Wix has come to be pretty broadly recognized over the previous few years, in component because of price range-busting advertising and marketing and advertising and marketing campaigns starring stars like heidi klum, jason statham and gal gadot, better called marvel female. However let’s begin with the basics. These days, wix is the most important participant in the internet site constructing panorama and hosts a whopping one hundred sixty million web sites.
Wix gives an terrific drag-and-drop web site builder to create small websites. There are 100s of unfastened templates available. Wix presents its personal net hosting in addition to domains (loose and paid). The app market makes it clean to add greater functionality which includes photo galleries or ecommerce. Who need to use wix? Their visually extraordinary layouts are designed for small agencies, eating places, online stores and artists consisting of musicians and photographers. They may be optimized for cell gadgets and can be spiced up with one of the severa apps available from the wix app market.
In a way you can study wix to a prefabricated residence: the essential shape already exists and can’t be modified. You could, but, paint the partitions on your gusto (choose a subject) and upload the fixtures you adore (photo galleries and other apps). In fact, i used it to create our very very own bilingual employer net website online called tool tester. Net. We had a selected design in thoughts and simply desired a quick way to build it. Also, i didn’t need to need to reflect on consideration on safety updates and so forth. Which supposed wordpress wasn’t an alternative.
In the end i considered each weebly and wix (our pinnacle-rated builders) and went for wix. With weebly there was just no ideal manner to make our layout look well on cellular devices. Working with the wix editor became a breeze, offering handy tools along with image filters and lively texts. However before on the point of swipe your credit score card, understand that each website has certainly one of a type necessities. Wix’s pricing alternatives.
Wix is to be had freed from price for so long as you need. If you need expert skills like your own location name or ecommerce, you have to choose from considered one of their top rate plans starting from “mixture” to “business enterprise vip”. The most inexpensive advert-unfastened plan with a custom area name fees $13 in keeping with month.
Wix Pricing
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Free – 0$ Create a free website with Wix ads. Not included: your own domain name. |
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Connect Domain – 14$ Connect your own domain with your Wix site. Your site will still show Wix ads. (Plan is not available in all countries). |
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Combo – 14$ Ideal for smaller professional websites. No ads and plenty of storage. |
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Unlimited – 18$ The right plan if you need a lot of web space (up to 10 GB included). |
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Business & eCommerce – 23$ Best plan to create an online store or use premium apps like Wix Bookings or Wix Hotels. Higher plans (VIP & Unlimited) available too. |
Pros and Cons of Wix
Pros
- The most remarkable thing about Wix is its templates. The designs are exceptional and offer pre-built layouts for many different industries.
- It’s extremely flexible. Whereas other website builder limit the extent to which elements can be moved around, Wix allows your to finish your work off “pixel perfect”.
- Adding animations. Wix is one of the few site builders that let you animate text and other elements. But make sure not to overdo it!
- App Market. There are hundreds of website apps that you can add to your website. There is a newsletter tool, live chat software, online booking widgets, etc. All of those can be easily integrated into your Wix website. But keep in mind: many of them are third party apps—if they get shut down you can’t complain to Wix.
- Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI). Wix offers a (relatively) smart assistant to create your website with. But this is only available for some types of projects (e.g. portfolios, yoga sites, etc). For instance, it’ll automatically connect your social media, generate a contact form for you or pick a suitable design for your audience. But don’t worry, if you don’t like something, you’ll be able to change it.
- Automatic Site Backup. Wix automatically creates backup points of your website that can be restored at any time. This way you will never lose any important information.
Cons
- Pricing. The cheapest ad-free plan with Wix is called Combo, which starts at $13 per month (compare Wix’s premium plans.) The competition offers cheaper options: Weebly’s cheapest plan without any advertising starts at around $8, for example.
- Templates can’t be changed easily. Once you have chosen your initial template, you can’t switch to a completely new one. You can certainly change the design within the template, it’s not possible to pick an entirely new one.
- Loading speed – Wix’s page loading speeds are not ideal as our research shows, especially on mobile devices. Although Wix seems to be aware of this issue, most competing website builders show faster loading times.
Rating Details
Features
Your own domain name (e.g. .com or .net) – Yes
Free domain name for one year included in the premium “Combo” and higher plans. Wix supports domain endings including: .com, .org, .net, .co.uk and .info. Renewal prices start at $14.95 per year. Using the “Connect Domain” package (and higher) it is possible to move your existing domain to Wix or point it from another domain registrar to Wix. More information. Always included: SSL encryption (https).
Depth of navigation
A maximum of two levels is possible. A third level would be desirable as right now it’s not very convenient to manage a larger site with Wix (30+ pages). Also, the more pages you add, the slower the editor tends to load.
Widgets (small tools to add extra functionality)
Wix App Market features a wide range of unique widgets and apps. We especially like Wix Music, to sell and promote music, and Wix Bookings that will let your customers book and pay for appointments and consultations. External applications can be integrated as well.
Monetization – Yes
You can integrate Google AdSense via their App store. Another possibility is banner ads and affiliate links.
E-Commerce
An online store is included in the “Business & eCommerce” packages. You can also test the function in the other plans. At $23 per month it’s fairly priced (there are no sales fees) and it allows to sell both physical and digital goods while tracking what you have in stock. Learn more in our detailed Wix Ecommerce review.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
You may have heard bad things about Wix’s SEO capabilities, which was still true a few years ago (more about this here). However, they have improved massively, letting you edit page titles, meta descriptions, and alt tags individually. There are even advanced SEO tools like 301 redirects. Unfortunately, Wix changes image file names into something cryptic (e.g. 09ab7~mv2.jpg/), which is a minor disadvantage. Beginners can use the SEO Wiz, a guided tutorial. For more information, check Wix’s SEO post.
Blog
Wix’s blog is a pretty good add-on, which is also SEO-friendly. It comes with most of the features that you’ll need (e.g. tags, categories, RSS, etc.). It’s also possible to schedule blog posts. With the Wix mobile app you can edit and publish articles on the go. A downside is the cumbersome commenting feature. Your visitors need to sign up for an account with your website to leave a comment.
Visitor statistics
In order to access statistics, Google Analytics must be integrated in advance.
Contact form – Yes
There is a simple contact form builder, which is limited to 10 form fields. More sophisticated tools can be found in the App Market.
Password-protected areas – Yes
Exemplary! Pages can be allocated an individual password. You can even create a small membership website where users sign up in order to receive personal login credentials. Unfortunately it doesn’t integrate with ecommerce. You decide whether they get approved instantly or manually by you. Both features included in all plans.
Newsletter tool – Yes
You can use Wix’s own “ShoutOut” newsletter service. It’s very easy to use but not as powerful as specialized external providers. Read our full Wix ShoutOut review here.
Add HTML code – Yes
Embed various widgets and other tools by means of an integrated app called HTML iframe. But that’s not all: Wix Code (Corvid) caters to people with advanced coding skills and lets you set up custom API interactions by means of JavaScript. You can also create databases.
Storage space – 500 MB+
500 MB – 20 GB web space, depending on the pricing tier. Please note that there is also a monthly bandwidth limit in most plans. This is only relevant for large websites, e.g. the 2 GB bandwidth of the Combo plan should be enough for about 3,000-5,000 visitors per month). The Unlimited and VIP plans both provide unlimited bandwidth.
Backups & Restore – Yes
Wix comes with a very convenient version control system, called Site History, that will let you restore to any previous version of your site with one click.
Fun Factor
Starting up is very playful and, initially, impressive results are achieved quickly. Wix gives you a lot of freedom in the design process.
Overall Rating – 4.6/5
Wix.com is a smart website builder with optical delights. Easy to use and as flexible as it can get. It’s the perfect website builder for photographers, bands, artists and any kind of (small) portfolio site. Loading speeds should be improved.
Wix Review: Conclusion
Wix recommendation
If I am being honest I had my reservations about Wix at first as their product hasn’t always been easy to recommend. Back in the days it was Flash-based and always a bit different (like your old classmate who had that weird taste in clothes). However, thanks to their neverending improvements they have become one of the cool kids, slowly climbing our ranking to now claim the top position.
Wix and SEO: can we be friends?
Wix SEO – They even got Google’s John Mueller to publicly state that Wix’s SEO capabilities are fine for their search engine. So unless you are planning on ranking for some insanely competitive keyword you should have no issues with Wix! In the end, SEO depends a lot more on your ability to create outstanding content rather than the website builder. Wix has one SEO disadvantage, though, due to its relatively slow loading speeds on mobile devices.
Wix’s App Market: all the widgets you will ever need?
One area where they’ve really done everything right is their app store. Most other website builders mainly rely on third-party apps that can break if the company stops supporting them. Wix’s strategy is a bit different: they have created more than 80 high-quality apps themselves. Among those: an appointment scheduling tool (Wix Bookings), the event management app Wix Events, hospitality widgets (Wix Restaurants and Wix Hotels) as well as Photo Gallery and Video tools. And you can bet that there will be more.