Wix Review

Thursday, June 1st

2023 Website Builder Reviews

Wix

• Cost: From $13 to $49 per month

Using Wix, you can create a professional website without knowing any coding. The creation process is flexible and intuitive, with an Artificial Design Intelligence feature to automatically design your site from scratch in under 10 minutes. Wix says that its drag-and-drop interface gives you full control over every aspect of your website design.

Their Own Programming Language

Wix has created its own programming language called Corvid to help you add custom code to build new features that Wix doesn't provide natively. They provide all the tutorials for Corvid, but if it's too overwhelming, you can hire a professional from the Wix Marketplace to write the code for you or even do other tasks.

Mobile-optimized For Small Screens

Wix sites are automatically mobile-optimized for smaller screens, but you can also customize whatever is generated to your preferences, including not showing certain pieces of content on mobile devices.

Upgrade For A More Professional Look

When you're done designing your Wix site, you can publish it to a free subdomain (such as example.wix.com). A more professional custom domain name can be set up by upgrading to a premium Wix plan to fit your needs. That will also give you the ability to have a more professional-looking email address at your own domain.

Personalized SEO Plan

To get your website found on Google, use the Wix SEO Wiz to answer a few questions about your site, location, and keywords. It will generate a personalized SEO plan for you.

Easy To Create A New Site

Creating a new site with Wix is easy. Just sign up for an account and click on the "Create New Site" button. Follow the wizard tutorial to choose the type of website, then choose whether to let Wix use its Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) feature to generate it for you, or choose a template to start creating on your own.

Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI)

When you choose ADI, it asks you a series of questions, such as the site category (what you sell or want to showcase), whether you need a blog, bookings, video, event scheduling, forums, chat, etc., the business name (or your name), the URL of your current site to import content from, a logo, and contact information. From there, you pick one of six themes to start with, create your color palette, pick a basic layout, select which pages to create, and begin to use the editor.

More Like A Wizard

The ADI process really wasn't that impressive. It felt like more of an extended "wizard". Instead of artificially intelligent software making things more convenient by designing based on only a few criteria, the user is still doing all the work by answering a large number of questions. At the end of the process, the design wasn't all that spectacular and still required a lot of tweaking to make it shine. It's debatable whether this ADI feature saves time through tweaking, or whether the user is better off getting it the way they want it the first time.

Frustrating Design Experience

Once we got to the point where we could start making modifications, we found, to our frustration, that the drag-and-drop capability promised on the Wix home page was limited to moving sections around between predetermined locations. Only by clicking up and down arrows one at a time were we able to get sections moved to their correct locations. Elements such as text and images were forms-based rather than WYSIWYG editable. We couldn't find any resizing or positioning controls on the corners and edges of individual elements. Everything is controlled through selections in property boxes.

Robust ECommerce Products

Management of eCommerce products was more robust, with a dashboard displaying all the products. When a product is selected, you get a full screen view of all of its properties, including variations and customization (limited to text only). It is also nice that Wix provides a way to create coupons, create a promo video, send an email campaign, or share the product via social media right within the product editor itself. And, you can set up a customer loyalty program whereby members create their own accounts (rather than checking out anonymously).

More Functionality Available With Upgrades

With upgrades, you do get more site apps, which are widgets that add additional features such as visitor analytics, SEO boosting, and events calendars. In the Business & eCommerce plans tier, you also get access to more customer care and helpful eCommerce workflow and fulfillment services.

Potential To Outgrow

Wix has a reputation among its fans as being easy to use, and so it is recognized as a leader in this space. What people don't realize when signing up for Wix and most other builders, however, is that websites grow and change over time. If you need to move to another system altogether, your content is not exportable. You're locked into proprietary systems of doing things with Wix. Outgrowing what Wix offers presents a major challenge to most business owners who came to depend on it, but now have extended requirements it cannot meet.

Easy To Use, But Limited

So, use Wix if you think you will benefit from its features for a long time to come. However, if you desire the flexibility to change your mind down the road, choose another builder that allows design and data portability.