Wix Review – User & Expert Reviews

Wix is one of the most acclaimed online website builders that offer you the opportunity to convey your ideas with minimal effort onto a fully functional website. You can start using the Wix website builder as soon as possible via a drag-and-drop interface with no need for previous development experience. As simple as that, all you need is a little imagination, and you are good to start exploring everything that Wix offers.

Overview Of Wix

As of 2022, Wix is used by 200 million users worldwide, making it one of the most popular website builders. It focuses on giving the creator as much creative freedom as possible for creating the desired content. Wix is user-friendly, and it offers more than 800 different website templates.

Creating a professional-looking website used to require some coding experience, but with Wix, all you need to do is create an account on Wix, choose one of the many templates according to your requirements, and customize it. Once you are done, after clicking publish, your brand new website will be online.

Nevertheless, you should choose your template carefully because you can not switch to another one once you have chosen a template. Wix offers free and paid plans that you should choose depending on your future work plans. So if you need to create your website, Wix is the right choice for you.

Who Should Use Wix?

With a range of innovative tools for creating websites, Wix focuses on giving you creative freedom. If you are a beginner and looking to start your blogging experience, create your portfolio, or if you have decided to start your business, such as a restaurant, hobby business, or small business, without a doubt, Wix should easily be one of your first choices. It offers you:

• Free site hosting
• Easy to use drag and drop builder
• Plenty of beautiful design templates
• It is very affordable
• With Wix’s vast integration library and built-in-apps, there is a ton of extra functionality that you can add to your site

However, if you have a long-standing business and want to strengthen your online presence with SEO, you should avoid using Wix. Even though there have been improvements, Wix still struggles with optimizing some SEO tools. So, if this is your priority, you should have a look at the Best Website Builder for SEO.

As for me, to share my first experience working with Wix has been quite pleasant. I have launched my website within a day. Everything was easy to find, navigate, and understand, speaking from the beginner’s viewpoint (or at least I try to do so).

In this Wix brand review, you can learn the basics of the Wix website builder, its features, and respective pros and cons – you’ll see if Wix is the most suitable host for you.

Pros and Cons

With more than 800 templates, Wix is a leading platform for building websites with millions of users. Wix’s key features are high–quality templates, an easy–to–use editor, and a massive range of tools.

Rating: Breakdown

We use thorough and continuous eCommerce builder testing to rank each brand in its expert review properly. The testing process allows us to check their functionality, assess their work across devices, and evaluate the risks. We use specific parameters that provide the most accurate results to specify the best builders present. Here are the factors we used for the Wix reviews.

Ease Of Use (Is It Easy To Use Wix)?

Wix is maybe best known for its easy-to-use functionality. Do not worry; Wix is relatively straightforward if you are a complete beginner. We will create a website from scratch in the following few paragraphs to confirm this fact.

The first step is to set up an account and fill in your information. You need to go to wix.com and click on Get Started on the homepage.

Next, you need to fill in the sign-up form, taking only a few minutes.

After signing up, you will be prompted to answer a quick survey to gather some insights about the website you will be creating. The survey is not compulsory, but I suggest looking at it and answering the questions to receive a better service experience from Wix.

After completing the survey, you are now ready to create your website.

Wix offers you two tools: Wix ADI and Wix Editor. Before building your website, you need to choose one or the other builder tool. To help you make the right choice, we will go over both builder tools’ features.

Wix ADI is an intelligent builder tool that will create your website in a couple of minutes. To get started with Wix ADI, you need to answer some questions about the content you want your website to contain.

After completing everything, Wix ADI creates your website automatically.

On the other hand, Wix Editor gives you complete control over the look of your website. It’s the traditional approach where you first browse Wix’s template gallery and pick the one you like.

Then you add in the content, add social media, create sections, add functionalities, etc.

Wix Value for Money – Pricing & Plans

Being one of the most popular website builders, Wix offers a variety of eight different subscription plans, aside from the free plan. Five of them are meant for simple websites, and the other three are more suitable for eCommerce businesses. The subscription plans range from $14 to $59 per month. Let’s analyze them so you can get all the information needed to make a choice.

Wix website builder can be one of the best values on the market if you choose the plan most suitable for you.

If you are a non-eCommerce user and are not expecting hundreds of visitors, I recommend going with the Combo plan. This ad-free plan offers a free domain, and you will get plenty of storage.

If you want to open an online store, you should choose the Business Basic plan. It comes with most of Wix’s eCommerce features, and it is the least expensive.

Whether you have chosen the Combo plan or some eCommerce plans, you can always upgrade later. If you are still doubting using Wix, you can always start with the free plan to see if it is for you, then upgrade to the best plan. Considering that Wix is a bit costlier than other website builders, the value for money rating is 4.8.

Templates (Design Flexibility)

Wix provides you with more than 800 designer-made templates. I can easily say that their layouts are some of the most enchanting designs. You can choose from various industry-specific layouts, from eCommerce to blogs, to portfolios.

After choosing your template, Wix provides you with good-quality sample text, layouts, and images. Wix’s collection of beautiful templates is one of the platform’s best features.

Have a look at a few of the templates that Wix offers.

One of the most popular templates is the Personal Blog. The combination and the simplicity created from the single black layout will make you feel comfortable scrolling through your page. It is the ideal choice for personal websites or personal blogs.

Next, we will look at one of Wix’s most recent templates. A dynamic theme is the best choice for a clothing store. You can showcase the best brands from your new arrivals and the most popular categories in the grid layout below.

Wix offers various great templates that make creating a unique website effortlessly. The customization is a bit limited, and the most significant downgrade is that once your website is live, you can’t change the template you have chosen. So the overall ranking would be 4.7.

Features and Tools

According to Wix’s website, the platform provides over 1,000 innovative features, such as eCommerce tools, mobile applications, online storage, etc. Let’s take a quick look at some of Wix’s features.

App Market

The App Store has played a crucial role in helping Wix become one of the leading platforms for website building. There are hundreds of applications designed by Wix’s platform team or third parties that you can easily install. Some apps are free, others are premium, but they often allow a 7-day trial period that lets you try out additional features before signing up for a monthly plan.

The App Market includes a variety of useful apps such as Wix Stores, where you can sell products online, and Wix Blog, where you can share your expertise. The App Market also offers a great app, the Wix Music App. It is one of the best options for promoting music. It is straightforward, which helps musicians, bands, and DJs with no coding experience or information create their website utilizing prepared-made web capabilities and an easy drag-and-drop interface. Many musicians have created their very first website utilizing Wix. The music industry-related templates are created using the latest web standards. They load faster than the average website. Musicians can sell their music albums, singles, or playlist at their prices. Wix Bookings is another app worth mentioning, letting your customers book and pay for appointments and consultations.

Mobile App

Another great feature that Wix offers is The Wix Owner App. This app is a robust and powerful application designed to help you grow your business from anywhere. You can manage your appointment scheduler, which means choosing your availability, so your customers will be able to book any service available to them. Always connected with your community, you can build and manage your online store, bookings, blog, etc., all from your mobile. For promoting your business, you can easily create types of content to help build web traffic, such as email marketing campaigns, social posts, and videos. With the Wix Owner App, you can communicate with your clients at all times via live chat. You can answer their questions, help them find out exactly what they are looking for, and respond to contact form submissions directly.

Domain Names

If you purchase one of Wix’s paid plans, you receive a free domain name for a year. Wix offers more than 50 domain names, and regarding which paid plan you are using, some domain name extensions are not available. However popular extensions like .com, .net or .org are available.  With that being the case, you can choose your domain name extension depending on your plan. Unfortunately, Wix’s domain name prices are higher than other registrars after the first year. In the long run, it’s cheaper to host your domain name with another registrar. The right domain name helps visitors find you online, adds credibility to your brand, and instantly makes your site look professional. Wix also offers privacy protection. However, this is a paid add-on at Wix, free with many other registrars. The functionality to get a domain name for your site is pretty straightforward. As shown in the picture, you have a choice to buy a new domain name or connect a domain you already own.

Social Media Integration

As we all know, social media is one of the best ways to engage directly with your audience. An online presence is pivotal for any business’ success.  Wix provides a Social Bar that allows you to connect your website to your social accounts. You can add the Social Bar from the Add Panel, but you can’t customize it to your own needs. You can drag and drop any of the icons to re-order them, click on the little trash can that appears when you place your cursor on top of the icon to delete it, and you can click on the orange ‘+ add icon’ button to add even more social icons to your social bar. You can link your visitors directly to your social network pages with one click. Wix also allows you to add a Social Media App to your website to share your diverse content and capture the audience’s attention with fresh, unique, & exciting content.

Security

When it comes to creating a website, security should be your priority. The website builder platform strives to implement the highest level of security processes and practices to keep the websites safe. Wix’s websites have SSL certificates to keep connections secure and private over an HTTPS connection.  Wix regularly scans its public interfaces for vulnerabilities and monitors, detects, and blocks incoming attacks on its platform. That makes Wix safe for online payments. I can conclude that they use superior security.

Blog

Wix is an ideal blogging platform. With the new Wix Blog app released, you can easily create a lovely blog on your website. This app allows you to write, edit and publish articles on the live side of your website. So once you set up your blog in the editor, you do not have to log into the backend of your website every time you want to add a new article. Also, with Wix Blog, you can write and edit posts, delete comments and manage your blog from your mobile. Other benefits of the Wix Blog include easy search, a profile page, you can translate your page, add multiple writers and use a rich text editor.

Video Maker

The Wix Video Maker makes it easy for you to create promo videos, demos, social posts, and more. You can now easily create a promotional video to announce a sale, share your music and design, and tell a story. The video maker tool is another feature available under Ascend’s “Marketing Tools.” Many video marketing statistics proved that video content could significantly increase traffic to your website.

Business Features

It is not a surprise to see a great lineup of business features as small businesses are one of Wix’s targets. To help you create a website for your small business that meets your needs, the Wix website builder provides various specific features specifically for businesses.

Marketing

Your business needs to engage its customers. Marketing is a tool to keep the conversation going. It also allows businesses to maintain long-lasting and ever-present relationships with their audience. Wix offers Ascend by Wix – a business solution that allows you to interact with your customers seamlessly. It is intended for business owners. Ascend by Wix offers many features that we will look into. Features include:

• Online Marketing Tools: Social posts, SEO solutions, email marketing, and automation
• Sales Tools: Tools that help you improve your sales strategy
• Customer Management Tools: Tasks and remainders, Contact list, inbox, and online chat

Ascend by Wix is an excellent tool, but it is not included in your monthly Wix subscription, so you need to pay an extra fee to use it. There is a free option. However, it is minimal and not recommended at all.

For the paid plans, there are three options:

1. Basic: The starting price is $10 per month. You have unlimited additional collaborators, real-time customer details, and ten customizable payment forms with the basic plan. You get up to 5 email marketing campaigns, 9500 emails per month, five social post campaigns, and five promotional videos. It also allows you to sync with Gmail and Facebook Messenger.
2. Professional: Starting at $24 per month, Professional covers all the basic plan features and more. You have 20 customizable forms, 20 email marketing campaigns per month, 50000 emails, 20 social post campaigns per month, and ten promotional videos. Chat automation is also included.
3. Unlimited: Starting at $49 per month, Unlimited is the most comprehensive plan of Ascend by Wix. This plan comes with all the features of the professional plan, including unlimited, customizable forms, email marketing campaigns, automation, and social post campaigns per month.

The Unlimited paid plan is undoubtedly the best option you can get. However, even though these plans are not the most expensive tools offered, they are also not the cheapest, so you need to research and figure out what you need before making the purchase. Also, on a side note, these packages feature a small discount for those who have chosen the annual payment plan.

Email Marketing

Using email for marketing is one of the most effective ways to stay in touch with your customers. The Ascend Email Marketing Tool by Wix brings you high-quality email marketing and lets you capture leads and design and automation emails. You can choose from many different email templates or create your template from scratch. The one downside is that it costs extra money to get this feature.

Wix SEO Tools

Wix eCommerce has search optimization tools that are generally good. They are backed up by inbuilt tools covering all SEO functionalities to rank on Google. In the last couple of years, Wix has improved the infrastructure to the needs of search engines to get the best SEO results.

The following few paragraphs will cover the essential SEO features Wix offers to its users.

• Canonical tags help search engines find the original version of a page. They can be a simple yet powerful tool for search engines optimizing your website.
• Google Analytics is a service that provides statistics for SEO and marketing purposes. It collects visitors’ insight and tracks a website’s performance.  You can use Google Analytics to improve marketing campaigns and gain more visitors faster. You can activate this service in Wix by simply clicking ‘+New Tool’ in the Wix Site Manager.
• SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is the standard technology that provides a secure internet connection and safeguards any sensitive data sent between two systems. SSL is included with any paid Wix plan. We will go over the steps to enable SSL on your Wix Website

1. Go to the Wix Website Editor
2. Find the Professional Options section of the page
3. Click on the “Turn On SSL” button
4. Click on “Continue.”
5. You will shortly get a notification that you have enabled the SSL-security
6. For confirmation, you should reload your page

• Meta tags are snippets of code that tell search engines important information about your website, such as who views your page and its information. Each Wix page has its section where you can fill in essential info.
• Structured Data is highly organized data for providing information about a page and classifying the content on the page. It has a well-defined structure and follows a consistent order. You can add Structured Data yourself, but it can be problematic. It is easier to add it in other website builders like WordPress.
• 301 Redirects are considered best SEO practices. A 301 redirect indicates the permanent moving of a web page from one location to another. A 301 redirect tells the browser that the page has moved permanently and that this is the new location. The browser having this information sends the user to that location. With Wix Stores, you can edit the URL of your product page under the product’s SEO settings.  You may decide to do this if you change the name of one of your products. To ensure that you don’t have any broken links, you can create 301 redirects from the old product URLs to the new ones.

Selling Online

As already mentioned, Wix is an excellent choice for building your first online store and taking it to the next level. You can create a professional online store, choose products to sell, and make money with Wix’s eCommerce platform. Apart from all that, Wix offers Wix Payments for payment processing. There are a few steps to follow to create an online store.

1. Choose from over 500 designer-made store templates to match your vision for your eCommerce store.
2. Customize your store’s design.
3. Add products to your online store.
4. Connect to Wix’s native payments solution or choose from a global network of payment providers.
5. Define a custom domain.
6. Publish your eCommerce online store and start selling.

Performance

Wix is not best known for his amazingly-fast performance like any other website builder. Unfortunately, many users found the performance of their website during the editing process slow. Even with a fast internet connection, the loading speed was still slow. However, low-performance results do not mean negative real-life performances. To give a final score, we put a few websites through GTMetrix.

Speed Page

E score and “43%” on performance do sound bad. The website takes 24.1 seconds to load fully, which is quite a lot, but it takes around 2 seconds to be fully interactive and load the most visible elements, which is not a bad result. I visited the page a few times, and surprisingly I overlooked a massive load time. We can conclude that Wix does not have a great page loading speed time, but for regular users, your Wix’s page loading speed will not be a problem.

Uptime and Response Time

To test Wix’s uptime, I ran an automated check on a website every five minutes for seven days to ensure it was still up. Wix performed well. At no point was the website unavailable. Wix also performed very well in the response time testing. Of course, the average speed of your website will also depend on your theme.

Based on the tests and the results, the overall ranking for performance is 4.7.

Help and Customer Support

Wix is known for its high-quality customer support by offering a 24/7 callback service. Customer service is a big part of eCommerce platforms. The platform provides multiple support options, including phone support, email support, social media support, etc.

In theory, Wix customer service has something for everyone, whether you want to talk to a natural person on the phone or prefer reading fully detailed help articles. It doesn’t offer a live chat, but this shouldn’t be a problem with all options offered. The Wix Support Center delivers documentation, forums, and FAQs for any question you might have. Some of the documentation is inconsistent and lacks details, so there is room for revision and improvement.

Many customer reviews show that the help and customer support area is where Wix falls short. One of the most frequent topics of negative Wix reviews is the lack of customer support, so we had to mention it in this Wix brand review.

Wix Example Sites

To get a more concise picture of Wix, you should look at some of the websites created by the platform. These are live websites used by real businesses and individuals built using a simple drag and drop principle.

Seven Grams Caffe (Online Store)

The Seven Grams Caffe sells coffee and cookies. It is a simple eCommerce online store that displays all the business’s products. The website uses a minimalistic design with simple black and white theme.

Animal Music (Music Website)

Animal music is regarded as one of Wix’s best websites. The website is a portfolio that uses a minimalistic design followed by a full-screen video that automatically plays once you load the page.

Sonja van Duelmen (Portfolio)

This website is a portfolio created by Sonja van Duelmen, a creative art director and designer. Her website offers many services, like photo-editing, corporate design, digital art visual design, etc.

Wix Review: Summary

Overall, Wix Website Builder is a well-featured website builder that offers more than 800 different designer-made templates. You can build a site that features a blog, online store, galleries, etc. It isn’t the cheapest website builder, but it’s reasonably priced. Furthermore, Wix has a free plan, so you can start with it as long as you like before opting for a paid subscription. It is best known for its easy-to-use functionality; it is the perfect choice for people without coding experience. You can choose Wix ADI for complete beginners, Wix’s AI-powered website builder. All you have to do is answer a few quick questions, and your website will be ready in just minutes.

A huge drawback is that Wix doesn’t have creative, responsive websites, and from an SEO point of view, things are less effective. Something else that I can count as a negative aspect is that once you choose a template, you are stuck with it. You have to continue using that template or start building the website from scratch. Ultimately I would recommend Wix to anyone looking to build a personal or small business website. It is a great website builder for small businesses interested in expanding their online presence, but It’s not so great for eCommerce-first websites. The functionality is there. It’s fine. But I would not choose Wix to start an online store.

Wix User Reviews

Being one of the most popular website builders on the marker, Wix has been reviewed by many users. The customer reviews are primarily mixed, as people are divided between Wix’s easy-to-use functionality, the lack of customer support, and the costly plans.

As concluded, Wix is generally easy to use and probably among the best choices for creating a simple website. Many functionalities like the drag and drop text blocks, strips, gallery templates, videos, forms, and more can be added and manipulated quickly. It’s also essential to mention that users are satisfied with the platform’s intuition. If you can’t find your way around adding a domain for the website, Wix includes step-by-step videos.

One of the cons is that once you choose a template, you can’t switch it, which means you would have to start from the beginning. The design options for mobile are limited, and sometimes the design shifts for no reason, causing the designer to double-check the design for desktop and mobile after the smallest of edits to the page.

The deal-breaker, however, with the users is the lack of customer support. Most of the users shared that whenever they have had technical issues, customer service has been hard to contact and not quick to respond. Wix’s customer service is one of the lowest-ranked services among other website builders. Combining the cheapest plan is one of the most recommended and used plans. However, it can become costly quickly because you have to upgrade to an even more expensive plan to add any functionality.