Wix review – the ultimate multitool

Wix is among some of the most popular website builders in the market. That could be due to its 3 different types of editors, hundreds of themes, and thousands of plugins. And so, for most people looking for a platform to make a website, this might look like the right option to choose.

Speaking of options, here's a fun business life hack: make your product good for everyone, and you won't have to waste time "finding your audience."

While some website builders try to aim specifically into one audience (i.e., Shopify – to eCommerce, and Zenfolio – to photographers), Wix is a very notable outlier.

Now talking about Wix, can you really do everything and do it well? That's what I'm testing today – I signed up and made my own website testing all of the tools Wix has to offer.

And just so you don't say I didn't warn you – this Wix review is quite beefy.

📢 Limited offer: Get Wix, only now 37% OFF

⭐ Rating:	4.5 ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
🏗️ Ease of use:	Powerful interface, pretty easy to use
🎨 Templates:	Over 900 various templates
💼 Business features:	Massive array of various business features
🏁 Performance:	Metrics a bit low, solid real-life performance
🔥 Coupons:	Wix coupon 37% OFF

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Wix pros and cons

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Wix for different websites

Website type	Benefits	Limitations
Blog	Great marketing and SEO tools, your website can go live in about an hour	Tools are mostly third-party, making Wix more expensive than other options for blogging
Portfolio site	Extreme flexibility design-wise, has specific tools for artists	Can’t change a template once you start editing one – all content gets deleted
Business website	Strong business features, editors suitable for beginners and intermediate users	Additional apps cost extra
Online store	Great eCommerce tools, options for both beginners and pros	The platform doesn’t let you migrate

Wix for blogs

Wix is a solid blogging option for both creative writers and emerging entrepreneurs. Wix's blog editor allows you to make formatting changes to your text, add bullets, links, and more. Wix also allows customizing your blog post's title tag and meta description, as well as lets you change the default URL of your blog posts.

However, Wix is one of the pricier options for blogging – considering the fact that there are plenty of blogging platforms that allow you to publish your creative writing for free. The free Wix plan is pretty limited and has Wix’s branding on it, your cheapest plan option with Wix costs $16.00/month, which is pretty pricy.

Wix for portfolio sites

Because of Wix’s nearly limitless customization, whether you’re looking to create a winning portfolio website for your artwork or want to sell your art online, this builder is a great option. The tools for selling art are all there, and this builder will definitely suit the needs of beginners and more experienced website builders.

Sadly, most of the tools are suitable for visual artists – print-on-demand third-party integrations, digital downloads, and templates focused on visuals won’t be much help for artists of a different caliber. While the builder is very versatile, mostly visual artists and designers end up choosing it for their portfolios.

Wix for business websites

Wix offers plenty of tools curated specifically for business, not to mention, you can always check out the app store and get additional plugins for your website. This builder has the best custom editing tools, and when you pair them with Wix’s marketing and SEO features and extensive customization, you are able to create the online presence of your dreams.

However, while Wix gives you customization freedom, it doesn’t have all the tools that you might need. For that, you’ll have to visit the app store, where for your preferred tool you’ll have to pay some money. For more information, read the full business features section here.

Wix for online stores

Wix offers everything a small business owner could possibly need – a great eCommerce suite, solid tools for marketing and SEO, as well as specific templates for online stores. Your site visitors will have plenty of options to fill their shopping carts with – you can sell both digital and physical objects. The editor allows you to make a completely custom store and fill it with intricate third-party integrations, such as Google Analytics.

While Wix is a great option for online stores, it has a very big negative – you can’t move your store. Once you’ve signed up for Wix, your shop is pretty much stuck on the platform. Scaling is only possible within Wix’s own system and the platform doesn’t allow the exporting of your site. If you want to find out more about Wix’s eCommerce abilities, read the full eCommerce section here.

Wix pricing

Wix offers a whopping total of 8 plans – ranging from completely free, to $159.00/month. Five of these plans are focused on regular professional sites, while the other three are tailored specifically for eCommerce. Overall, Wix prices are fairly reasonable, and within the industry's standard.

Here are the website plan options:

Plan	Features	Price
Free	A simple plan for testing the platform	$0.00
Light	Great tools for simple websites: Get an additional 10% OFF Premium Wix plans using code 'CyberNews10!'	$16.00/month
Core	Unlimited bandwidth, extra marketing tools – good for growing businesses	$27.00/month
Business	eCommerce features for selling online	$32.00/month
Business Elite	All of the above features, plus priority customer care	$/month

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From the first look, it's pretty obvious that prices are quite steep.

A s for Wix's plans, let's talk about them in a bit more detail.

Wix free plan

The free plan is always interesting. After all, who doesn't like not spending money on something, right? Well, you might want to think twice before counting your savings.

On good conscience, on this Wix review, I simply can't recommend the free plan to anyone: it has too many limitations to be used for a proper website. Wix ads will be displayed on your page at all times, and instead of a custom domain, you'll have to use a subdomain with .wixsite.com at the end. Wixsite is a free subdomain, which marks all the websites made by a free Wix plan, and for a business, it looks just a tad unprofessional.

Really, the free plan should be seen as an "unlimited trial to test out Wix", more than anything else.

Is Wix free? Technically, yes. There is a free plan, and it will not require any of your credit card information. But there are just too many limitations.

Wix premium plans

Overall, all of the paid plans will let you use a custom domain (and include a free domain name for the first year, too), add a free SSL certificate, and remove ads. And it's the premium plans that you should choose.

So, what are each of these premium website plans for, then?

• Light package includes all the basic features, making it great for people looking to make personal, or representative small business sites.
• Core plan includes more storage, basic site analytics, and eCommerce functionalities, and several helpful marketing tools. So, naturally, it's a suitable pick for small businesses looking to market themselves with a website.
• For A-Z online branding, Wix has Business and Business Elite packs. Both come with even more storage and a larger variety of eCommerce features than Core. The only tangible difference between the $32.00 Business and $159.00 Business Elite plans is that the latter adds more storage and priority customer care.

But before you jump into a plan, I'd like to direct your attention to the small print. Let's enhance.

Site Booster app and Analytics and Events Calendar (starting with $27.00/month Core plan) are only free for one year. So, what happens after that year passes?

Well, not much. All of the website apps – Site Booster, Analytics, and Events Calendar – offer free plans, as well. But they do have their own premium options, adding more listing features, bigger visitor limits, and unlimited events. The prices for the premium versions will start at around $5/month each. And on the Wix plans, you get to try those premium versions for free for a year, so you can decide which ones are worth keeping, and which ones are not.

Still, it's something worth keeping an eye on, as with the premium apps, your Wix expenses may balloon up quite a bit.

I find Wix pricing to be pretty solid. And even though I have a pretty hard time recommending the most expensive plans for both regular and eCommerce websites (looks like too much extra money for not enough features!), I still find everything to be a solid experience. If you're looking for a cheaper solution, our list of inexpensive website builders (with great value for the money) might be helpful,

Is Wix easy to use?

• The Setup Process – Everything is pretty simple. You get a quick-start menu, which lets you choose the kind of website you want to build & what editor you'll use.
• Website Editors – You'll be given two options: the regular editor, and Wix ADI. The regular editor will give you hundreds of themes and plenty of editing freedom. Wix ADI will generate a website, based on the information you give it.
• Managing Your Website – the difficulty of the process will depend on the editor you choose. The classic editor will have a slight learning curve, but it should take less than a day for a beginner user to learn the ropes. The ADI, however, is as simple as it gets.

Wix offers an all-in-one website-building experience: hosting, domains, and website management are all available under one hood. And if you already have your own domain purchased elsewhere, you can easily connect it to Wix. And overall, that part makes using Wix pretty simple.

As for making your own website...Whether Wix is simple or not there, depends on the approach you choose to follow.

It's the variety of options that will cause most of the headaches.

And before you choose whether you wish to use Wix to make your website, you should see all of those headaches in action. That's what I'm writing this Wix review for!

So, take the passenger seat next to me, and let's roll. In this part, I'll be making my own Wix website. In fact, I'll show you what I got right here: click the image to see everything in full.

Here's what the experience was like.

Getting started with Wix

The signup procedure was pretty easy. Honestly – before you get even asked for your name, you need to tell Wix what type of website you're planning to make.

And then, you'll need to pick one of the two editor options.

Now, don't waste time contemplating for hours here. All of these options can be changed and reversed. You can use one Wix account to make several websites, and each time, this is the screen that you'll see. So, go with whatever you feel like suits you better. If not, you can always do this all over again!

So, what are these options like?

• Wix Artificial Design Intelligence: "Let Wix ADI create a website for you " just about describes it. This option is meant for complete beginners, who just want a website, quickly – and are not interested in in-depth editing and custom designs.
• Wix Editor: This method allows you to choose a template, edit fonts, add blocks, drag and drop elements, and do a lot of other things to have a truly unique, one-of-a-kind website.

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Wix ADI

For beginners who don't want to get into the hassle of using a drag-and-drop editor, I feel like Wix Artificial Design Intelligence is a brilliant option

If you choose to use it as your preferred option, all you'll have to do is to answer a few fundamental questions that describe your ideal site. The self-proclaimed algorithm will then combine all the answers, your computer will go bzzzzz, and your website will be all done!

So, let's use this Wix review to dig deeper, and quickly make a store that sells clothes for dogs!

So, naturally, you might be interested: "why does that matter?". From what I understand, your selected niche will decide two things. The first one is the placeholder media that will be placed on your site. The second one is the next step: the features that will be added to your site.

Depending on what you pick, you'll be suggested the most important features such a website would require.

But once again, you can just scroll down a bit, and choose to add whatever you feel like adding – Wix won't place limits just because of what you picked.

Then comes the rather simple part of adding your business' name.

And once you're through with general information...

...You'll be asked to choose a preferred type of website. However smart the ADI might be, it still needs some style guidance from you. If you already have a logo for your business, it can also adapt your website to the color scheme of your logo.

And there you have it – your website is nearly done. At the final step, you'll be asked to choose the design you like the most.

And finally, you'll be given an opportunity to add something that you would really like to see on your website. All of these sections are tailored to the existing theme of the ADI website.

And ta-da! The website is done and waiting for you to publish it.

The process takes no more than 5 minutes: and during that time, you'll get the opportunity to make a website that matches your preferred style, and has the pages you need.

If you're looking for ease of use, and a simple website builder that just gets the job done – it's the pick for you.

Suggested article: AI Website Builders: Best Smart Design Tools

Wix Editor

Wix Editor is the real Wix builder. The original, the one that put Wix on the map, keeps it at the top, and the one most Wix reviews choose to talk about. And it might a little bit tricky to use from time to time, but it's still a very streamlined setup experience.

Once you choose to build a website with the classic Wix website editor, you'll be asked to pick a template.

You get hundreds of options, for dozens of different purposes. I decided to opt for a fintech company, and not long later, I found something very suitable. And then, a simple click to "Edit" got me straight into the Wix Editor, which looks a lot like this:

And right from here, you work on editing your website, and making it yours!

Editing your Wix site

• Editing with Wix ADI – it's a very simple, but a largely limiting experience. Wix itself accepts that, even suggesting to transfer a website to the regular editor to do serious changes.
• Editing with Wix Editor – it's a very open, and slightly intimidating experience. However, the editing possibilities are completely unmatched.

Naturally, both builders also offer a varying editing experience. Wix Editor lets you do everything – and Wix ADI's best feature is....letting you move to Wix Editor.

Let's have a deeper look into both of these options:

Editing with Wix ADI

Wix ADI lets you edit in blocks: meaning, that you can pick an entire section of your site, and then pick what to do with it. The "Design" section will let you choose an alternative look for the blocks.

And the "Edit" option will let you change the text and the media.

You can also shift the blocks up and down, as well as use the Plus button in between the sections to add some new ones.

And quite honestly, that's it. Even the platform itself suggests you move your website to Wix Editor city, where the grass is green, and editing options are pretty!

Speaking of pretty, this is a pretty good time to speak about the other Wix website building option.

Editing with Wix Editor

Let's return to the screenshot of the editor I did previously.

As you can probably see, there's quite a lot to do. You can drag and drop all the elements seen on this website. By clicking, you can edit them all separately.

The collection of icons at the left is what lets you add new elements to your site. The "Add" option is the one that will show you most of the available elements.

The other options on the left include editing the menus and pages, changing the background, color scheme, adding extra applications, photo galleries, media, blog posts, booking, multilingual website creation, and accessing various business tools. And the tools you can find there are too plentiful for even this massive Wix review to try and list.

It's a massive builder, and from time to time, you're bound to run into something that causes you questions. For instance, when making my own test website, I deleted about half of it. And instead of the website simply getting smaller, parts of it just got replaced by a massive blank space.

It sounded pretty bad, until I realized that all the deletion processes happen to start by clicking a button at the top, called "Zoom Out and Reorder". This enters a new mode, letting you easily rearrange and delete any section on your site.

The same is true for adding and editing various elements to the website. While the "testimonial" element looked completely different from my color scheme, I had an easily accessible way to make any element fit my preferred color scheme. I just had to know where to look!

"Know where to look" is the whole story of Wix Editor. There's so much that this platform can offer, you just have to remain persistent and keep searching for the right solution.

Wix probably knows this, because at any time of editing, you can click the "Help" option at the top and open the Editor Help Center, which will include articles and even tutorial videos.

And that's the story. While Wix ADI has the basics, the Editor gives you everything. You can choose any of the 900 templates, add video backgrounds, pages, galleries, shapes, vector art, lists, boxes, audio & video players, insert custom code, social sharing bars, social media updates, and so much more.

I didn't mention something specific that you need? It's probably there. You just got to know where to look.

Wix website scalability

If you’re looking into making a business website or an online store, scalability is a very important topic to touch on. Can you make a scalable website with Wix?

Well, Wix only allows you to scale within its own system. While you can scale up plans, you can’t change hosting – Wix keeps your website on its servers, which means you have to let Wix host your website permanently. This becomes a problem if you don’t like the servers or the pricing, since you can’t just relocate your site.

However, gone are the days when Wix wouldn’t let its users access code. Scalability is less of a worry when you can implement almost limitless customizations with the use of HTML and CSS.

Unpublishing a Wix site

First things first, unpublishing and deleting a website are two different things. Unpublishing means that you’re just temporarily removing it from the public. Deleting removes your website completely from Wix’s servers, meaning that you won’t get any of your content and data back.

If you truly are sure that you want to unpublish your site and not delete it, here’s what you need to do.

1. Go into the “My sites” section once you log into your account
2. Select the website you want to unpublish and click on it to be redirected to your dashboard
3. Go to “Settings” – by default, you’ll be on the “Overview” section. If not, go to the “Overview”
4. Check the “Publish status” – you’ll see an option to unpublish your site
5. After selecting to unpublish your site, after a few moments you’ll get a pop-up stating that your website has been unpublished.

And that’s about it. You can publish your site again whenever you want using the same guidelines as for unpublishing.

Wix templates

• How many templates? Wix has over 900 designer-made templates. That's the best result for a website builder.
• Are they any good? Majority of the templates are pretty good – some are fairly outdated, but there are still hundreds of good picks.
• How much do they cost? You can use any template you want to. There’s no extra cost besides the subscription.

Choosing a Wix theme will be quite a serious decision because you are not allowed to change a theme once you pick it. And the platform won't make it easy for you, as there are over 900 options to go through.

Luckily, a lot of those themes are very narrowly catered for specific audiences: here's what it looks like if you decide to pick "Business".

And here's what it will be, if you choose "Creative". By the look of it, it's clear why Wix is one of the best website builders for artists.

The quality certainly varies. There are some that look stunning:

And some look...genuinely woeful.

Despite my or your view of any of those designs, it's still worth noting that all of them are mobile-friendly and will let you accept visitors from a wide range of devices.

So, despite the rather unfortunate fact you can't change your theme once you choose it (and have to make a new website instead!), there's still a very wide and lovely selection of themes you can choose from. Don't get discouraged by a few bad apples. The harvest at Wix will still give you a cornucopia of options to pick from, no matter your business.

Wix business features

• Selling online – At $27.00 a month, Wix offers a solid suite of eCommerce features. It's all pretty user-friendly.
• SEO – Wix has a surprisingly good suite of SEO features. Helpful guides will be good for beginners, and structured data, XML sitemap, canonical URLs, as well as fast indexing, will be great for more advanced users.
• Email marketing – Ascend by Wix lets you capture leads, design emails, and automate emails. It also includes analytics for your campaigns. Shame, that it costs extra.
• App Store – A solid third-party app store adds even more features to Wix. It's one of the biggest markets available.
• Wix mobile app – A pretty powerful mobile app allows you to maintain and manage your business dealings on the go.

Wix's target market is individual entrepreneurs & small businesses. So it's no surprise to see a pretty solid lineup of business features for management, marketing, branding, customer support, e-commerce, and more.

Overall, it's a decent package for a small business.

Wix eCommerce - create your online store

In the website builder market, Wix’s eCommerce integration is right there at the top. There are plenty of top-notch features available with the cheapest, $27.00-a-month eCommerce plan, such as selling up to 50,000 products and including an abandoned cart recovery for your users. You can also accept bookings, take online orders, and sell tickets to events, without signing up for a more expensive plan, or an additional premium service. You can see how Wix compares to other online store builders in our best eCommerce website builders' overview.

Adding and managing products

A simple Store Products menu lets you see and add the products to your website. There, you can easily choose between a physical product, i.e., a shippable product, or a digital product, i.e., a downloadable product.

Once you are in, add all the details – that means images, videos, name, price, sale price (if any), options, etc.

You can also add it to “collection” so that people filtering/searching a particular category can find it there. For instance, if you sell tees & jeans, you can assign the product to their respective collections, so each product is placed within other similar products.

Selling your services

Say, you're looking for a photography website builder for both displaying your art, and selling services through your site, Wix is great at that, too. The Wix Bookings can help you manage your calendar & bookings, giving your users a chance to quickly sign up, and helping you avoid overbooking.

You can edit staff members’ working hours, add a time buffer between appointments, and even connect the website via Zoom (best for consultants & coaches). However, there's a caveat: in order to unlock the full Wix Bookings features package, you'll need to sign up for its additional premium plan, which costs $17/month.

So, you can look into some alternatives. There are freemium apps like Boom Calendar, Sell Tickets, Event Viewer, and Schedulista Booking. And there are also some decent free options like Google Event Calendar or Bandsintown, letting you do similar things, without spending anything.

Wix SEO – a solid suite of options

Generally speaking, website builders are not known for their amazing search engine optimization. They're not what you pick for ranking high on search engine results. But here's the thing...

Wix is actually pretty good when it comes to SEO, and it has done a decent job adapting itself to suit beginner users and their needs - claiming a top place on our best website builders for SEO list.

Wix will give you an SEO plan to follow in order to be seen on your preferred search results. Besides that, you'll be given an option to do redirects, add custom URLs, access XML sitemap, edit your robots.txt map, and similar.

As for content, you get options to change/add meta titles and descriptions, customize your headings, and add alt tags to your images,

All in all, Wix is a pretty decent website builder for SEO. There's plenty for beginner SEO experts to do.

Emails and marketing

For most businesses, marketing is their bread and butter. To those people, Wix has a full three-course meal, and they call it Ascend. It's an in-house solution, combining email marketing with social media content, contacts, invoices, and much more.

It allows you to quickly make and send out content to reach your audiences. Personally, I love its really simple email builder, allowing anyone to make a decent-looking, attention-grabbing message.

Same way, you can use this tool to create & distribute social media posts, make promo videos, and connect with other advertising & marketing tools to get visitors.

There are several pre-made templates for you to choose from, so if your design skills are as good as mine, you're in luck!

You can also connect your existing email marketing apps like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, and connect their analytics to track crucial stats like open rate or CTR.

However, there's once more a caveat, and once more, it regards the pricing – the premium version of Wix Ascend starts at $5 a month. Not a massive amount, but still something to keep in mind before you jump in.

Wix mobile app

If you wish to manage your business or your website on the go, you'll enjoy the Wix mobile app. I did! In fact, you can literally set your entire website up using nothing but its mobile application. And if you already have one, you can manage just about anything on the app.

I had no issues adding the products and setting up the sales.

And, for example, if your website has live chat functionality, this is the app you'll also get to use to respond to your visitors!

Overall, during this Wix review, I enjoyed using the app: it has just the right amount of functionality to save you from taking out the computer every time you need to do something. Nifty!

Wix app store

For every built-in feature that Wix has, there are dozens more available from third parties. And Wix App Market is where they're at. With hundreds of options for marketing, eCommerce, services, media, design, and communications, there's quite a lot to choose from.

Wix itself joins the party, too. With 50 "Made by Wix" apps: all free, freemium, and paid, you can choose between going in-house, or third-party.

Sometimes, third-party apps get much more love from the users. And it's great to see Wix letting them thrive.

With the in-house Wix Forms app getting mixed reviews, you'll also have an opportunity to use the free 123 Form Builder instead.

This is one of Wix's biggest strengths – even if some features or in-house apps fall flat, there's still a community that can offer suitable alternatives. And the Wix App Market is where all of that comes together.

And to conclude the whole “Wix Business Features” section, I’d say:

Wix made sure that small businesses get full access to a wide variety of features. Some of them may cost extra, but with many alternative options made available, there's still plenty to be excited about – even if you're on a budget.

Wix customer support

If you ever have a problem while building your website, it’s always good to know that you’ll have good customer support to fall back on. Now, Wix offers three ways for you to get customer support.

• Live chat
• Callback phone line
• Ticket submission

Out of the three, the callback phone line might be the most reliable option – you’ll definitely get help from a person. I personally tried to get in touch with a real representative while chatting with a bot, but it was no use – it only offered for me to submit a ticket or to check out the Help Center.

Help Center – it’s well-curated and has answers to problems that could happen on both the regular and the ADI editors.

A huge plus about the Wix support is that it’s available for both free and paid account holders – you can receive premium help for free. Even if that premium help is only speaking to a chatbot…

All in all, Wix offers pretty great customer service options. The knowledge base is very extensive and well-curated, having almost all answers to any problems that may arise.

Wix performance

Website builders are not commonly known for their lightning-fast performance. With so many editable details, complex site structures, and a focus on having "as much of anything as possible", it's no surprise to see Wix perform a little bit slowly. However, low-performance results do not translate into negative real-life performance.

For the final showdown, I put up my very own test website through GTMetrix, which measures the site's load time and overall structure, and gives a final score.

A D score and "56%" on performance do sound bad. But during this Wix review, I visited the website a few times and didn't notice a massive load time. In fact, everything was surprisingly swift.

My experience is backed by GTMetrix as well. While the website does take 8.4 seconds to fully load, it takes just around 3 seconds to be fully interactive and to load the majority of visible elements, and that's a perfectly fine result.

So, what should you take away from this? Wix is not a super-optimized speed demon, and it shows: but for regular users, your Wix's page loading speed will not be a problem.

Wix video review

Wix review - conclusion

Wix is the most popular website builder in the world – and there are reasons for that. It's incredibly versatile, and even though I made numerous websites with it, I'm sure that I haven't even discovered all that it can do.

The editing on Wix lets you pick your own adventure. I see a lot of use cases for both Wix ADI – the super simple, questionnaire-based website builder that lets you quickly put together a great business website, and Wix Editor – the pixel-perfect option with over 900 custom-made templates.

While the editor may sometimes appear a bit complicated, and additional features might cost extra, this builder can help you make any kind of website, in any way that you want.

And so, I recommend giving Wix a shot – give it some time, test out the options, and you'll be making completely custom websites in no time.

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