How To Add Medium Blog To Wix Website

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In this Wix review, we take an in-depth look at one of the most web's most popular website builders. We'll walk you through all the key pros and cons of the platform, and help you find out whether Wix is the right fit for your project — or whether you'd be better off with an alternative.

Ready? Let's dive in with a key question…

What is Wix?

Wix is a website building tool that aims to let people without coding skills create their own website or online store.

It's a 'hosted' solution, which means that it runs on its own servers or 'in the cloud.' So, there's no software for you to install anywhere, and you don't have to buy any hosting.

So as long as you have a web browser and access to the internet, you can build, maintain and promote a Wix website.

Example of a Wix template designed to appeal to the life coaching market. In general, Wix is a platform aimed at serving small businesses or 'solopreneurs' rather than big enterprises.

How many people use the Wix website builder?

Wix is one of the more established website builder companies — it was founded in Israel in 2006 and now has 5,000 employees. And it has a very big userbase — internet statistics company Builtwith.com estimates that it currently powers 4.5 million websites.

This makes it a bigger operation than many competing platforms including Squarespace, Jimdo and Weebly — all of which have considerably smaller userbases.

Wix's large size matters because it reduces the risk of the organisation folding, taking your website with it.

It also means you can expect regular feature updates.

Does Wix provide all the functionality I need for my website?

A Wix website can be used for:

publishing text, image and video content
blogging
building an online store
appointment booking
collecting contact details

and much more.

However, you will need to pay to use some of these features — which brings us on to Wix pricing.

Let's take a look at that.

Wix pricing

Is Wix free?

There is is a free version of the Wix website builder available that allows you to create a simple site. This is a good way to try the platform out, but it

is ad-supported (and the ads are quite noticeable)
doesn't let you build an online store
prevents you from connecting a domain name to your website.

If you need a website to accompany a 50th birthday party, wedding, or small community garage sale, the free plan is totally fine — however, due to lack of features, and the in-your-face Wix ads, it's not really an option for professional users.

The Wix advertising displayed on the free plan is instrusive.

On the plus side though, the Wix free plan allows you to use all 800+ of the Wix templates, and includes hosting.

It also lets you use all of the images, clip art and icons provided by Wix, and add apps from the Wix app market (more on this later).

You get 500MB of storage, and 500MB bandwidth on the free plan. These limits should be fine for a small website with low traffic. And you can use the free plan without needing to provide any credit card details.

You can access the free Wix plan via this link.

Wix premium plans

Moving onto Wix's paid-for plans, these vary by country but are usually named and priced in fairly similar ways.

In the USA there areeight paid-for plans available, divided into three categories: 'Website,' 'Business and Ecommerce' and 'Enterprise.'

Website plans

Combo — $14 per month
Unlimited — $18 per month
Pro — $23 per month
VIP — $39 per month

Business and Ecommerce plans

Business Basic — $23 per month
Business Unlimited — $27 per month
Business VIP — $49 per month

Enterprise plans

Wix Enterprise (from $500 per month)

All these plans let you connect a custom domain, make use of unlimited bandwidth and don't feature any Wix advertising.

The key differences to look out for on the Wix premium plans are:

Ecommerce— selling features are only available on the business, ecommerce and enterprise plans.
Storage (text, video, images etc.) — this varies according to plan; the more you pay, the more you get.
Access to certain Wix apps— the more expensive plans include a 'site booster' app which allows you to submit your site to directories; an events calendar app; and a logo-making app.
Video hours— the more you pay, the more video content you can upload to, and sell from, your Wix website.
Support — premium support is only available if you are on a VIP or Enterprise plan.
Domain names — if you pay annually for a Wix plan, you can avail of a year's free custom domain name registration (yoursitename.com etc.).
Mailboxes — you can either buy email mailboxes through Wix (these are provided via Google Workspace), or alternatively, you can configure your Wix domain's DNS settings so that your email address solution of choice can be used.

We'll dig into these differences in more detail as the review goes on.

A quick note about the 'Wix Enterprise' plan: as the name suggests, this is geared towards corporate users. The main difference between this and the other plans is a lot more personalized support and access to consultants.

Most users won't really need to consider the 'Enterprise' plan, but if you are interested in it, you'll need to request a call with Wix to negotiate pricing for it.

What are Wix's 'video hours'?

Wix's 'video hours' feature lets you upload video content to your site, which you can then sell or rent. It's potentially useful for filmmakers, musicians or online course sellers who want to charge for access to their video content.

It's also quite an unusual feature in the website builder market, because lots of competing platforms typically only allow you toembed videos from Youtube, Vimeo etc. (rather than upload them).

Now, we've discussed how much Wix costs to use — but how do websites built with the platform actually look?

Let's find out.

Wix templates

Wix gives you a choice of over 800 templates. This is considerably more than key competitor Squarespace, which offers around 140; and all of the Wix templates are free, which is not the case with competing online store builders like Shopify and BigCommerce.

The templates look professional and are visually appealing — so long as you populate them carefully, Wix websites certainly don't have to look like a 'do-it-yourself' creation.

The templates also make good use of spacing and typefaces to create impact, and are particularly effective when used with high-quality photographs or video backgrounds.

And speaking of photography, Wix also provides a large library of professionally shot images, icons and vector art that you can use for free. If you're not happy with those, you can also buy Shutterstock images and videos directly from Wix, at discounted rates.

The templates are organised into intuitive categories, which means you should be able to find a template which meets your needs fairly easily.

And the large number of templates means you can get very specific: for example, in the online stores category, there are lots of sub-categories available — fashion, food, jewellery, electronics etc. The 'Music' templates have different sub-categories available for singers, bands and DJs and more.

Once you pick your template, you'll find that the Wix website builder provides good-quality sample text, pictures, and layouts. These get you started, give you a sanity check about what to include, and help avoid writer's block.

However, you have to tread very carefully when selecting a Wix template because after you've picked one, you can't switch to another one.

Although you'll be able to change the color scheme and typefaces of your Wix template, if you want to change your design in more radical ways using a different template, it's a case of having to rebuild your entire website.

Many of Wix's competitors are much more flexible — Jimdo, for example, allows you to switch templates easily without losing any content, and the same goes for Shopify and BigCommerce.

Content management, ease of use and interface

Wix offers three main options for building websites:

Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI)
Wix Editor
'Velo by Wix'
(formerly 'Corvid')

(There's also a new version of Wix which has recently been released — 'Editor X.' I'll discuss this in more depth shortly).

By default, when you start using Wix, you are given the option to choose either an 'ADI' site or an 'Editor' one.

Let's take a look at the three main versions of Wix, starting with ADI.

Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI)

The aim of Wix ADI is to make it easy to build a website, even if you hate computers and have no IT skills at all.

Wix ADI creates your website by asking you some basic questions and collecting whatever information is available from an online search of your business.

Editing is done via a drag and drop user interface that automatically lays out the pages for you (see video below for a demonstration). For absolute web design novices, who just need something simple, it's probably the best version of Wix to use.

A nice feature of Wix ADI is that you can convert sites created with it to Wix Editor format at a later stage — meaning that if you outgrow its capabilities, you can switch to one of the more 'grown-up' versions of Wix.

Wix Editor

Wix Editor is the 'standard' version of Wix, and offers you a lot more control over the design and features of your website than ADI. It's roughly equivalent in complexity to using Microsoft Word to lay out a newsletter — so fairly easy to use.

Velo by Wix

'Velo by Wix' (formerly known as 'Corvid by Wix') is the developer's version of Wix. It provides access to the code, databases and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that let developers create more bespoke Wix websites and custom apps.

Is Wix really as mobile-friendly as it claims?

More and more internet users are accessing the web via smartphones, in some cases exclusively. This means mobile-friendliness is essential for your website.

Wix claims your website will "look amazing on every screen with a mobile-friendly version of your website", and makes much of your ability to customise the mobile view of your website.

Building a website on Wix requires you to create separate designs for your desktop and mobile websites.

However, the Wix CMS uses something called absolute positioning, which means web elements are positioned by pixel rather than relative to the user's screen. Absolute positioning gives you more flexibility in positioning elements (text, images, forms and so on) — but means your website will not adapt as well to different screen sizes.

The 'Wix Editor' interface uses an 'absolute positioning' approach to web design — this gives you flexibility but makes it a bit harder to craft websites that display correctly across all devices.

Key competitors like Shopify or Squarespace use responsive design, meaning that page elements are positioned relative to the screen of the viewing device, and your site design will automatically adjust so that it displays nicely on any device it's being viewed on.

Google recommends responsive design too, stating that sites not using this approach may not perform as well as they could in search results.

Competing platform Shopify uses responsive web design, meaning that your site adjusts itself automatically to display correctly across devices.

The use of absolute positioning means that although Wix claims to provide some responsive elements, Wix websites are not fully responsive.

In practice, this means that you have to pay a LOT of attention to how you position the elements of your website, to avoid any problems with how it displays across various devices.

A key alternative to Wix: Squarespace

It's worth focusing a moment on another key alternative to Wix — Squarespace.

Like Wix, it is a hosted solution, so it's easy to set up and comes with a lot of built-in features, like email marketing and ecommerce (and includes comprehensive support).

Unlike Wix, however, Squarespace allows you to create fully responsive sites, and its interface is arguably easier to use.

You can learn more about Squarespace and try it for free here.

That said, Wix does make it easy to hide, resize, and move elements on mobile devices (in ways that competing products don't) and provides a 'mobile view' for you to do this. It also makes a reasonably good job of creating a mobile draft of your site automatically.

So in most cases you should be able to create a website that displays consistently well on mobile devices using Wix. (And some users will appreciate the fine-grain control over how their site appears on a mobile device).

However, websites using absolute positioning will inevitably be a bit less mobile-friendly than a website built using responsive design — and depending on how you're laying out your content, can be more time-consuming to set up.

Wix 'Editor X' — a way to build responsive websites using Wix?

Wix recently released a new edition of their platform, called 'Editor X.' Importantly, this does allow you to build responsive websites.

This is currently aimed at agencies and developers, but hopefully some of the mobile-friendly functionality it provides will make its way into the other versions of Wix soon.

Do I have access to the code for my website? Can I change providers or export my website?

Wix doesn't allow you to access the code for your website, change or access the CSS files, or export your website to another provider.

A workaround for exporting your site is possible by copying and pasting the content from it into another platform — fine for small to medium sites, but not so good for large ones.

You can export products however (up to 5000 of them), so long as they are physical ones.

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Blogging with Wix

Publishing quality blog posts is a crucial way to drive traffic to (and sales from) your website. So how does Wix stand up on this front?

Well, Wix's built-in blogging tool isn't bad by comparison to some of its competitors — it provides version history features, for example, which not all similar platforms do; and it lets you make use of both categories and tags.

However, Wix doesn't let you export your blog posts terribly easily (there's no dedicated export option and you may end up having to resort to a workaround involving RSS feeds to get your blog content out of the platform).

In essence, Wix is fine for basic blogging — but if I was looking for a platform to start a professional blog on, I'd look elsewhere (and most probably in the direction of WordPress).

Now, so far in this Wix review we've mainly explored visuals and content management.

But what about selling stuff?

Ecommerce in Wix

You will need to be on a Wix Business Basic plan ($23 per month) or higher to sell products on your Wix site.

If you are, you'll find that the platform does a good job of making ecommerce accessible and 'non-scary' for entrepreneurs trying online selling for the first time.

Getting started is quick and straightforward: enter the data, set up payment options, and off you go.

Core ecommerce functionality in Wix

Wix provides a reasonably good range of ecommerce features for small to medium-sized businesses.

The platform lets you:

sell an unlimited number of products (digital or physical), with 6 product options, in up to 1000 variants
allow users to filter and sort your products
manage your store from your phone, using a mobile app
enter tracking information to your store orders
use an abandoned cart saver tool (this allows you to automatically contact people who leave your site mid-purchase — usually with a discount code or other incentive to complete their transaction)
facilitate dropshipping (using apps like Modalyst, Spocket and Syncee)
provide customers with real time shipping calculations (Brazil and the U.S. only)

Not all these features are available on the cheapest Wix ecommerce plan ('Business Basic') however — and you'll probably need to upgrade to a 'Business Unlimited' or 'Business VIP' plan to make the most of them.

Let's zoom in on a few key ecommerce features:

Selling digital products

Wix makes it particularly easy to sell digital products — a complete novice can build a website and start selling digital goods in an hour or so.

The platform provides built-in functionality for your customers to download their products, and sends automated emails to acknowledge purchases.

And, as discussed above, Wix is a useful tool for selling or renting video content.

The file limit for (zipped) digital files is 1GB, which stacks up reasonably well against the limits imposed by Squarespace and BigCommerce (whose limits are 300MB and 512MB respectively), but it's not as generous on this front as Shopify, which lets you sell files of up to 5GB in size.

One thing to watch out for is that you can't export digital goods from a Wix store.

Tax and shipping

Wix has reasonably flexible tax and shipping options. You can set up tax on a per-region basis, which you may need to do in order to adhere to different tax rules in US states and Canadian provinces; or support VAT MOSS (VAT Mini One Stop Shop) when selling digital goods to European customers.

Automated tax calculations are now available in Wix too, so long as you're on a Business Unlimited plan or higher. However, rather ungenerous limits apply: 100 transactions on 'Business Limited' and 500 on 'Business Limited.' This may cause you problems if you have a high number of monthly sales.

You can also set shipping rates per region, and configure rules to calculate shipping based on weight or price, as well as flat rate and store pickup.

Point of sale (POS) features

Point of Sale lets you use Wix to sell not just online but in physical locations too, and sync your inventory as you do so (i.e., if you sell a product in a physical location, your inventory levels will be updated accordingly in the back end of your online store).

There are two main ways to use POS in Wix.

First, you can use either a third-party POS system in conjunction with your Wix store — the options available are Square or SumUp.

Square is supported by Wix for users in the US, Canada, UK, Falkland Islands, Ireland, Australia and Japan.

SumUp is supported for Wix users in Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

Depending on the country you live in, you can now use Square as a POS system for Wix.

Alternatively, you can use Wix's new built-in POS system, the appropriately named "Wix Point of Sale".

Designed to compete with Shopify's 'out of the box' POS platform, it aims to 'unify' selling online and in person using Wix.

Accordingly, Wix Point of Sale offers users a wide range of hardware (including not just card readers but scanners, receipt printers and so on) and integrates very tightly with the Wix online interface.

At time of writing, Wix POS is only available to 'select users' in the US, however.

Selling in multiple currencies

Wix allows you todisplay prices in different currencies — via a currency converter drop-down menu — but store visitors can't yetcheck out in their own currency.

This matters because the checkout page is a crucial part of the sales process, and a non-local currency being displayed at this stage can put people off completing a purchase.

Displaying prices in local currencies. — Wix lets you display prices in local currencies — but this isn't really a substitute for a full multi-currency checkout process.

So, if multi-currency selling is an important feature for you to have, you're much better off with BigCommerce or Shopify, both of which offer much better multi-currency features.

Dropshipping with Wix

Dropshipping with Wix is facilitated thanks to integrations with a few well-known suppliers, including Modalyst, Spocket, Printful and Syncee.

The Modalyst integration is bundled with the 'Business Unlimited' or 'Business VIP' plans — but watch out for the 250 product limit that's applied on the 'Business Unlimited' one.

Payment gateways and transaction fees

A payment gateway is a piece of software that processes transactions on your online store.

Wix works with a reasonably large number of third-party payment gateways. The options vary depending on your location, but in total, around 70 are available, and these include big hitters such as Paypal, Stripe, Square, and Worldpay.

Wix's payment gateway offering is less impressive than that provided by rival Shopify (which works with 100+ payment gateway options), but is much more extensive than Squarespace's (Squarespace integrates with just 2 — Stripe and PayPal).

There's also the option of using Wix's built-in payment gateway, which is currently available in the following countries / currencies:

Austria (EUR)
Belgium (EUR)
Brazil (BRL)
Canada (CAD)
Finland (EUR)
Germany (EUR)
Ireland (EUR)
Italy (EUR)
Lithuania (EUR)
Netherlands (EUR)
Portugal (EUR)
Spain (EUR)
Switzerland (CHF)
United Kingdom (GBP)
United States (USD)

In terms of transaction fees for Wix Payments, they are as follows:

European Union: 1.9% of the transaction amount + 0.30 EUR
Switzerland: 2.3% of the transaction amount + 0.30 CHF
United Kingdom: 2.1% of the transaction amount + 0.20 GBP
USA: 2.9% of the transaction amount + 0.30 USD
Canada: 2.9% of the transaction amount + 0.30 CAD

Alternative online store builders to consider: BigCommerce and Shopify

Although Wix does a reasonably good job when it comes to ecommerce, there are some dedicated ecommerce platforms that you should also consider if your primary goal is to create an online store — particularly BigCommerce and Shopify.

Both these platforms work in a similar way to Wix, in that they are hosted store builders that run in a web browser.

But they provide significantly more advanced ecommerce functionality than Wix, especially where point of sale, multi-currency selling and real-time carrier shipping are involved.

Our BigCommerce vs Shopify comparison highlights all the key differences between these two products.

Find out more about Shopify here — or read about BigCommerce here.

Integration with other apps

Wix has an App Market with over 250 apps, some made by Wix and some by third parties.

The App Market is easy to use, and provides lots of useful functionality you can add to your website, including online chat, popups, reviews and ratings, social media integrations and calendars.

Another way to add functionality from third-party apps is by using a HTML block to insert a widget from one of those apps.

The range of integrations in Wix's app market is less impressive than what you'll find from other website building tools (Shopify, for example, has over 6,000 apps in its app store; BigCommerce has around 800), but you'll find a decent selection of integrations and add-ons here nonetheless.

Data capture and email marketing

Wix provides some basic built-in forms for your customers to send you a message or provide contact information.

These will be fine for must users, but if you want custom forms that do more sophisticated things with your data you'll need to add the FormBuilder app to your site. This will give you access to features like conditional logic; autoresponders; a Mailchimp integration; spam filtering and more.

Contact data captured on your Wix website is automatically added to your website's 'contact list'. You can also import contacts or add them manually to this list.

An interesting Wix feature is built-in email marketing, something which is not yet provided by all of its key competitors.

Wix allows you to send three e-newsletters per month to up to 5000 emails. This is actually pretty generous — not many email marketing apps provide you with this kind of free functionality.

If you want to do more sophisticated email marketing with Wix, this means purchasing the 'Ascend by Wix' suite. This lets you broadcast more emails per month and make use of a variety of automations — emails that are triggered in various ways by actions made by visitors on a Wix site (purchases, form completions, live chat etc.).

The below video gives an introduction to the feature.

You can also connect Wix to an external email marketing tool provider (e.g. GetResponse, AWeber, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor etc.) by adding an HTML block to your website.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and analytics

Wix SEO

Wix search engine optimziation features are generally good — the platform allows you to easily perform key SEO tasks, including:

adding alt text
adding and editing meta descriptions
editing page URLs
creating 301 redirects
.

The platform also integrates neatly with Google Search Console and Google My Business, allowing you to get your site indexed by Google quickly, and shown on maps easily.

One SEO feature which may particularly appeal to SEO novices is Wix's 'SEO Wiz' tool. This walks you through the key steps for optimizing your website for search engines, helping you to to update your page titles, meta descriptions, alt text, and so on.

If you have no idea what all these SEO terms are, not to worry — Wix's SEO Wiz explains what you are doing, and more importantly, why.

If you're on a premium plan, the SEO Wiz can also help you register your site with Google Search Console.

However, there is one issue to be aware of — and one that we've already touched upon: how mobile versions of Wix sites display.

As we discussed earlier, Wix creates separate views of your site for desktop and mobile, rather than using responsive design. And responsive design — where you are dealing with one template that adapts its size automatically to the device it's being viewed on — is preferred by Google to Wix's 'absolute positioning' approach.

Despite this omission, Google's Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller is on record as saying Wix websites 'work fine' in search, and it's important to remember that the performance of Wix sites in search results will not be exclusively about technical SEO.

Google will also factor in:

the keyword research you've carried out for your Wix site (check out our Semrush review, Ahrefs vs Semrush comparison, our guide to Semrush pricing or our Moz versus Semrush post for more about all that)
the quality of content on the site
the number of quality links pointing to your site
.

Tip: if you are new to SEO, you might find our post on increasing site visibility in Google helpful.

What about Wix and Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are a new set of Google targets relating to the speed, responsiveness and visual stability of a website — and sites that meet them can receive preferential treatment in Google search results.

In common with other leading hosted site builders, Wix didn't perform great on this front initially, but improvements to the platform have since been made which seem to be making a difference.

As a Wix user, you will have to take quite a few steps to help your site meet Core Web Vitals targets (this typically involves formatting images in a certain way, and not overusing web fonts). To help you with this, Wix have created a video guide about what you need to do to improve your Core Web Vitals scores on your website.

Analytics and conversion tracking

Wix has good support for analytics tools, providing built-in integrations for:

Google Analytics
Google AdWords
Google Tag Manager
Facebook Pixel
Yandex Metrica
.

You can use Google tag manager to implement any other third party code or pixels, or add custom code directly to your Wix site to track conversions.

A built-in analytics tool is also provided by the platform.

NOTE: I am not a lawyer, so please note that the below observations should not be interpreted as legal advice, but I'm going to do my best to spell out some of the key GDPR issues facing Wix users below.

In the light of the EU's relatively new GDPR laws, there are many steps that website owners now need to take to ensure that they are adequately protecting EU customers' and visitors' privacy.

There are serious financial penalties for not doing so (to the point where it's sensible to consult a lawyer about what to do); and even if your business is not based in the EU, you still need to comply with the regulations if you are targeting EU users with your website.

Based on my understanding of the GDPR rules, the key priorities for prospective Wix store owners are to:

provide an adequate privacy policy and cookie notices
process and store data securely
get explicit consent from people signing up to mailing lists that it is okay to send them e-newsletters
provide a means to opt into cookies before they are run, or revoke consent to use of them at a later date

Many hosted solutions like Wix let you meet the first three requirements easily enough, but often don't give you the tools to handle cookie consent properly.

However, unlike many of its competitors, Wix actually handles cookie consent reasonably well — a built-in cookie consent banner lets you block cookies for quite a few popular marketing products before they are run.

Creating a GDPR compliant cookie banner — Unlike several competing solutions, Wix offers a pretty decent cookie banner that can comply with GDPR requirements

These include cookies from Hubspot; apps created by POWr; and tracking cookies from Facebook Ads, Google Analytics and Google Ads.

However, you may struggle to achieve GDPR compliance if your cookie originates from:

social tools added from Wix's 'Add' panel
a third-party app from Wix's app market
custom code.

Customer support

When testing Wix, I was able to find answers to almost everything I wanted to know by searching in Wix's Help Center, which contains a large library of articles and good search functionality. There is also excellent contextual help provided throughout the site.

In terms of the kind of support that's available from Wix, the company provides customer service over the phone and via email; live chat is available too, but not in all locations.

Not all of Wix's key website builder competitors provide phone support — Squarespace and Jimdo being cases in point — so a thumbs up to Wix for doing so.

Phone support is available 24/7 for English-language users; or office hours, Monday-Friday in French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish. You will need to request a callback, which at least means you don't need to wait on hold.

You can also submit an email ticket. Wix Support doesn't commit to a timeline for answering these, simply promising to get back to you 'as soon as possible'.

When I submitted a question, a member of the Wix customer service team got back to me at the start of the next business day.

If you are paying extra for VIP support, then you will jump the queue — so long as you use the email address associated with the account.

Wix review: conclusion

It's not without its flaws, but overall Wix is a well-featured product that allows a small business on a low budget to create a website with a lot of functionality. For a small monthly fee, you can build a site that features an online store, a blog, email marketing, galleries, appointment booking and much else besides.

The platform is reasonably easy to use — there are lots of well-designed wizards, support tools, training videos, and help files that provide very effective hand-holding for even the most nervous of users.

In terms of the drawbacks, the fact that Wix doesn't create responsive sites is probably my biggest concern. This can mean it's a bit harder to build a site with Wix than other platforms, and it also makes things a bit less effective from an SEO point of view (as discussed earlier, Google prefers responsive websites).

Another negative aspect of Wix is that it makes it difficult to change your mind — you will have to stick with the template you picked when you first built your website, or rebuild it completely.

And, although Wix offers you a way to create a decent online store easily, you can only sell your products in one currency.

So, is Wix the best website builder for your project?

Ultimately, Wix is a strong choice for small business owners or individuals wanting to quickly create an attractive website with a lot of useful features without breaking the bank — if you find yourself in that category, you'll be really pleased with the range of 'out of the box' features that Wix provides.

Professional online merchants would probably be better off considering solutions like Shopify or BigCommerce, however, as the ecommerce features on these platforms are considerably stronger.

Below you'll find a summary of the key pros and cons of Wix.

Our overall rating: 3.7/5

Wix pros and cons

Wix Pros

It's an affordable and pretty user friendly way to build your site.
A large range of templates is provided (800+), which are of a high quality and feature useful sample content.
Whilst quite in the same ecommerce league as platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce, a Wix ecommerce plan nonetheless gives you a wide range of selling features.
Built-in email marketing tools are provided with your Wix
account.
Wix includes a wide range of professionally-shot photographs for use on your site.
You can enhance basic functionality easily thanks to a good range of integrations in Wix's app market.
Phone support is available, which is not the case with several other leading website building tools.
The 'ADI' version of Wix is very easy to use and well suited to website design novices.
A free custom domain name is included with on most plans
(you pay for this after one year).
A totally free version is available.
In the long term, a premium plan is a much better bet, but Wix's free plan represents a good way to try the platform out.

Wix Cons

Although workarounds are available to make a Wix site display correctly on a mobile device, the sites that you build with Wix are not fully responsive.
True multi-currency selling is not possible with Wix — if you want to sell internationally, there are better ecommerce options available to you.
You can't export digital products.
You can't switch templates once you've built a site.
You can't export blog posts.
Although all paid plans come with unlimited bandwidth, storage is capped at various levels (the more you pay, the more you get). Most key competing platforms don't limit storage like this.

Alternatives to Wix — the other site builders available

Wix is one of the best-known site builders, but it's not the only one! There are lots of really good alternatives available.

If you're looking to build a largely content-driven site, then Squarespace is a superb alternative to Wix — check out our Squarespace review for more details on this platform.

Squarespace template — Example of a Squarespace site

Squarespace is aimed at a similar 'small business market'; the main advantage it has over Wix is that it provides truly responsive websites and (in my view) has a slicker interface.

However, it is slightly more expensive and its ecommerce functionality is not quite as comprehensive as Wix's. Check out our Squarespace vs Wix comparison to see how the two tools stack up against each other or access the free Squarespace trial here.

If your main interest is in online selling, then BigCommerce or Shopify are likely to meet your needs considerably better than Wix. Check out our Wix vs Shopify comparison for more details on how Wix stacks up against the latter, or read our Shopify review and our 'How to start a Shopify store' guide.

Amazon and Etsy are also an options to consider — both these platforms work in a different way to Wix in that they are not standalone website builders but online marketplaces where you can list your products. Check out our Shopify vs Amazon comparison and our Shopify vs Etsy shootout for more information on selling on these sorts of platforms.

If you're on a very low budget, Big Cartel or GoDaddy might be worth a look; these platforms are not as fully-featured as Wix but are very affordable. Check out our Big Cartel review, our Big Cartel vs Shopify comparison and our Shopify vs GoDaddy comparison for more details on these platforms.

And finally there's WordPress, which can serve as a great platform for both showcasing content and facilitating ecommerce. There's two versions available — hosted and self-hosted.

Hosted WordPress, available at WordPress.com, works in a similar way to Wix — it runs in a browser, hosting is included, additional functionality is available via apps (or 'plugins' to use the correct WordPress terminology).

Self-hosted WordPress typically requires a bit more configuration and ongoing maintenance on the user's side (see our WordPress web design section for more information on how we can help on this front).

Our Wix vs Wordpress comparison is worth a read if you're interested in seeing how Wix and self-hosted WordPress compare. Similarly, our Shopify vs WordPress post lets you take a look at how one of Wix's main competitors stacks up against WordPress.

Now…over to you!

Got any thoughts or questions on our Wix review? Are you likely to choose Wix — or try another platform? Please do leave any observations or queries you have in the comments sections below. We read them all, and we try to answer your questions wherever possible.

Did you know? This article is now available in French. Check out our 'Wix Avis' post.