Why You Shouldn’t Use Wix for Your Business Website

A lot of people ask me why you shouldn’t use Wix for your business website.  I’m going to explain all the reasons why I don’t recommend it.

Many business owners are afraid to hire a web designer, thinking it costs too much to have a professional create their website. Some have tried to hire a web designer only to find that their services are way outside of their budget.

Of course they want to have an amazing website, but many decide that designing their own website is the more affordable option. If you do it yourself with their wesite builder, you don’t have to rely on a designer for updates or maintenance.

This is a big reason that Wix has grown in popularity. You don’t  have to have programming skills to create a nice looking website. Not only that, but you don’t have to wait on someone to design it, or deal with a pushy salesperson trying to talk you into services you don’t need.

You can simply create an account, design your site, and go! You have a no-hassle, do-it-yourself website and it looks great. So why not use Wix?

Wix is counting on the fact that business owners don’t know a lot about web design, search engine optimization, or the price of hosting.

Before you design your website with Wix, you should know why most professional web designers don’t recommend it and prefer WordPress for business websites.

Wix is not search engine friendly

The biggest reason most web designers and SEO consultants do not recommend Wix is because their websites are not search engine friendly. If you own a business, you want people to find you in Google.

There are numerous reasons for this. Many of their templates use flash web design. Their web builder also has limitations with on-page and technical search engine optimization.

Wix uses a lot of javascript, so any page you create will be filled with extra code. When Google crawls through your site, they will have to weed through lots of code. Javascript is harder for Google to crawl through. Because your pages are all in javascript, the links on your pages may not be indexed or crawled by Google.

If you don’t understand what this means. You can right click on your Wix website and select view page source. What you will see is a whole lot of code. Try to find the links in your source code.

If you view the page source on any WordPress site you will be able to find the urls that you linked to on the page easily.

Wix has spent a lot of money on advertising and trying to convince users that they are great for search engine optimization, but most SEO consultants would recommend using WordPress over Wix if you want a Google-friendly website.

When comparing the stats for WordPress websites with Wix, you can easily see why designing your website with WordPress is better than Wix.

According to Afrefs.com, “46.1% of WordPress websites got at least some monthly search traffic, compared with only 1.4% of Wix sites.”

Wix has limited design options

Wix is easy to use. It’s a drop and drag page builder, but it’s difficult to design something that stands out with it. You are limited to the options that come with each template.

They do have over 500 templates you can choose from, but if you look through them, you will see they all look very similar. If you want a basic, clean website, Wix is a good solution. If you want a custom website that stands out, and doesn’t look like a cookie-cutter website, you are not going to get that with Wix.

Wix websites load slow.

Why you shouldn’t use Wix?  Because Wix uses a lot of javascript and excessive code, their websites often load much slower than other websites. Search Engine Journal conducted a review of 25 different content management systems including Wix, WordPress, Weebly and Joomla. When it comes to site speed and performance, Wix performed the worst.

Their survey compared four major platforms, Wix, WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal, on how they performed based on ““first contentful paint” (in other words how fast they load usable content) Wix also came in last.

User experience is important not just for your visitors, but for Google. In 2021, user experience will be an important ranking factor for Google.

Wix sites are difficult to update. Once you select a template, you can’t change it.

Wix is not as flexible as WordPress. If you create a website in WordPress and decide you don’t like the theme, you can easily change it to another one. With Wix, once you choose a template you can’t change it. In order to update the look of your website, you will have to create a brand new website and then move your domain name and plan over to the new site.

You cannot move a Wix website.

If you talk with anyone who’s owned a website, chances are they have changed hosting providers or found another company to work with at some point. If your site is loading slow, or the company you’re working with has terrible customer service, you can migrate your website to another hosting provider.

It’s usually very simple. In fact, many hosting companies will migrate your website for you for free. If you decide you don’t like WIx, you’ve outgrown them, or you need a better website, you can’t take your website with you.

This may not be a big deal for a small website, but what if you have hundreds of products or years worth of blog posts? Not being able to move your website could become a huge hassle down the road.

Wix’s selling point is that it’s easy to use. What if I told you WordPress can be as easy to use as Wix?

You might be surprised to learn that WordPress is not hard to use. Some themes are more complicated to work with than others. But, if you use a theme with a page builder like Elementor, WordPress is not much harder to use than Wix. Although you will probably need some help with the initial set up and design, once your WordPress site is installed and designed, you can probably maintain it yourself.

Wix may not be as affordable as you think

One of the biggest reasons business owners turn to Wix is because it’s affordable. Take a look at Wix’s pricing. These are the prices for their basic websites. Prices for ecommerce websites start at $23 a month. This might not sound like a lot, but if you start comparing prices with other hosting companies, you’ll find that Wix costs 4 times as much or more for a comparable plan elsewhere.

My hosting plans at MyBadassHosting start at $2.95 a month for 30 GB of storage and unmetered bandwidth. Wix charges $14 a month for only 3GB of storage. For the equivalent amount of storage and bandwidth you would need to upgrade to their $39 a month plan.

What if you could have a professionally designed website that you can maintain yourself? I offer affordable web design for small businesses. The initial investment in your design might cost more than Wix, but in the long run, you will have a website that you love, that loads fast, performs well in search engines. If you decide you want a new look, you can easily update it.