Wix Review: Inside the World’s Easiest Website Builder

Customer views of Wix vary a bit. Many people generally like Wix, saying they enjoy being able to fully manage their sites from a smartphone and that all business functions are centralized.

Users have found that the search engine optimization (SEO) tools provided work in generating organic traffic, and that building a site with Wix was highly intuitive and easy to learn. Some people reported being able to build a full site within an hour.

Occasionally there has been a little frustration with the loading time of the editors when working on their site, but overall, people feel that the process works in their favor.

One issue that has cropped up repeatedly is that the support is not particularly up to par. People have expressed disappointment at getting help resolving issues with payments.

Overall, people who have used the paid services have been fairly happy with the product.

What Are the Pros and Cons of Wix Website Builder?

Wix’s website builder is a strong contender for beginners creating a website. It lacks customization and portability, but most businesses should be able to find an acceptable template and take advantage of the built-in marketing tools.

Wix may be the best website builder for: Small businesses and new users with limited website-building experience. It’s also good to get an attractive website up quickly while building or scaling a business.

Store design

Creating a website with Wix is a very straightforward process. When first setting up an account, you are provided with a basic questionnaire asking you what sort of site you wish to create. For this review, I selected an online store.

You are then prompted to name your store and then indicate whether you are currently selling, ready to start, or only thinking of it. For this review, I chose “thinking of it.”

Also, you are provided a list of possible tasks that you might like to use on your store, including shipping rates and labels, automated sales tax, abandoned cart recovery, email marketing, Facebook and Instagram ads, and product subscriptions. I chose all of these.

You also get the choice of setting up multiple accounts for the store and options for many other features. Some examples are bookings, events, blogs, pricing plans (for subscription plans or memberships), Instagram feed, video, music, and online programs. There are also groups (active communities), restaurant table reservations, food orders, menus, and bands in town (for listing live events).

Dashboard:

Other tools:

Wix provides a range of themes that are customizable to your specific shop. Many seemed well-designed and competitive with some designs one might find from a professional web designer. There appear to be approximately 875 different themes to choose from, and though not all may fit every specific store type, you can certainly find one that will meet your needs.

You’re free to use the images pre-populated in the templates; however, as the number of themes is limited, there’s the risk that your site could look like someone else’s. Therefore, it’s a good idea to customize it further with your images.

Product upload

Entering products into your Wix store is fairly easy. Clicking “add your first product” brings you to a page with several dummy products already created. You can modify these to describe your actual items.

Wix also gives you the option of importing a product inventory. It provides you with a comma-separated values (CSV) template, which you can modify to upload all existing items, and then upload the file as you choose. The process seemed fairly intuitive.

You can easily add photos or other various media to your products, and there are places for including an engaging description, any product information, return and refund notifications, shipping information, pricing, and more.

Abandoned Cart Recovery

One feature that is becoming more common across many providers is abandoned cart recovery. Wix is no exception in this category. To help improve user retention and potentially increase sales, abandoned cart recovery identifies when customers have left with items still in their shopping cart.

With abandoned cart recovery, Wix will help you finish transactions by automatically sending users a link with a photo of the item they left in their cart, making it much easier to return and complete the purchase.

For this to work properly, several conditions need to be in place. The customer must have already provided you with their email address. Wix will wait at least an hour with items still in the cart before sending the message.

It’s not ideal to be perceived by your customers as harassing them, so a few other criteria will prevent these messages from being sent, such as if they have unsubscribed from your mailing list.

SEO

Wix boasts a wide range of SEO tools to increase the chance that your ideal customers can find your site. Built-in features include the ability to create sitemaps, and XML indexes designed to help search engines map and index your site.

You can set up a robots.txt file which will send instructions to search engines regarding which pages of your site to crawl. These tools are designed more for advanced users, but it is nice to know that they are available as part of the Wix package.

There is a relatively easy-to-understand SEO settings page to help you set up the proper meta descriptions and tags across all page types. You can default to allow search engines to index and crawl your site, though you can turn this off. Also, you can set up a standard image that will appear whenever your site is shared across social media platforms.

Several wizards will help you connect directly to Google, Bing, Pinterest, Yandex, and Naver. Also particularly helpful is the ability to set up good redirects to ensure that users are not sent to blank pages if your site changes its structure in any way. They will be automatically forwarded to the correct page.

While it lacks the sophistication you might find with Shopify or many WordPress tools, it is well-designed for beginners who wish to improve the site’s rankings.

Payment processing

Wix appears to be a bit complicated for setting up payment processing. Searching through the help center lets you know how to pay using Wix but offers little information about handling customer payments unless one has already upgraded.

I was able to find a wide list of payment providers. Wix does appear to have a built-in system for accepting payments, but you may work with a third party if you prefer.

It is important to note that Wix payments will not accept various business types for business transactions. These include any adult services and extend to other areas within the financial sector, so it’s wise to check these out before beginning transaction processing with Wix.

You must also specify what business type you are running: an individual/sole proprietorship, a partnership, limited (LTD), a limited liability corporation (LLC), or a nongovernmental organization.

Once set up, Wix will accept payments from all major credit cards, debit cards, iDeal, and PayNow. You can also set up payments directly from PayPal or accept manual payments (cash or check; useful for in-person stores). Apple Pay is another option, but unfortunately, Wix websites are not set up to accept it for all users, particularly those who use “Spaces by Wix,” “Fit by Wix,” or “Dine by Wix” mobile apps.

Wix connects to providers in a wide range of currencies, so international business is possible.

Mobile support

Wix sites are responsive by default, adjusting well to mobile environments. This is particularly important because many users prefer to shop using their mobile devices.

Wix supports iOS 12 and above, and Android 9.0 and above.

You have the option of being able to preview your site in a mobile environment by selecting preview from the top menu.

Inventory management

One feature I like is Wix’s fairly easy-to-use inventory management features, built right into the product management pages. You can track inventory, and manage whether an item is in or out of stock. Inventory tracking also can be applied to variants of your product, such as “small black shirts.”

In addition, this is easily manageable with a Stock Keeping Unit (SKU), an individual ID that you can assign items within your inventory. You can let customers know immediately if an item they seek is available or not, and the system will automatically provide an “out of stock” message to the user interface, letting people know if the item is unavailable. You can also customize the “out of stock” messages to read the way you wish them to appear.

One particularly nice feature that may help drive sales of items is a “low stock indicator,” which will let customers know that they need to act soon if they want an item that is about to run out.

Email marketing

Wix has a few built-in tools to send marketing campaigns to your contact lists using email.

There are several easy-to-use templates so you can create professional-looking email campaigns. One of the features I liked about this product was that it did not require sophisticated graphic design tools. You can build email campaigns with only a few clicks and personalize them with images and text.

Better yet, you can track the success of your email campaigns directly through the dashboard, where you can see if customers are clicking through on your emails to your advertised promotions or sales. You can measure what does and does not work.

As you get the hang of this, you can schedule your emails to go out at opportune times to ensure they can positively impact your sales.

Reporting and analytics

Wix provides a fairly decent range of analytics at its base level, though to get the most out of these, you may need to upgrade. Reports are divided into several basic categories. Here are some of the highlights:

• Traffic reports: These cover how your visitors navigate through your site and will give you information over a specified period, time of day, where users enter your site, what devices and locations they are using to access your site, and whether they are new or returning visitors.
• Sales reports: You can know which items are selling the most, at specific times or over longer periods, whether people are using coupons, where your buyers physically exist, and more.
• People reports: This gives you a snapshot of your customers, such as your top customers, whether they are new or repeat customers, and you can even use this data to generate leads.

These are only a few examples; reports also cover bookings, accounting, your blog traffic, various stores, events, marketing and SEO campaigns, app members, videos, restaurants, music, and subscriptions.

If you wish to upgrade to a higher membership level, you can create custom reports.

Shipping options 

You can manage individual products, identifying the weight of an item, so it makes it easier to immediately calculate shipping costs.

Wix enables you to set up your shipping within the U.S. and includes options for shipping internationally. For the latter, you must set up individual rules for each country.

You can set up these rules in your site’s settings’ shipping and fulfillment section.

When you set up your shipping rules, options include free shipping, a flat rate, rate by weight/price/product, or using the USPS calculated weight.

One drawback is that Wix only provides shipping via USPS, so there’s no connection to UPS, FedEx, or DHL. However, you do have the opportunity to connect to third-party logistics providers to handle the delivery of your products. These include Amazon, Shipreadygo, Bigblue, ShipBob, and eHouse App.

Wix scores high on security measures. The company employs several procedures to ensure your site is secure. Features include:

• Security staff: Good security personnel is key to a secure enterprise. Nefarious actors are constantly attempting new tricks and finding ways of exploiting vulnerabilities. Often, prevention requires direct human intervention. Wix teams actively scan the platform and the infrastructure for any potential threats that might arise and perform regular audits.
• Compliance: Wix is a PCI Level 1 Merchant & Service Provider certified as ISO 27001 and ISO 27018 compliant.
• Physical access controls: Wix uses some of the top state-of-the-art cloud hosting systems, using both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud. It maintains security certifications including ISO 27017, SOC 1, SOC 2, and SOC 3, and is fully compliant with PCI DSS Level 1.
• Secure sites: All Wix sites use SSL and Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) as part of all basic service packages.
• Secure transactions: Wix maintains and enforces strong user authentication measures, and any personally identifiable information (PII) can only be accessible by using TLS v.1.2.
• Monitoring: Wix uses SOC 24/7/year-round monitoring, pays close attention to internal network traffic, and employee actions. It also regularly engages in ongoing research to be aware of any new vulnerabilities and works quickly to ensure these are protected against.
• Third-party access: Any tools that are installed for use by third parties must go through a rigorous check for internal and communication security.

Wix’s help center features documentation divided into categories for every topic imaginable, such as getting started, using the editor, domains, and billing.

If you are running into technical issues and need support, it has an automated customer assistant which will run you through the most common technical issues. But if this fails, you may choose the chat options for communicating directly with a customer care expert. You will need to navigate some fairly complex menus to get to the correct person.

After navigating through this, I found that it was necessary to submit a ticket, waiting for Wix to email me with an answer. Once I browsed through the site, I was unable to find any information about how to contact someone directly via phone or chat.

Community

There does appear to be an online forum called “X Community,” where you can ask questions of other Wix users. However, this community does not appear to be particularly active, possibly because it appears hidden on the website.

The most recent question under “Getting Started” was seven weeks old. Other questions in the general forum were as recent as eight hours, but there were few, if any, responses to the questions.

While the website appears to be rich in content and features, Wix suffers from what appears to be nearly non-existent support.

Accept alternate payments

You can accept alternate forms of payment beyond credit and debit cards, such as Venmo, checks, and more through the Wix POS app.

Prevent selling out-of-stock items

New controls are in place to make sure you don’t accidentally sell a customer something which you do not have in stock. You can override these rules if necessary.

Coupons

New features have been added to allow customers to use coupon codes (either monetary amount discount or percentage discount)coupons or other sales promotion items at checkout. Coupon promo codes s can help your business boost sales.

New SEO learning hub

There are now many in-depth guides to generate organic (non-paid) traffic to your site. Tools on the Wix SEO Learning hub include guides, webinars, and videos.

Automatic local business lookup

You can automatically generate local business markups to improve your site searchings for local customers. The markup is particularly useful for brick-and-mortar stores or businesses with in-person sales. Visitors in your region will now be able to find you better with search engine searches.

Compare Wix Website Builder Alternatives

Wix is a fairly strong choice for non-technical users who wish to create e-commerce websites. It is certainly not the only, nor the cheapest, option on the marketplace. But for people who lack detailed coding skills and wish to avoid working with web developers, Wix can be an excellent platform.

I compared Wix’s website builder to various other providers in the e-commerce marketplace. Below you can see how Wix compares against other providers.

How I Rated Wix Website Builder

The approach I took to rating Wix involved an in-depth assessment of its site-building software and setting up a store. I took this examination from the perspective of a business owner with limited technical skills and the desire to create a unique e-commerce platform for marketing wares or services.

With this in mind, I gave more weight to ease of use over other features. The user is assumed to have little technical knowledge and a limited desire to hire professionals. As Wix advertises itself as an easy way to bring a business online, I took the company at its word and attempted to replicate this process.

While not the most sophisticated platform available, Wix scored strongly in terms of ease of use and ability to handle most aspects of running a shop online. The flexibility of options available was impressive, and while not the most inexpensive option available, its approachability gave it very high scores.