whatsoever with the Wix platform itself – the problems and challenges come with the misconceptions of people. You may feel that Wix (the company) is misleading them but Wix (the platform) is fine. I’ve also seen ads for things like “best unlimited network” from T-Mobile that isn’t actually the best unlimited network. And Comcast bashing AT&T and DirectTV with out and out fabrications about their competitor. Allstate offering ‘safe driver discounts’ in their ads when its not available in every state. My logic is, when writing an article like this, be careful to separate your problem with the business from the product.

Thanks for taking so much time to write your very well thought out comment. Yes I agree with you – with the right knowledge Wix is a good enough tool. There are many pros who would say to people never to use it, but as you said, every tool is ‘dangerous’ in the wrong hands and with the right knowledge it can be effective. The point of this article wasn’t to bash a platform, but to highlight the areas of knowledge you talk about. The ecosystem isn’t nearly as big as other platforms, but you could say that about plenty other content management platforms, and yes, there are many crap addons and plugins to WordPress too (but some amazing ones).

I have to disagree with you. Based on what you are saying, you have only read about Wix, but have never actually attempted to a build a website for yourself. SEO is not an issue. I’ve personally built Wix websites for business that compete on a national scale and achieved 1st page results for them. The platform is not the problem. Any “website designer” can do a poor job of SEO independent of the platform they build with.

As far as apps go, now that there is Wix code and database driven pages – many paid apps can be bypassed and built directly using Wix code.

The best part – An experienced Wix designer can put together a site in half the time it would take a traditional developer – and achieve similar web performance, and likely have a better looking site. Sorry to poo poo you.

Most of the people (Devolopers) avoid Wix because they kept wasting time for lots of coding work but all of a sudden lots of people have direct to Wix and they are afraid of loosing their income with coding stuff I am a developer too but now I use Wix it’s faster, easier .. why use hard ways if you have enough resources of easy ways?

I made a basic website for a customer of mine using wix. Page 1 of google ranked 4th. By searching her (fairly common) name. Your article is very 1 sided and self-serving. Frankly it’s doing you a disservice having it published.

I just spent several days laying out a website with Wix, and came at last to the blog functionality. If your site intends to have a dynamic and/or frequent use of a blog, do NOT use Wix. They’re new blogging platform has severely decremented its feature set from what they used to have, it removes standard and critical features like archiving.

I for one am just happy I finally found a website offering an opinion that is not a wix partner masquerading as an honest review. Many people are being scammed & tricked not realising how many tech pages have sold their souls & are just quoting from a Wix script about the Wix performance stats. More should be done to highlight this.

Thanks Darren, excellent commentary on Wix, I had only been exposed to their commercials and wanted an unbiased opinion. You’ve been very insightful on the negatives, thanks!

Honestly – as a real live marketer with experience in Wix & WordPress, I would say I actually prefer Wix for some sites but not all.
The biggest benefit of having a Wix site is that the updates are internal and do not break every plugin whenever they happen. Optimization of a Wix site is very easy. You can change your website’s look and feel in a day or two.
WordPress sites have their own issues. First, it can be very easy to hack a novice WordPress website because the starting features are not all that secure. Then there are the updates. WordPress only updates the base platform which leaves developers of plugins scrambling to update their plugin to work in the new environment. Then there’s Yoast. It is a great plugin, don’t get me wrong, but inexperienced people seem to assume that just having it turned on for their site will help their SEO – it won’t.
Essentially, what I feel this post should really break down to is “If you are not a marketer, designer or developer, it is unlikely that the site you build on any CMS platform will bring you a flood of new customers.”
However, if you know the ins and outs of a platform and how to make things run properly, go for whatever one feels most comfy for you. I like Wix because it has easy visualization of the website as I build so I can spot issues and fix them. This feature is automatic in Wix but requires a plugin for WordPress.
WordPress has a wider range of plugins available – but these plugins have a high chance of breaking with every WordPress update. Some won’t update unless you pay for them. And the new Guttenburg builder or whatever they are calling it now is just terrible and makes designing a page a nightmare if you don’t get yet another plugin to make it so you don’t have to use it.
All of these plugins create a security risk. Why? For the reasons I stated before – WordPress updates itself. The developers of plugins have to update their own after the fact.
In my experience with WordPress, hacking attempts are most likely to be successful during the period between a WordPress update and a plugin update. I don’t like vulnerable sites, which is why my website is built in Wix.

You are wrong about Wix and SEO. It is extremely easy to do SEO for any site by opening up the pages tab on the side menu, clicking on the circle with 3 dots and select SEO & Social. That opens the page settings block where you can optimize the metadata, keywords, page name, URL and your appearance in Social Media in the event that your page is shared.

It is really easy and doesn’t require installing anything extra.

Need to add Google Tag Manager? You are in luck – all you need to do there is go to your main dashboard (not the website). Click Settings then scroll to advanced settings and click Tracking and Analytics. At the top right there is a +new tool button. That takes you to the integrated tool drop down that includes Tag Manager, FaceBook, Analytics, Yandex, and Custom HTML. Edit the info you want and where you want it to be, save and Ta-Da, you have applied the codes to the appropriate places.
This means you can add things like Schema.org and other custom codes too.

That said – if you’ve never built a website and you need it to bring in money for your business, hire an expert, preferably one with a marketing background, to make sure that your site attracts customers.

WIX CUSTOMER SUPPORT NON-EXISTANT

I’m not sure how else to get Wix’s attention. I tried to contact customer support when the editor became buggy. It wasn’t creating links properly, randomly adding images to background – stupid things, but things the editor shouldn’t be doing.

These aren’t the things that get answered on a “quick-fix” support page.

Surprised to find no text support – that is common these days.

Phone number for support always receives a “we’re closed” message even if I called during published office hours.

Put in email ticket after ticket. Only got one reply back after I took to social media to complain and then the one response was followed by – *crickets chirping* – silence.

Then I received an email today saying my ticket was closed because it was answered!! Like hell it was!

I like some of the nicely designed features of Wix website building, but when my year runs out I’m going to have to switch services. I have a premium plan which means I’m paying their top dollar for a website but I can’t get anyone on the phone – or text – or email – or semaphore – when I’m having a problem.

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