Wix website builder review
Build your website from the ground up with an industry leader
OUR VERDICT
Wix is feature rich and has a powerful editor, making it a great choice for building a website. However, some users may not appreciate the long wait times for support or the fact that the e-store only supports physical and digital items, not services.
FOR
- Easy to use, powerful editor
- Easy blog and e-store setup
- No e-store transaction fees
AGAINST
- Customer support a bit slow
- Online store not included in basic plans
- Can only sell physical/digital items in store
- Can’t change templates in standard editor
- Bandwidth limits on low-end plans
When it comes to building a professional-looking website, bigger can be better. With 1,800 employees around the world and nearly 100 million users, Wix website builder certainly fits that description.
Thanks to this success, Wix website builder is able to offer robust website building tools, some 500 eye-catching templates, and more than 200 widgets that enable you to leverage third-party services and integrate them directly into your site.
If you’re looking to monetize your website through an online store, you’ll find no shortage of e-commerce templates. To sell your products, you’ll need a business account, but 100% of your revenue from sales is your own—Wix doesn’t take a cut, unlike some providers.
Beginners will appreciate a number of tools aimed at creating a great-looking website with zero experience necessary. Meanwhile, more advanced users can leverage features like Wix Code, which supports database management, forms, custom JavaScript, API access. and more.
However, having access to a wealth of design tools and templates can also be overwhelming. To ensure that your website looks and feels like an extension of your brand, it’s important to write a brief for your designers. This brief should include information about your brand’s style and voice, the types of content you’ll be sharing, and any specific features or functionality you need on your site. With a clear brief in hand, your designers can help you create a website that not only looks great but also supports your marketing and branding goals.
On the whole, Wix is to be commended for having successfully balanced ease of use and powerful features, not something all website builders manage.
If you don’t want to pay, Wix website builder offers access to its drag-and-drop editor and up to 500MB of storage and data transfer per month in exchange for displaying its branding on your site. However, given the file size and transfer limits, this will only work for the smallest of sites.
In the UK, users can opt for the £3/month Connect Domain Plan, which increases bandwidth to 1GB, enables use of your own domain name, but still displays Wix branding.
A fourth paid plan is available in the US only: the Pro plan, which costs $22/month, with unlimited bandwidth, 20GB of storage, $300 in ad vouchers and more.
Finally, Wix’s $39 (£18)/month VIP plan includes 20GB of storage, unlimited bandwidth, and additional perks like professional logo design and priority response customer support.
If you’re looking to sell online and take payments, you’ll need to sign up for one of Wix’s Business & eCommerce plans. The cheapest one costs $24 (£13)/month and resembles the VIP plan in terms of bandwidth and storage. At $27 (£16)/month, the Business Unlimited plan increases storage to 35GB, and includes a professional logo design and social media logo files. Finally, $49 (£22)/month brings you 50GB of storage and priority customer support.
All the Business & eCommerce sites include a free domain for a year, Google analytics, absent Wix branding, $75 ad vouchers, and the Site Booster app.
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Choose between Wix’s ADI and the standard Wix Editor. (Image credit: Wix)
Getting started with Wix website builder
Wix website builder makes it easy for anybody to build a website, even if they have no prior experience. Creating an account is easy: just sign up with your email address and choose a password. To get started, you’ll be asked what kind of site you want to create (business, photography, music, etc.) . Moreover, you are given the choice between using Wix’s Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) or the regular editor.
Choose the Wix ADI if this is your first website or if you’re looking to create one with minimal effort. The ADI streamlines the whole process. By answering a few questions about your site and content, it will automatically generate a custom website. You can then personalize your website by changing the theme, adding or removing elements like FAQs, Testimonials and Services, and modifying text, images, and videos as you see fit.
The regular editor is less automated, but still very easy to use. Start with a template, and then personalize the design by dragging and dropping components around the page. You can adjust these elements to a greater degree than with the ADI. However, there’s a trade-off for the extra level of control: unlike the Wix ADI and other website builders like Weebly, once you’ve chosen a template in the standard editor, there’s no way to change it.
If you’d like more control over your website, don’t hesitate to go for the standard editor. Users don’t take long to get used to many of its features, as they’re well-designed and laid out. So, even beginners should have no trouble. If you’re just looking to get something online as quickly as possible or don’t feel confident about using an editor, the ADI can still produce a great looking website in record time.
The ADI editor helps you get started with an attractive, custom design in seconds. (Image credit: Wix)
Editor
The ADI editor is uncluttered and easy to understand. You’ll see an overview of your website as it will appear online, a few buttons, and a ribbon at the top with principal functions to add and customize elements, manage your blog, and get help.
Modifying your website is easy. Just hover the mouse over any element and you’ll be presented with buttons to edit it or adjust the look. Clicking on an element brings it up in the sidebar, where you can adjust text, add images, and more. However, when you use the ADI, the arrangement of elements on the page is static: they cannot be moved or resized. Furthermore, adjustments to font and colours are site-wide.
The ADI editor thus lets you create an attractive site from A to Z in very little time, with sophisticated elements like a web store or a blog.
You can also use the ADI editor to get yourself set up, and then switch to the standard editor for greater control. But be warned: once you’ve made the move, you cannot go back to the ADI editor, so just be sure that you’re comfortable with the increased level of control.
You can switch to the Standard Editor if you want more control. (Image credit: Wix)
If you do opt for the standard editor, whether from the start or once you’ve built the bones of your site using the ADI, you’ll be able to reposition elements on the page right down to the pixel, customize complex objects like forms with headings, buttons, and text, and adjust fonts and colors with much greater precision. Additionally, most objects support a range of actions, like opening a link or displaying a pop-up.
Adding text, images, menus, forms, and social media and e-commerce elements is a breeze, thanks to an attractive and intuitive gallery with full-color, rich previews of each object. It’s easily one of the Wix editor’s best features, enabling you to pick whatever variant looks best on your site. Plus, objects added to the page come already populated with sample images and text, so you can build a quick mock-up of your site before filling it with content.
Wix website builder has some powerful HTML5 at work. Right-clicking brings up context menus with appropriate commands for the selected item. Repositioning elements on the page is easy with dynamic alignment guides and rulers. Moreover, a powerful built-in image editor enables you to adjust images and apply filters. Finally, the floating menu makes it easy to add or remove layers, change alignment, rotate objects, and duplicate or delete elements.
Right-click for the context menu. (Image credit: Wix)
Power users will also love the vast array of keyboard shortcuts, a great feature for those who make frequent modifications or build sites regularly. You can select multiple elements, copy and paste them, bring them forward or back in the layers, undo mistakes, redo actions, all without touching your trackpad.
The Wix editor is intuitive and easy to use, impressively balancing simplicity and powerful functionality. There’s no shortage of visual cues to guide beginners—we again call attention to the visually gratifying elements gallery—with enough customizability to satisfy the most meticulous webmasters. We had no trouble using the editor in Safari. Although Google Chrome locked up with high CPU usage and we were forced to quit the editor once.
Rich visual previews show you exactly what you’re getting with each element. (Image credit: Wix)
Media
Adding multimedia to Wix website builder is easy. There are a wide variety of page elements for displaying single images, slideshows, galleries, music, and video files of all major formats. You can upload your own media directly to Wix, or embed it from sites like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Soundcloud, Spotify, and many more.
If you choose to upload images or videos to your account, you can access them across all your pages and sites by clicking on the Add Images dialog. This way, you can avoid uploading files you use repeatedly. Wix supports uploading images up to 25MB in size, but remember that your plan includes a limited amount of space. Use embedded media as often as possible to avoid using up all your storage.
Upload images to add them to your websites. (Image credit: Wix)
Wix website builder also has its own library of images that you can add to your site, and supports purchasing images from Unsplash and Shutterstock.
Add free images from Wix. (Image credit: Wix)
Finally, the App Market features a number of add-ons with more powerful video players, document viewers for PDFs and Google Docs, displaying visitor analytics, building forms, and more—but be aware that in many cases, you’ll need to pay to remove branding or for full functionality.
Check out the App Market for additional ways to display your media, but be warned, many of them are paid. (Image credit: Wix)
Blogging
Wix’s blogging platform is basic but has everything you need to put your thoughts down in black and white and published online. With just a few clicks, you can add a blog to your site, manage entries, customize the layout, and promote your content with custom feeds, recent posts, and RSS buttons.
Users can enrich Blog posts with tags, categories, and related posts to make it easier for users to explore your content. While custom meta titles, meta descriptions, and mobile-friendly titles will help drive traffic to your site.
Once you’re happy with your post, you can publish it immediately or schedule it for later. In fact, there’s lots of ways to get your content out there. For example, you can automatically publish your posts to Facebook, a great feature for managing your social media, or send a snippet to mailing list subscribers.
Users can interact through your blog with built-in Facebook comments, or one of the comment add-on apps (although the free version limits comments to 10 per post). An insight system lets you see basic analytics on your blog’s traffic, while Google AMP support can help reduce load times and increase search engine rankings.
All in all, Wix’s blog platform is straightforward and relatively powerful. It may not beat out WordPress, but it’s head and shoulders above that of many other website builders.
Adding a blog to your website is as easy as clicking a button. (Image credit: Wix)
E-commerce
As we mentioned before, if you want to sell products on your website and take online payments, you’ll need to sign up for one of the e-Commerce plans. But once you do, getting started is simple.
To build your store, you can choose from a wide range of templates, add extra elements as needed, and customize to your heart’s content. Once again, Wix has managed to hide a surprisingly powerful product beneath an intuitive and easy-to-use interface. Like with adding other elements, dynamic previews with sample images make it easy to design your e-store before adding content.
Unlike Weebly, Wix only enables you to sell physical (e.g., clothes, jewelry) and digital (e.g., eBooks, music files) products, but not services like landscaping, cutting hair or, say, designing a website. Still, the products you can sell will look great. You can use videos as well as images and provide custom product information like size or weight.
The Wix store supports discounts and promotions with coupons, organizing your items into collections, and setting up your own shipping and tax. Plus, you’re spoiled for choice when it comes to getting paid: Square, Stripe, Moolah, Worldpay, Wirecard, Paypal and more are available, depending on your region. Finally, as we’ve already said, Wix doesn’t add any transaction fees.
While the Wix store may not stand up to specialist e-Commerce solutions, or even the best web hosting providers, it nonetheless makes it very easy to get started selling your products online. It’s a great option for entrepreneurs and small businesses, especially given the low cost.
Monetize your site with a simple e-store, built in seconds. (Image credit: Wix)
Support
Wix has support both built into the web editor and available in the knowledgebase, via online form, and through a telephone call-back service.
There’s a help pop-up for virtually every aspect of the editor, accessible either through the Add menu or by clicking on objects on-page. Just click on the Help icon to load the pop-up, which can be conveniently moved about the editor as you work. The help articles are well organized, with helpful visual aids and animated GIFs to illustrate actions. They do a pretty good job targeting both beginners and power users.
If you need more help, don’t hesitate to go outside the editor. There is a rich knowledgebase, although we found the organization wanting. There seem to be many articles with similar titles and overlapping content. This makes it difficult to find exactly what you’re looking for. Still, there’s lots of information, so with some digging, you should have your answer. If you want to speak with a human being, you have two options. First, an online form enables you to generate a support ticket. Just enter your details, describe your problem, and the support team will get back to you. In our test, we received a reply within 36 hours. While the response was helpful, 36 hours is a bit long, and doesn’t do much to negate numerous bad reviews regarding their support. You may want to give it a try yourself before making any commitments.
As mentioned, the telephone support is available as a call-back. It’s available from Monday to Friday, 6am to 5pm PST (we’re warned that hours “may fluctuate due to high call volume”). This may mean that you end up waiting longer than you’d like for your call-back. But it’s the only way to speak live with somebody on the support team.
The user support thus leaves something to be desired. Home users probably won’t have to deal with it much, given how well the editor works and how intuitive site-building is. For larger businesses with big e-stores that count downtime in lost revenue, it could be problematic. We recommend testing out the service with a few queries to make sure you’re satisfied.
Final verdict
Wix has a robust editor, with some gorgeous templates, and everything needed to get a website off the ground for both beginners and seasoned webmasters. All of this helps mitigate the negative effects of a potentially unreliable user support, so we strongly suggest giving everything a try to see if it meets your needs.
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