Wix Website Builder Review 2022

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What Is Wix?

Wix is a website builder first founded in 2006. It’s designed to make designing, creating, and running a website easy through the use of drag-and-drop tools. 

Wix stands out for its massive list of website templates. It’s best for those who like to tinker with the fine details of their sites, as it offers more customization than most other website builders on the market.

Using Wix

Wix offers a free-forever plan, so you can try everything out before you decide on a paid plan which removes ads and lets you use your domain name.

Getting started with Wix is easy. When you sign up, you’re asked whether you want to jump into editing your site immediately or use the ADI (artificial design intelligence) tool. ADI asks you a few questions about the type of site you plan on running and automatically sets up some defaults for your Wix website, saving you time.

Wix Features and tools

Free website hosting

Besides access to the easy-to-use website editor, a Wix plan includes many of the things you need to host a website, all rolled into one monthly subscription. This includes website hosting. Your website is hosted on Wix servers and there’s no additional setup required.

Free Wix websites get 500MB of storage. Each paid plan has its own amount of storage, ranging from 3GB on the Combo plan to 50GB on the Business VIP plan.

Open platform development

Wix has a platform for building advanced web applications called Velo. This means you can develop bespoke website functionality, offering you more power and freedom than most website builders. 

Velo includes a rapid visual front-end designer, unified database manager, and an integrated development environment for designing and coding a more complex Wix site.

Security

Wix offers enterprise-grade security to each and every user. By operating under the best cyber security practices and managed by experts 24/7, Wix allows users to focus entirely on their business. There are no extra steps to take to enable security features—once you're done building your site with Wix, it automatically receives the security needed to safeguard your online business.

Wix apps

The Wix App Market is full of useful tools from Wix and third parties that extend the functionality of your website. Wix Ascend is an all-in-one marketing solution, Wix Bookings adds the ability to take bookings through your site, and there is a whole heap of other great apps like Wix Hotels, Wix Events, and Wix Restaurants that can totally change how your website works.

Creating a website with Wix

How to Create, Design, & Edit Your Wix website

Wix made a smart move in giving users the option of starting with the ADI wizard first or jumping right into using the Wix editor. The ADI wizard does an excellent job of setting up a Wix website for you based on your responses to a short questionnaire.

Next, you’ll choose from one of almost 1,000 templates. While Wix’s templates aren’t always as visually impressive as competitor Squarespace’s templates, it offers many more options, so you’re more likely to find a relevant theme for your business or project from the get-go.

Then, it’s simply a matter of dragging and dropping elements onto your pages. Notably, Wix allows you to place elements anywhere on the page while most website editors force you to stick to a grid. This ultimately makes Wix more powerful, but it can mean your website looks a little weird on mobile devices until you tweak the mobile version.

Adding Multimedia to Your Wix website

Adding images and videos to your site is as simple as dragging and dropping the relevant element to your pages. Once you’ve uploaded images and videos to Wix, you can reuse them throughout your sites and marketing. You can even import media from Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr, use Wix’s free images, or buy images from Shutterstock from within the Wix interface.

Wix includes both an excellent photo studio and a basic video maker that allow you to edit and manipulate your media after you’ve uploaded it.

Marketing Functionality with Wix Websites

Wix has its own basic app for email marketing called ShoutOut, or you can choose third-party apps in the Wix App Store. Site traffic reporting is equally bare bones.

This is because Wix sells a separate marketing product called Ascend. It starts at $10/month, and you get email marketing, chat boxes, forms, and social media marketing. Ascend is quite sophisticated, allowing you to send posts on a schedule or when users perform particular actions.

SEO Functionality & Add-Ons with Wix Websites

Wix pages include all the basic details you need to make your site search engine optimized. The Wix SEO Wiz is a step-by-step wizard that takes you through everything you should do to boost your website’s online presence. This includes making your site accessible, submitting structured data to Google, and optimizing your site for mobile.

You can extend the functionality of your site with apps from the Wix App Market. There are loads of third-party apps here, around 300, which is many more than competitors like Squarespace but fewer than WordPress. Most apps add ways to collect leads, analyze traffic, and interact with visitors.

E-commerce

Choose an e-commerce plan from Wix, and you’ll get an excellent online store. There are loads of options for setting up taxes, shipping, product variations, subscription payments, and coupons. If you want to sell niche products, there are many helpful apps in the Wix App Store. 

Payment can be accepted from PayPal, credit cards, Square, and Stripe. Transaction fees are reasonable, at 2.9% of the transaction plus $0.30 if you’re in the U.S., for example.

Wix Plans and pricing

Wix has no fewer than 7 paid plans and a free-forever plan. Every plan has a 14-day money-back guarantee and you get half off your first term if you buy a year or more in advance.

Help and Support

Wix has an excellent help center that’s available from within the editor itself. The developer mode has its own superb support website, with video tutorials, step-by-step exercises, and examples.

Human support isn’t far away, either. Impressively, 24/7 ticket and callback phone support is available to all Wix users, even if you only have a free account. In our testing, we always got a call back within five minutes.

How Wix Compares to Other Website Builders

Wix is priced broadly in line with its main competitors, but you typically get more for your money. It has nearly 1,000 templates, for example, many more than most others. It also offers the most flexibility in its editor, although it doesn’t have responsive designs as you’ll typically find in other website builders.

Bottom Line

While many website builders restrict your creativity, Wix offers a great balance of functionality and simplicity. It might take a little longer to get started as you learn how the interface works, but it may ultimately pay off because you have more control over your website. 

With nearly 1,000 great designs, excellent e-commerce tools, and superb support, Wix should be near the top of your list if you need a versatile website builder.