Pros & Cons
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- Remarkably intuitive interface
- Numerous widgets
- Hundreds of templates for specific businesses and other uses
- Good tools for mobile site building
- Rich web store features
- Excellent uptime and customer service support
- Many commerce options, including the ability to sell digital downloads
- Free option
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- Third-party apps offer better analytics
- Doesn't let you switch templates
Wix Specs
| Basic Image Editing | |
| Blogging Tool | |
| Download Selling | |
| Free Version Offered | |
| Site Membership | |
| Web Store |
If you want to build a website with minimal effort and maximum creative freedom, look no further than Wix. It offers standout features, such as online storage for your site assets, e-commerce tools, cool video backgrounds, title animations, mobile apps, and a useful free service tier. Plus, its Wix Studio interface stands out as one of the most intuitive, slick, and powerful we've tested in the ever-growing field of website builders. In short, Wix is a simple-to-use, multi-faceted tool that easily earns our Editors' Choice award alongside Duda, which is an excellent service tailored to enterprise needs.
Plans and Prices
You only need an email address to get started with Wix. If you don't mind advertisements, you can spin up a site for free.
On the other hand, if you want an ad-free site with a custom URL or e-commerce options, you must upgrade to a paid account. These range from the $17-per-month Light account (2GB of storage, free domain for one year, two collaborators) to the $29-per-month Core plan (50GB of storage, five collaborators, basic analytics, and e-commerce). If you want a shopping cart and other money-making features, peruse the Business and Business Elite plans that cost between $36 and $159 per month. Finally, the Enterprise-level plans require a bespoke quote from a Wix representative (they start at $500 per month). See Wix's plans page for a full rundown of account types.
After creating an account, you search for a general site type—business, designer, event, blog, and so on—and then choose whether you want to use a site template or have Wix automatically create a site for you using Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI). More on ADI in a bit. There are nearly 20 top-level site types, each with several subcategories. For instance, there's a Restaurant choice with subcategories that include bar, café, and catering. For our Wix test site, we picked the Blog category, which offers more than 70 beautiful template options.
Wix has hundreds of template choices, more than Squarespace or Weebly. Many are free, though some business choices require an e-commerce-level subscription. Each template has a full demo so you can get a feel for the theme before editing. In a nice touch, the template preview also shows you how your site will look on a smartphone screen.
There's one downside. Unlike Squarespace or Weebly, Wix doesn't let you switch templates once you've chosen one. That's a significant ding against the service, as you need to create a separate site and transfer your files to the new pages to give your online destination a fresh look.
For in-depth comparisons on pricing and more, check out our articles on Wix vs. Squarespace and Wix vs. WordPress.
Web Design Options
After choosing a template and editing your site, you're treated to a one-minute introductory video. The templates are modern and attractive, with many pinning your navigation icons to the top as the site viewer scrolls down. Eight, round buttons let you add elements, change the background image, access the App Market (from which you get third-party site widgets), see your uploads, and start blogging. You can easily minimize or hide these controls if you need to edit the area under them.
(Credit: Wix/PCMag)Wix contains all the usual options for text, media, social media widgets, buttons, and shapes that you'd expect in a website builder. If something you want is not included by default, check out Wix's App Market. You can also embed HTML and easily add SoundCloud or Spotify playlists to treat your site visitors' ears.
Editing the template design is a cinch. Just click any element to see resizing handles and dragging buttons. You have much more freedom to place objects where you want them than with Squarespace or Weebly. Double-click text to edit and format it. Guides pop up as you move objects around, helping you align them with other elements. A toolbar offers tools for sizing and arranging objects, including size matching, alignment, and overlap options. If you select multiple objects, you can move them around the page. We like that Wix lets you animate any object, with effects like Bounce-In, Glide-In, and Spin-In.
Wix has outstanding right-click context menus, too. Most other builders do nothing with right clicks, except launch browser options that don't help the site-building process. Wix lets you use right-clicks to change images or edit text. You can customize page design to your heart's content, including the number of columns and their sizes. In addition, you can easily add new pages and drag them around to change the site's navigation hierarchy. Wix lets you password-protect particular pages or require a membership sign-up or sign-in to access content.
Editing
Wix Studio (previously Editor X) is a website-building option that features cleaner, more design-centric templates than the basic editor. More importantly, they're responsive templates, unlike the ones you deal with in using Wix's classic editor interface. To show you the ropes, Wix Studio Academy offers helpful lessons and video tutorials.
(Credit: Wix/PCMag)Wix Studio operates more like Adobe Photoshop or InDesign than a traditional site builder. Layers let you stack elements, while Masters let you quickly copy a design element to other pages. Click a text element, and you're presented with collapsible menu options for changing sizes, positions, anchors, and other items. The basic editor's right-clicking functionality is repeated here, launching context-sensitive menus when activated. If you're working on a responsive website, Wix Studio starts with three different page sizes you can toggle between to see how your site looks. You can also add more breakpoints, different resolutions that become a part of your toggleable choices. Overall, it's far faster to move elements around on your site using Wix Studio than Wix's already efficient website builder.
Typography and color swatches are available, and you can save your choices to design libraries. This allows you to quickly change a page's overall color or perhaps the header text without losing your previous design choices. Wix Studio is also built for multi-user collaboration, with design libraries allowing a group to test different ideas without throwing anything away.
Website Builder Extras
Wix's main account administrative interface is clearer than Weebly's, too. It has a complete page listing for your sites. Click one, and the site dashboard appears with a side rail of site option buttons. You also see a site activity feed and buttons for everyday tasks.
Wix Analytics provides basic site-traffic reporting, but you're better off using the free Web-Stats app or setting up a separate Google Analytics account (which requires a paid account level) for this functionality. Web-Stats is informative, telling you where visits came from and what display, computer, and browsers visitors used—even for free users. Premium account holders can add Facebook Pixel reporting. The App Market offers even more tools for tracking SEO, video views, subscription data, and music plays. This is on top of other, more specific extra features like creating custom seat maps for your recurring live venue events or making a branded app for your restaurant.
Wix has several features that'll enhance the hosting experience, including Wix Fitness, Wix Turbo, and Ascend by Wix. Wix Fitness is a site-building framework that caters to, you guessed it, fitness entrepreneurs. It simplifies promotion, scheduling, client management, and even selling online workout videos. Wix Turbo is a performance technology that Wix says will improve site-loading speeds. According to the company, "Wix sites will be optimized for accelerated JavaScript execution time and use the most recent CSS functionality." If you're updating a site you haven't touched since the arrival of Wix Turbo, which improves page load speeds, you must go through a site-updating process. For our 17-page test site, the process took under a minute, and the site looked just the same after the process.
Ascend by Wix is "a suite of 20 products that lets entrepreneurs start, manage and promote a business directly from the Wix web development platform." The tools include chat, site membership, invoices, workflows, tasks, automations, and price quotes.
Wix lets you generate English text for your site using AI. You simply hover your mouse pointer over a text block, select "Get Text Ideas," and tell Wix what your site is about and the topics you'd like the text to cover. Wix gave us some pretty convincing paragraph options for our journalist portfolio. It's a cool feature, and Wix has continued to expand it. You can now talk to an AI chatbot assistant to generate an entire site using AI just by answering some questions. You'll still want to tweak whatever the AI creates to truly personalize the site for your needs, but this tool can save much time up front. Hostinger Website Builder (formerly called Zyro) also offers various AI tools for building your site and predicting user behavior.
Artificial Design Intelligence
We used Wix ADI to build a test local business website. It dramatically simplifies site building, is surprisingly fun to use, and offers lots of handholding. You answer basic questions about the site's purpose, features, location, and title. It then searches the web for content related to your business or activity. You can optionally add social accounts such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. After this, you pick a style, have ADI create a color palette based on your logo, and click Create My Site.
Wix ADI takes some time to complete its design work. It tells you what it's doing through the process, like adding menus and optimizing your mobile site. We tested using a local bagel shop's info, and ADI created a site that looks better than the store's actual website! We're also impressed by the site we made for an artist friend who was wowed by the results. After ADI builds the initial site, you customize the boilerplate text and sales items. Wix ADI is worth a shot if you aren't interested in designing your site.
Working With Photos and Videos
Wix has a big advantage over Weebly and Squarespace when it comes to photos: It lets you reuse images you've already uploaded by saving them in online folders. The other services require you to reupload photos if you want to use them elsewhere on your site.
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(Credit: Wix/PCMag)You can add images from other online sources like Facebook and Flickr. Ditto for videos. In fact, you can use video in places where other services only let you drop photos, such as the main theme background. The service also provides many stock images and videos for your site. This content is mostly free, but you can purchase reasonably priced stock images from BigStock.
With the integrated Aviary editor, you get complete photo editing and enhancement capabilities. It's simple to add a link to an image, either external or to a page on your site. Adding a border, animation, or resizing behavior is just as simple.
How to Make Money With Wix
Wix offers rich e-commerce capabilities. The Wix Store option adds a Shop page with a product gallery prepopulated with sample products you replace with your own. You need an e-commerce premium plan to receive payments. The web store can have multiple pages, including a product page, a shopping cart, and a Thank You page. Wix also offers customizable storefronts and recurring payment and subscription options, further expanding your money-making possibilities. There's a detailed product-editing panel, and you can group products by collections and offer coupons. Credit card processing options include Stripe and Square, and you can accept PayPal and snail-mailed cash. You can enter shipping and tax rules, but the built-in store doesn't help you figure these things out with, say, UPS or FedEx integration.
Selling digital downloads is built into Wix, and you can also sell music with no transaction fee through Wix's Music app. The app accepts the MP3, WAV, FLAC, and ALAC file formats, and plays music on your site.
For marketing your goods, a Wix mail-blast app called ShoutOut lets you send up to 5,000 emails per month. Third-party integrations for email marketing are available from MPZMail, CakeMail, and V.I. Plus.
Ascend by Wix is a marketing service for your site. It lets you interact with customers via forms, chat, invoices, price quotes, and trigger actions. It even offers workflow organization tools. The Ascend Inbox can aggregate your email and chat messages. Ascend provides email marketing, SEO, social posting, and video tools. Wix's automations include sending reminders to customers about invoices due. Likewise, the service's workflows are useful for lead follow-up and contact management. Its Tasks tool saves you from using an external (though excellent) option like Asana. Finally, it lets you create a Members area, with special pages and features like a forum, store accounts, and user profiles. In sum, Ascend brings together a lot of useful tools for web businesses.
Blogging Tools
Adding a blog to your site is as easy as clicking the Blog entry on the main site element toolbar. You design your blog page layout like any other site page, or choose a single-entry style with no header. Subscriptions and comments are options you can offer your readers. You can tag posts, and even display a tag cloud, RSS button, Facebook comments, and Disqus comments.
Wix has a separate, simple blog-posting interface, unlike Weebly, which uses the same web page interface for blogging. In Wix, you can add photos, galleries, video, and text, all formatted to taste. You can schedule any post for later publication and designate it as Featured. In all, it's a rich blogging tool with everything you need.
Mobile Site Options
Sites made in the basic editor aren't responsive in the strictest sense (meaning you can resize a browser to see its contents squeeze to fit a smaller size), but that shouldn't worry site creators: Wix produces mobile versions of your sites that pass Google's test for mobile-friendliness. Tap the phone icon at the top of the site editor and switch to the mobile editing view.
By default, our site had the "Make your site mobile friendly" option checked, so we didn't have to do anything to make it work well on phones. Still, Wix allows you to edit the mobile view if you're not happy with what it produces. In particular, you can hide elements you don't want to appear on mobile screens. You can also add a Mobile Action Bar so that visitors can email or call you with a tap of a finger.
That said, Wix Studio lets you design fully responsive sites. Not only are there fluid sizing options for certain elements, but the Breakpoints feature lets you see what your site looks like at any resolution. CSS grid and Flexbox are available in Wix Studio, ensuring your site morphs to whatever screen it's on.
Wix offers apps for interacting with site visitors and editing store items like products and prices. You can upload photos from your phone, but you can't create and edit sites from the app, as you can with Jimdo and Weebly.
Wix Code
Wix Code allows site builders—even those with no programming experience—to add features to their websites that in the past would have required familiarity with database development. The feature is still labeled as beta, but is available in all Wix accounts. Wix Code comprises five tools: Databases, Dynamic Pages, External APIs, Forms, and Managed JavaScript.
(Credit: Wix/PCMag)Databases, Dynamic Pages, and Forms require no formal knowledge of coding. Using these prefab databases is similar to filling in a spreadsheet. Custom forms and user input controls help collect information from site viewers. A food site could let users submit recipes, for example.
Data-driven Dynamic Pages sound like they're for developers, and indeed, using these capabilities significantly improves the site design process. It means that your site pages are built on the fly depending on entries in a table. A college course page designed in Wix can display different pages for each course, all using the same template. Duda's InSite feature offers similar dynamic customization, letting you send other content to viewers depending on criteria like time of day, date, location, and number of previous visits. The Duda feature is simpler to use, but it's not as powerful as Wix Code.
Wix also includes new API and JavaScript features that let professional web developers use Wix to design sites and then go under the hood to extend functionality. They can do this via a fully managed JavaScript development environment and by calling external APIs to leverage web services and augment site behavior.
When we first tapped the Wix Code menu, a panel appeared with an explanatory video and links to resources to get going with the feature. It does indeed add complexity to the site-building interface, adding Backend and Database entries to your Site Structure sidebar. From those, you can add modules and collections, respectively. The latter are similar to spreadsheets in which you add specific data types, such as images or text.
A wizard helps you fill in the info necessary to create a usable collection, to enable things like dynamic pages, forms, or member-generated content. You can add dynamic content to a page, dynamically created pages, or index pages drawing from the database. Though all of this is powerful, it pushes Wix away from the easy site builder category toward being a developer tool. Those who prefer to keep things simple never need to turn on these developer tools. We created dynamic pages with an index to a few of our reviews, without jumping through too many hoops.
Customer Support
Wix is one of the more intuitive site builders, so there's a good chance you won't need to contact the support team. The Wix editor displays a question mark in its top-right section that launches the well-stocked Help Center. If that doesn't contain the answer to your problem, you can submit a support ticket or request a 24/7 phone call back. That service is, impressively, even available to free accounts. WordPress.com, on the other hand, only offers its free users access to a knowledge base.
When you first contact support, a chatbot asks for your site information and walks you through logical steps to remedy your problem. When you get to a point where the text robot can no longer help you, you'll see a Contact Us area with two options: Submit a Ticket and Talk to a Support Agent. We chose the latter and were tasked with keying in our phone number and issue. We asked how to schedule posts, and a customer service representative contacted us roughly a minute later. The rep kindly walked us through the process.
Uptime
Website uptime is a vital element of web hosting. If your site goes down, clients or customers cannot find you or access your products or services. Finding a reliable web host to keep your site running is in your best interest. Otherwise, customers may go elsewhere, and they might never come back. Wix displays its uptime status on its site along with a detailed log of past incidents. The readings indicate extremely stable performance, rarely dropping below 100%, meaning you can count on Wix as a rock-solid foundation for your website.