Overview

There’s little wonder why Wix boasts an average of 45,000 new users per day: Well-rounded and features-rich, this website builder has firmly established itself as one of the most trust-worthy and hard-working platforms on the market. Not only does Wix offer 100’s of specialized themes for niches as specific as food and drink e-commerce and men’s hair salons, it is also leading the way with its apps marketplace, teeming with useful add-on’s like a Shopify plugin and chat support.

Sure, Wix’s interface may not be the sleekest on the block – but what it lacks in cool minimalist design, it makes up for in functionality. For those unsure of their design prowess, Wix provides plenty of help, including pre-selected color palettes and snap-to guides. Meanwhile, for users who are looking to set up a webshop, Wix comes complete with useful SEO functionality and a detailed yet intuitive way to organize products.

No website builder is complete without a nod to mobile sites; Wix offers an easy mobile editor that is skillfully designed to help users understand the differences between desktop and mobile design.

In all, Wix makes for an easy and fun website building experience. Here’s what to love most about their service:

• An unparalleled app market with dozens of useful add-ons
• An intuitive and surprisingly powerful HTML editor that combines ease with functionality
• A transparent pricing system that allows for growth
• A detailed and user-driven support page, complete with a forum, FAQ, and tutorials.

Ease of use

Getting started with Wix is essentially a two-step process: Once users press “Start Now” on Wix’s landing page, they are directed to a sign-up page that asks for a name and password (users can also sign up via Google+ or Facebook).

Next, users are directed to a templates page, asking what kind of site they’re looking to set up. The list of options here is exhaustive; for some, this may seem like a needless hurdle to jump over before coming to choosing a template and moving on, but the majority of Wix users will appreciate the streamlining that this pre-selection process creates.

With your niche identified, it’s time to choose a template that best matches your aesthetic and website needs. For each sub-category, Wix provides a dozen or so options that are tailored toward individual industries.

Wix’s templates are, for the large part, modern, mobile-optimized, and user-friendly, with plenty of styles and moods to choose from. This is especially impressive when it comes to Wix’s e-commerce sites, which run smoothly and are full of playful details, like pop-up product windows.

Unlike many website builders, Wix lets users play around with the functionality of a website template – opening new pages, clicking on products, navigating all over the site – without any commitment to start editing. When, however, a user is ready to jump into the editing process, they simply click “Edit This Site” at the top right of the page, and will be automatically directed to Wix’s HTML editor.

Simple Editing

A website builder’s drag and drop editor is the very crux of its service; if it’s too busy or difficult to understand, users will flee. If, meanwhile, it’s too dumbed-down, users will become frustrated and look elsewhere.

Wix operates on a perfect middle ground with it’s finely tuned HTML editor. Its setup will be familiar to anyone who’s ever used a website builder before: settings for design, pages, and add-ons sit on a floating menu to the left, while organizational elements such as grids, guides, and cropping tools rest on the top menu bar.

Once a user has chosen the template that best matches the look they’re going for, the overall feel of the website can be changed in the design tab, which holds functions for background, color, and text. For a quick change, Wix offers pre-selected color palettes with sweet names like “At the car wash” and “I’m a bumble bee”.

Background images and font size and style can also be changed with the click of a button. For fonts, Wix provides a package of Google Web Fonts along with suggestions on which styles look best together. Users simply click on the font combination they like best, and the entire website design is altered accordingly.

While many users like the instantaneity of pre-selected font and color choices, more intrepid and design-savvy users can always go it alone and customize font and color elements themselves.

Adding and moving elements, such as images, audio, and video is an equally straightforward process on Wix; simply select the kind of element you want to add in the editor’s “Add” section, and drag it to the website template.

Wix offers a wide selection of elements to add, including partner content such as SoundCloud audio and the Spotify Player. When it comes to adding images, meanwhile, Wix’s editor offers a variety of gallery options to showcase pictures, so that images can appear in a stack, as a “honeycomb”, or on a slider – just to name a few.

Adding buttons is also a breeze: Wix’s standard editor comes with automatic PayPal and iTunes buttons (a rarity among its competitors), as well as a variety of menu and anchor options.

Mobile

Oftentimes, users spend far too much time worrying about their desktop website, when the majority of their traffic is actually derived from smartphones and iPads. Wix does a very good job of highlighting the importance of mobile optimization with its mobile editor, which is superbly designed to deal with common problems that arise when designing for smaller screens.

While adding and changing content and pages is still left up to the desktop editor, users can add helpful usability details like a scrolling button, a “Mobile Action Bar” that works as a quick navigation menu for users, and a layout organizer that lets users choose which items they want to shelve and which they want to be made visible.

All together, Wix’s mobile editor is one of the service’s best features.

Themes

Wix’s templates are, for the large part, modern, mobile-optimized, and user-friendly, with plenty of styles and moods to choose from. This is especially impressive when it comes to Wix’s e-commerce sites, which run smoothly and are full of playful details, like pop-up product windows.

Particularly helpful to many users will be the sheer detail of categories and sub-categories to browse through. Not only do Wix cover nearly any market or niche a user could imagine, they also provide a healthy variety of design styles, from of-the-moment flat design to slightly more conservative layouts.

Unlike many website builders, Wix lets users play around with the functionality of a website template – opening new pages, clicking on products, navigating all over the site – without any commitment to start editing. When, however, a user is ready to jump into the editing process, they simply click “Edit This Site” at the top right of the page, and will be automatically directed to Wix’s HTML editor.

 

Scale

Aside from Wix’s 5 pricing plans that lets functionality grow with a user’s budget, Wix offers a raft of enticing features to help businesses get on their feet:

• For users who purchase the “Combo” subscription package and up, Wix offers $125 worth of Google and Facebook advertising vouchers to help promote your business.
• Even at their free level, Wix offers unlimited pages, so that users can continue to grow content without fear of limitations.

What really makes scaling up with Wix possible, though, is its App Marketplace, offering over 200 services to help businesses reach their fullest potential. Among the most popular on the marketplace are standards like Shopify, Eventbrite, and MailChimp, but the services available extend to myriad other possibilities for translation, social media optimization, and live chat.

This said, one key scaling tool is strangely absent from Wix’s platform: While they offer plenty of integrations for analytics (including the ever helpful Google Analytics), Wix itself doesn’t offer much in the way of custom statistics or click tracking like many of its competitors do.

 

SEO

For the most part, Wix provides SEO settings for each element and page region, helping to ensure that search engines pick up on the content provided. The only place where, somewhat puzzlingly, this isn’t the case is on product pages; no place for meta descriptions is made visible.

Wix’s support area offers a wide variety of FAQ’s, tutorials, and how-to’s, helping SEO novices navigate the confusion that all too often comes from trying to understand what SEO is, and how to make it work.

Still, Wix does a great job of helping to boost SEO, both through its AdWords and Facebook Ads credits, and through a nice array of apps that help users analyze and improve their search rank. Possibly the best in this regard is Site Booster (free on Unlimited and eCommerce plans), which helps list websites on search engines and business directories, and drive more traffic.

Blog

Blogs come free for all plans on Wix, and couldn’t be simpler to implement and maintain. Just like the rest of it’s HTML editor, Wix’s blog editor has several options for customizing content, and comes with great standard options to create better readability and sharing, such as a tag cloud, RSS buttons, and archiving. Blog layouts are also totally customizable, with plenty of alignment options to choose from.

When it comes to actually adding and editing blogs, meanwhile, Wix provides a familiar and painless interface with just enough options to add media and images. Social media icons and sharing opportunities too are made easily accessible, with options to add icons for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Spotify, Google+, and more.

 

Store

It’s no small feat to add store functionality to a website, as anyone who has tried to add a “buy now” button the old-fashioned way will tell you. Wix impresses with the depth of features it offers as part of its ecommerce platform, and importantly, provides all users (no matter the plan they’re on) the chance to play around with its online store manager even before upgrading to an eCommerce plan.

Adding a shop on Wix couldn’t be simpler: Users simply click “Online Store” in the “Add” section of the tools menu, and start dragging and dropping shop elements onto a specially designated page. Once elements are arranged more or less as desired, users click anywhere to see another menu that takes them to “manage store”.

From here, things get a bit more complex (though always understandable). Wix’s powerful store manager takes users through each product and product collection, allowing them to change price, availability, descriptions, and photos. Payment methods, shipping, and tax can also be customized, although conspicuously absent is an inventory manager – a feature that can be added via Wix’s app market.

 

Speed

Wix is one of the web’s largest and most trusted website builders, with millions of users creating and maintaining sites through their platform. This is both a blessing and a curse, as Wix is constantly struggling to keep up with the barrage of content that their service hosts. As a result, customers have been known to complain about site speeds in the past, prompting Wix to make some necessary changes. While by no means perfect, their improved CDN (content delivery network) and automatically optimized progressive images have helped somewhat.

 

Price

Unlike many website builders whose subscription plans are mired by opaque conditions and features, Wix does a great job of laying everything out as clearly as possible. After their initial free plan, which allows access to Wix’s templates, editor, and a branded sub-domain, Wix offers 5 paid monthly or yearly subscriptions:

Their “Connect Domain”, at $6.90/month, is Wix’s most basic subscription, but not exactly the cheapest on the block (competitor Weebly’s plans start at $3.29/month). This plan lets users connect their own domain to their site, but doesn’t removed Wix’s brand ads. While premium support, 1GB of bandwidth, and 500MB of storage are provided, not many perks are offered at this level – no ad credits, no ecommerce features, no favicons, and no free domain for a year.

From here, prices move steadily up, peaking at $29.90/month for their eCommerce plan. Here, users enjoy a nice package of benefits, including free domain hosting for a year, all ecommerce features, favicons, premium support, $125 worth of advertising vouchers through Facebook and Google, and access to two of Wix’s most popular apps, Site Booster and Form Builder.

 

Top 3 Pros and Cons

Pros

• Excellent mobile and blog editing interface
• Detailed and helpful support
• Well-stocked app marketplace

 Cons

• No in-house analytics, especially for ecommerce
• No meta descriptions for ecommerce products
• More expensive than many competitors at the basic level

Support

Wix’s support is among its strongest assets, with a fantastically detailed support page, ticketing system, and phone help.

Well laid out and easy to navigate, Wix’s support page offers a good variety of information via their tutorials, FAQs, and user-generated forums. If, however, questions persist, users at all levels can submit help requests via a ticketing system.

For premium members, this ticketing system is sped up enormously, with requests automatically moved to the top of the list. For VIP users paying the full $29.90/month, Wix also allows US & Canada users to call a toll free line without having to schedule in advance.

Conclusion

With nearly 60 million users and growing, it’s hard to imagine that Wix would be anywhere but at the very top of their game. For the most part, this is true: Not only does Wix offer a fantastic array of professionally optimized templates for a wide variety of industries, its powerful drag and drop editor is as easy to use as it is powerful: technophobes and savvy designers alike will appreciate its flexibility.

Wix is best suited for small businesses just starting to grow their online presence, but not quite ready to graduate to complicated analytics and and business management interfaces. While their prices aren’t bargain-basement, users will appreciate the a la carte options provided by Wix’s App Market, which makes up for almost any of the service’s initial shortcomings.