Comprehensive Wix Review

With so many CMS (Content Management Systems) out there, each one offers pros and cons.

In the case of this article, you’ll learn about Wix, a website builder that’s also a hosted solution. Wix allows customers to build beautiful sites, and easily create content with their drag and drop builder, without messing with code. Additionally, the Wix product is mostly dedicated for customers needing to build sites that will make money, like through selling digital or tangible items, booking reservations or events, and more.

Wix is a website builder that also acts like a web host, also known as a hosted solution. The purpose of Wix is to offer a webpage builder that customers can easily build a website with.

In a way, Wix can be compared a little bit to WordPress.com (not WordPress.org), as they are both hosted solutions, where you don’t have to install the code, in order to start a website. All you need is your computer, a website browser, and Internet access to build a Wix powered website.

While Wix started in 2006, it didn’t open up their website builder until 2012, and based a lot of its ideas and code on other CMS and web page builders, while working to deliver a product that customers can build and successfully launch their websites. They even go a step further with their Wix ADI, to intuitively suggest the right template for the customer to start building with. Once you choose your template, you can start creating content.

As of January 2022, Wix, according to W3Techs, ranks 3rd in market share trends, for content management systems.

At the basic plans like free and Combo, you can build a website, blog, photo gallery, or a simple ecommerce site. This is decent if you don’t need many frills. However, if you need much more, like a booking system or event ticket system, or more, you will need to upgrade your account. With an upgraded account, you get access to more advanced add-ons and more disk space.

However, Wix doesn’t offer too much outside of either building a super simple website or blog, or something to make money. This isn’t necessarily a negative, as Wix is focused on customers that want to make money with their site. However, if you want to build a web directory or something complex, Wix isn’t the solution for you.

• Offers a built-in drag and drop editor
  Wix put together their own basic drag and drop editor, as well as built templates that you can easily alter.

• Offers many applications to add to site
  If you’d like a simple e-commerce store, forum, or blog, you can use those in Wix’s free plan. Most other apps, you will need to upgrade or pay for a monthly subscription

• Lots of templates to choose from
  With over 800 free templates, this should be enough for anyone to choose how their website should look.

• Wix ADI
  If you’re building a site for the first time and have no clue what to choose, the Wix ADI can help choose a decent template that will fit your website’s purpose.

• Says it has built-in SEO, but code output is encrypted
  Wix does have some SEO options built-in, but it’s limited. Some of the front-end code output of the page is encrypted, like image names, which are vital in SEO.

• Analytics aren’t offered
  Analytics aren’t offered in the free and Combo. This is difficult if you’re starting off and need to track your traffic.

• Limited disk space usage
  At the Combo plan, you only get 3GB of disk space. This can quickly be used up, especially if you build a large ecommerce site, or use a lot of images.

• Inflexible on changing from one template to another
  If you built your site and want to change the template, you’re stuck redoing the entire thing over again.

• What is built on Wix can’t be taken elsewhere
  Wix sites are built strictly to be on Wix, and if you get the hankering to move, you’re stuck rebuilding the entire site from scratch on another web host and CMS.

• Costs more per month when upgrading, than other CMS solutions
  While Wix has a free plan, it’s very limited. Their first upgrade plan is called Combo, and starts at $14/ month. In the long run, this solution is not cheap for the basic DIY-er starting a site on a dime.

With Verpex, a cloud web hosting account is only $3 per month on the Bronze hosting plan. Additionally, in going back to the disk space issue that Wix has, Verpex offers 50GB.

This review of Wix has been broken down into the following areas:

• Popularity
• Type
• Installation
• SEO
• Ease of Use
• Security
• Content Manager
• Themes
• Plugins
• Support

Each area will have a rating between 1 to 5, one being really bad, and 5 being excellent.

1. Popularity

Wix, in combination with it’s Wix Store add-on, are pretty powerful and popular. Alongside the powerful website builder, according to BuiltWith, as of January 2022, more than 7 million sites are powered by Wix. This number has risen dramatically since 2011.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Reason: For a hosted solution, Wix has established a good product and has continually improved their services enough to attract so many users.

2. Type

Website builder and hosted solution. With Wix, you only have 1 choice of a CMS tool, so it eliminates having to choose between the countless other platforms out there. Other web hosts usually offer a few different CMS to choose and install.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Reason: Drag and drop builders are helpful for even the most basic of users.

3. Installation

With Wix ADI, you just click the Create Website button, and are asked to select a couple options, based on the type of website you desire to build. You can either choose the Wix ADI to choose a template for you, or they will give you a few suggested templates to choose from. Their walkthrough launches your website in seconds.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Reason: All you have to do is go through Wix’s builder walkthrough. There’s no installation process. You’re immediately given a choice of Wix randomly choosing a template, based on the type of site you want to build, or you can choose your own.

4. SEO

Wix offers some basic SEO for your title, page or post descriptions, social sharing, and more. However, from the front-end, if you use images, while you can see the image, the image names are actually encrypted into Wix’s proprietary code. This isn’t very SEO-friendly, or web-accessible.

Rating: 3 out of 5

Reason: The rating could be worse, but at least Wix offers some essential SEO features for pages and posts. Wix could try to learn from WordPress SEO plugins in order to improve their own features.

5. Ease of use

To be honest, the drag and drop feature is pretty handy. Additionally, with the pre-built templates, it’s easy to jump in and start creating content. Please note that if you want to add a blog to your site, it is a free add-on. From experience with clients, I’ve seen them miss this important process by not turning on the blog add-on offered by Wix.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Reason: As much as Wix is easy to create content, it’s good when you want to create from the desktop browser. I’ve found it quite irritating to try using it via mobile. Some bloggers do live blogging at events, and are blogging straight from their mobile browser or app.

6. Security

Unlike other CMS, Users don’t really need to worry about security with Wix, as they are a hosted solution, and take care of all security needs. This being said, as a Wix user, make sure to choose a difficult password, as this is one of the few security issues that could pop up.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Reason: Security is super important, but many times, the basic user has no clue or the time to learn about how to secure their website. Since Wix takes care of this, it’s one less thing to manage from the user-end.

7. Content Manager

You can’t go wrong with the content manager, or in this case the Wix editor. You can drag and drop content wherever you like. As for blogging, once you’ve chosen how you want the site to look, also known as a template, then you can click on a pre-built blog post to create your own.

There’s a separate area called the Blog manager, where you can create new posts, edit old ones, or even remove them. The editor is a WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get), where you can see how the page will look when you publish it.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Reason: Wix takes out the confusion of how your content will look, when you’re building content.

8. Templates

There are hundreds of free templates for Wix users to choose from. A good deal of them are beautifully designed and allow the end-user to click and edit the template to suit their needs.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Reason: No coding is necessary when working with any Wix template. This is really helpful for newer website users, that don’t have any CSS or HTML background.

9. Add-ons

With so many types of websites to build, sometimes having simple choices eliminate all the confusion that you as a customer might have, when it comes to what type of add-ons you need. If you need an ecommerce solution, while there’s a free add-on offered, it might be best to upgrade in order to take advantage of launching a more robust shop.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Reason: There aren’t really a lot of add-ons, but there are some handy ones like event tickets, booking reservations, and the Wix store. With time, perhaps Wix will offer more variety

10. Support

If you pay for an upgrade, you can access Wix Support. They usually will troubleshoot any issues since you have no access to the code within the website builder or the offered add-ons.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Reason: From a past experience with a client that used Wix’s upgraded plans, their support was unable to troubleshoot why Facebook Pixel wasn’t properly tracking their survey and optins. If this is important to you, don’t use Wix until they’ve fixed their end.

Wix certainly offers a lot for the customer looking for a solution that not only focuses on making money, but making it easy to create content, and build beautiful websites. The appeal of an all-in-one-solution that Wix gives, is certainly a selling point, but if you’re needing more than what their add-ons offer, you might want to look into other content management systems.

Additionally, if you’re a person that likes the freedom to be able to move your website around, Wix won’t be the solution. You will have to rebuild from scratch, and that’s just too much money and time to deal with.

However, if you are the type that truly wants to take charge of your site, and you don’t have much technical or design skills, then Wix may be the ideal CMS for you.