Wix Review Main Features
- Intuitive Drag and Drop website builder – Top Extensibility.
- Professional themes and templates for a variety of niches – Any type store owner, performer or service provider will find an appropriate design.
- Unique third party application add-ons – You can extend the functionality in a single click of a button
Wix is a free website building platform which allows people who know nothing about web programming to create beautiful and useful websites. Our Wix review helps those who want to scale up their website, and use the upgraded plans which include more features, and much fewer limitations.
The whole process of creating a website is very simple: you just register for an account at Wix, choose a theme for your new website, and then edit it in the visual drag and drop editor. You can preview the changes you’ve just made before publishing the edited version.
Generally, Wix has lots of different website templates. You can use the platform to create your own personal portfolio (freelancer, photographer, anything in general), eCommerce website, blog, or business. Those are the topics that pretty much sum up 80% of the websites on the Internet today.
But let’s dig deeper into Wix and find out what they are doing good and what they are doing poorly. Below you will see a comprehensive review of the features, ease of use, and premium plans of Wix.
Review Outline
- Wix Is Ideal for What Type of Websites?
- Ease of Use
- Top Pros and Cons
- Wix is Geared Towards…
- Wix Templates
- Wix Support
- Wix App Market
- Wix SEO
- Scaling Wix
- Wix Premium
- Review Conclusion
Is Wix ideal for your type of website?
Wix procures a pretty powerful functionality, has an overall ease of use, yet at the same time doesn’t expect its users to have any coding, site-building or technical skills. This is partly why we can recommend this website builder for anyone.
This is a great platform for users and business owners who prefer to take the reigns, and have full control over the appearance of their website. Here, they won’t need to hire a web admin person, nor a web designer. If it’s important for them to make an interactive, easy to use and beautiful website, Wix is one of the best website builders out there that can help them achieve this.
One tool that will certainly be easy to use for beginners is the drag and drop function. Making a Wix website is also really affordable, won’t take up too much of your time, and your first version can be published in less than a day. You have the option to improve it afterward.
Feel free to check out their templates and website examples before choosing to use Wix. You’ll see that they’re professional and look really beautiful. The websites are created by non-professional web designers, which is really impressive.
Wix is ideal for designers, hospitality, small businesses, restaurants, photographers, musicians, and more. These are only some of the niches they provide websites for. This web builder has implemented tools and designs geared to many different specific industries. Most other website creators haven’t thought of building particular tools to help hotels or musicians grow their businesses.
Wix is really innovative and adding advanced features on a constant basis, updating designs, and overall making their website builder easy and enjoyable for its users.
Ease of use
Wix’s drag and drop tool editor is top-notch, which is partly why the website builder scores high on ease of use. What you include into the website editor will appear exactly the same once the website gets published.
This feature is especially handy for eCommerce websites. In order to help beginners work on important tasks, the dashboard has only a few buttons to choose from. All the elements on your homepage and product pages can be moved around with a click of your mouse. You won’t have to know or change code to make any customizations. Wix made sure to give its users a taskbar at the top to save or publish their work, and not to lose anything they do. On the dashboard, you’ll see five buttons on the left to help you add elements, access the App Market, modify pages, design items, and change your settings. It also comes with help buttons pretty much everywhere, including on specific elements. Meaning, if you would need any help concerning the element you’re currently using, you’ll receive a more targeted tutorial. Generally, Wix offers a simple, easy, and fun interface.
- Pros
- Cons
- The Drag and Drop Builder
The beauty of drag and drop builders is that they are great for both novice and advanced users (just like Squarespace). If you’re someone who’s never created a website before, being able to position modules exactly where you want them to be, without having to touch a line of code, is amazing. This is also great for advanced users who are just trying to refresh the design of their website and they want to use Wix as a prop first. - Theme Availability
Wix’s directory of themes is pretty extensive. You can easily sort the themes by categories or by new, popular or blank ones. Blank templates have nothing on them and you will have to build everything from scratch with the drag and drop builder. The “normal” templates, on the other hand, have an already predefined design which you can alter. The difference between the two types of templates is that the latter gives you a rough outlook of how your website will end up looking, while with the blank you have to play a bit longer.
A good plus is that there is a small information panel next to each template in the template library which shows a small description and the best uses of the theme. These are great things to know for people who know little about web design. Visit the new theme library here. - Scaling Tools
Wix offers an entire section of tools that help websites gain popularity. Those include SEO and traffic boosters. As you know, the more your website is exposed to search engines, the more people will be able to access it.
Quite a few of those tools are available for free. Of course, there are upgraded versions of those for premium users. But with the abundance of apps that will help you grow in popularity, you are bound to have success! - Trial Period on Premium Plans
If you’re considering to upgrade to a paid plan, or a more expensive one, you can do so with a 14 day money back guarantee (no questions asked even!). This is very good because it allows people to test the features of the paid plans without risking their money.
Even though it’s quite clearly stated what each package gives you when subscribing to it, some people might find that the subscription just doesn’t suit them. The 14 day guarantee reassures those people that nothing will go wrong.
- Ads Displayed on Free Users
When you’re creating a website and you’re not subscribed to one of the premium plans, Wix will display third party ads on your website. Even though it is justified (you do get a free WYSWIG builder and free hosting), it’s not something that will leave a good impression in your visitors.
If you want the ads to disappear from your website(s) then you will have to upgrade to, at least, the “Combo” plan. - Inability to Change Template
Once you choose a template for your website, it’s there for life. You can’t change the template you’ve initially chosen. This is a large setback for those people who want to freshen up their website every few months/years. Or it could prove to be something really inconvenient for people who are just looking for the best fitting theme.
If you’re planning on building a website that’s going to stay around for a long time, we recommend that you created a few test websites with different themes. Then fill them with dummy content (lorem ipsum text) and test out what works best for you. Only after that should you begin your actual website project with the theme that fits your needs best. - No Bandwidth/Storage Counter
This is inconvenient for Wix users because all but 2 plans (VIP and Unlimited) have bandwidth limitations, and all plans have storage limitations. Only when a user is close to the bandwidth limit, he will get a notification that he is close to the bandwidth cap. What happens once that cap is surpassed is that the website becomes lower-priority on the server and it will cause it to load much slower (it will not shut it down) until the day of the bandwidth counter resetting.
Wix are reassuring their clients (both paying and free) that it is going to be very hard for the users to reach the bandwidth limit of their plans. For some cases this might be true, but if you have a website which is scaling fast, you will have to consider upgrading to one of the two plans that don’t have a bandwidth cap. - Sloppy Support
We went through the forums and support center and went through some of the tickets that people have been opening. We encountered something strange – on a few tickets, that were very similar in topic, even though the answer was formulated differently, the admins answered in the exact same way (like copy-paste). There was even a ticket with a follow-up question, which was a bit different from the original one, and another admin, different form the one that had answered the original question, appeared to have just copy-pasted the first answer and posted it for the follow-up question.
That might seem a bit scrambled and non-logical, but it does bring up some questions about the quality of the customer support.
Wix is geared towards many types of websites
Wix is oriented towards people who don’t have any knowledge or experience in creating websites. If the abbreviations HTML, PHP, and CSS doesn’t ring a bell, don’t worry – you’ll be able to create a website with Wix quite easily. There are tons of tutorials, both text and video, where you can learn how to use the basic functions of the builder, as well as dig deeper in Wix and create more advanced and interactive websites.
But that shouldn’t take away from all of the advanced features that the platform offers – you can add your own custom code to the website, and you can use advanced apps, such as SEO optimization ones, for your website.
Generally, the drag and drop, WYSWIG builder is great for novice users, but it doesn’t allow that complete flexibility of being able to edit the source code and tweak it to fit your needs perfectly. For a person who is just starting out – the builder will be more than enough to create an interactive website with lots of info and features on it. But once you become more skilled an experienced you are going feeling that the builder is halting you (these are practically very small details that newbie website creators can’t see).
For more experienced users that are having those problems we recommend exporting the website and putting it on dedicated hosting where you have total control over the code.
Wix templates and themes
The majority of the templates in the Wix catalog are free. For the people who aren’t intending to get a paid subscription plan, this is great news. A cool feature is the availability of Blank Templates. These are practically just layouts with nothing on them – no modules, no set color scheme, no nothing. A perfect feature for those who want to start from scratch and create a highly personalized website.
Even with the free templates you will have the feeling that they are created by professionals. The difference between the quality of free and paid themes is small. This both makes free users feel appreciated and doesn’t make paid users feel like they don’t get their money’s worth. One obvious downside is that you can’t change a templates once you’ve already picked a template.
The themes are categorized and you can quickly and easily choose the theme that conveys the message that you want your website to convey too. There are over 10 different categories, all of which have several sub-categories. This allows users to go into large depth when choosing a theme.
The availability of the Wix App Market ensures that you can further customize your website, beyond what Wix is providing you with. Most of the apps on the market are not created by Wix, but are monitored by them, meaning that they assure you of their quality. Of course, for the market, there is a rating system which displays the user satisfaction from a certain app.We recommend installing only highly-rated apps.
SIDENOTE: Need help looking for a design? Take a quick look at our recent collection of the best Wix templates you can use for your website.
Customer support and user guides
Wix offers a high quality in customer support, whether over the phone, through forums, etc. If users have any problems or questions, they can post them in the forum and will receive a reply there. This feature is especially handy, since it puts a bit of pressure on the Wix team to answer users’ public questions ASAP. This forum is very active, helpful, and comprehensive. Make sure to check whether your question had been answered by the support staff before posing your question. It’s easy to search this, and will save you lots of valuable time. Usually the Wix staff answers quickly and is very responsive, which is a reflection of a vibrant online community.
You can also get support over the phone and email. Wix specialists will answer your calls between 6am and 5pm PST, but you can also schedule a time for one of them to call you back. If you have a VIP plan, you access their VIP Team immediately. Overall the satisfaction rating and feedback of their phone support has been positive.
The comprehensive Wix Help Center allows you to search questions and keywords on their page. You’ll find many categories there, such as ‘domains’, ‘the Wix editor’, ‘mailboxes’, and many more. These help you set up an email, domain name, Wix Mobile, an online store and other editor tools step-by-step. Wix offers a lot of text-based tutorials there, but also many video tutorials. So, it’s up to you whether you prefer to look at the steps on how to make your own website or read all about them.
Wix App Market
This website builder comes with an App Market with over 260 apps to use on your Wix website. These apps allow for a better functionality of your site, using different tools and services. Basically, Wix doesn’t provide certain tools in their basic services, but offers tools by external services providers to you separately. Installing them is easy, since it just takes one click per app. The App Market includes apps such as live chat widgets by LiveChat and shopping carts by Shopify (read our Shopify review here). It also offers other functional services, like schedulers, reservation tools, social widgets (e.g. forums) or marketing tools (e.g. coupons). Most of these apps are free, but you can choose to purchase their Premium versions to access more options.
Wix SEO
All Wix’s websites are built using HTML5, which is basically the technology used to built websites.
Furthermore, Wix allows its users to customize their web page address so you’ll get a unique web address that will help you rank better on search engines. Thanks to Wix, you’ll be able to edit this address and only use words that you want the search engines to find. This has two benefits: it helps Google and other search engines understand the purpose of your page, but it also makes the name more memorable for your visitors. These are only some ways in which Wix helps you with SEO.
Scaling with Wix
Nowadays it’s not so hard for a website to gain popularity fast. Websites scale pretty fast and if you’re committing yourself to Wix, you need to be sure that they have what it takes to get your website to the next level.
Website scaling with Wix is a bit complicated – it depends on the topic and content of your website. If you’re running an online store and it becomes visited by thousands of people every day, you are going to need some advanced tracking tools. Even though Wix does have a rather good eCommerce solution, when your website grows to become very large you might find that the tools provided do not give you all of the information and features that you need.
But if you’re running a small community website, personal blog, landing page, or an informative business website, then you’re going to do pretty good with Wix. They have good support, and the modules that are provided with the drag and drop builder are more than enough to help you build a successful website. Read more about Wix here.
Wix Premium
Wix currently has 4 subscription plans available globally. The last one, VIP, is only available in the US and Canada. The packages range from the lowest $4/mo, to the highest $25/mo.
The way that the packages are currently distributed is perfect for growing websites. If you’re starting out free, then the cheapest package ($4/mo) isn’t going to feel too heavy on your budget. Once your website starts growing bigger and bigger, and you potentially earn more money from it, you can upgrade to the other plans. A thing to note is that even if you’re subscribed to a plan for an entire year, you can upgrade to a higher-priced one and you’ll only be paying the latter.
With every plan from Combo and above you get various gift vouchers to use (Google, Facebook) which not only adds great value to your purchase, but allows you to grow your website in popularity by placing ads on the Internet. Every plan above and including Combo you also get a free domain name for an entire year.
Wix Review Conclusion
When compared to the other major online website creation services, Wix does appear to come out on top. However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t areas in which they can improve. Most services like Wix, with their higher priced plans, offer unlimited bandwidth. We can’t figure out why a price plan which is more expensive than the Unlimited plan has only 10GB bandwidth included. For websites which have a lot of media on them (which drains bandwidth fast) a better solution would be a lower-priced package which does come with fewer features.
Another thing that can be improved is the (forum) support. As we already mentioned, it seems as if sometimes the answers are templates with users’ names included in them. However, their phone and live chat support is fast and excellent.
Unlike some of the other major services similar to Wix, we didn’t feel “pushed” to upgrade to a premium plan at any time. The basics are all available for free: the majority of themes, SEO optimization, a great WYSWIG editor, and an app market. This is a great plus for users who are just looking to play around with the tool and create a small website with no intent of monetizing it.
The availability of 4 different premium plans does make it easier for the users to make that next step. When you become a paid user at the lowest level, it costs just $4/mo. That doesn’t affect your budget in any way, and when your website grows big enough, upgrading to the next package doesn’t feel too expensive either. Besides that, after the Combo package you get great deals for coupons and other services included within Wix.
I actually used to hate Wix. I first started using them when they came out over a decade ago, and all it was, was problem after problem. SEO wasn’t a big deal back then, but they were one of the last to catch up in the race. Sure, it was fun designing dynamic websites but not everyone had a decent internet connection. I’m quite tempted to give them another go now though as they are one of the most affordable services around, does anyone have any hands on experience?
Hi Antoine, I was in exactly the same boat! I gave up on Wix when other CMSs came out, but I reverted last year after they sent me a promo code. The SEO issue is gone, and so are all of their bugs and issues. Genuinely they are my favorite service and I use them for all of my client sites. Their dynamic designs and animations save massive amounts of time compared to coding manually too, so don’t rule them out.
I definitely agree with Sharon, the Wix that you knew aren’t the same Wix of 2015. For a start they rehashed all of their existing features and now everything runs flawlessly. Even visual sites can benefit from backend SEO tools. They haven’t upped their prices that drastically over the years either so what do you have to lose by giving them a shot? I think that they had a trial promotion on recently, but check their site as it may have expired.
Just checked and it expired, but maybe their customer team can help you if you get in touch with them directly? If not then you can just buy one month or use their free service if you don’t mind the ugly looking URL for a while.