2022 Wix Review: Who This Site Builder Is Best For

Wix’s Free plan is one of the best ways to build a free website. You get free rein to test out both of its editors (the drag-and-drop editor Wix is famous for and the Wix ADI, which uses artificial intelligence to create a template for you) and access its 800-plus templates. Whichever you choose, you’ll have a good idea of the designs Wix is capable of, as you can also add any of over 300 apps from the Wix Marketplace.

Note that this plan still has limited features, is hosted on a Wix subdomain, and displays fairly prominent Wix ads. Hence, it’s not appropriate for any small business’ website, but it is a great way to test out the platform.

The Combo plan costs $16 per month billed annually or $23 month-to-month. With this plan, Wix ads are completely removed, a free custom domain is included, and you get a slight upgrade in storage and bandwidth.

As with the free version, you also have access to the Wix Marketplace for downloading and integrating third-party applications, including analytics, forms, and email marketing. It’s a decent plan to start with if you want a small site or a one-page website, or if you’re a blogger looking for basic features to grow your following.

The Unlimited plan costs $22 per month when billed annually ($29 month-to-month). This option gives more than double the storage (5GB) plus unlimited bandwidth.

You also get free site analytics for one year to see how your site is growing, its top web pages, and what areas you can further optimize. It’s a great choice for freelancers, mid-sized bloggers, or when you need to upgrade from the Free or Combo plan because your site is growing or gaining in traffic.

The next plan after Wix Unlimited is the Pro plan, but instead of the Pro, which costs $27 per month but lacks ecommerce, we suggest you subscribe to the Business Basic plan. These Wix plans cost the same ($27 per month billed annually or $34 month-to-month), but unless you are only looking for more storage, the Business Basic plan includes so much more than the Pro plan.

You get 50GB of storage and all the ecommerce features online stores need. It also comes with niche tools for restaurants, events, artists, service businesses, memberships, subscriptions, gyms, and fitness professionals. This plan comes packed with ecommerce features, especially compared to most competitors’ entry-level ecommerce plans.

For example, you can sell an unlimited amount of physical or digital products (including dropshipping, which you can do via integrations), and you get abandoned cart recovery and the ability to sell gift cards (through a third-party app). In contrast, similar features cost $29 per month on Shopify or a hefty $49 per month on Squarespace. However, these tools come at a lower cost with Weebly, whose highest plan tops out at $22 per month (with annual billing).

Aside from being able to sell online, upgrading to a Business plan allows you to use Wix Bookings and Wix Fit with your site. Wix Bookings is Wix’s native appointment and scheduling tool that integrates with Wix Payments, while Wix Fit is Wix’s native gym management feature. On this plan, you can also gate parts of your site for membership-based content, allow recurring payments for subscriptions, and sell tickets for events.

Wix’s extremely large selection of beautiful templates (not available on Wix ADI)

Wix has two different site editors. With its classic drag-and-drop editor, the design freedom you get is unparalleled for a site builder. First, you can select from Wix’s library of over 800 templates. These templates span a range of industries like blogs, restaurants, services, and online stores.

Then, you can easily edit your site’s design by customizing your template in just about any way you envision by simply clicking on an element and dragging it anywhere on the page. Site design is intuitive and made even more manageable as any time you want to add a new content block to a page, there are multiple premade variations to plug and play.

On the other hand, if you use Wix ADI (which stands for artificial design intelligence), it’s even easier to get started and build a website quickly. Going this route, Wix will ask a few questions and assign a template based on your needs.

Instead of the drag-and-drop page builder, you’ll use a section-based editor to edit premade sections to flesh out your pages. While its design capabilities are much more limited than Wix’s classic editor, it provides a very sleek-looking site in a much quicker way and reduces the chance you’ll make mistakes or end up with a less-than-professional-looking website design.

Note that you can switch from the Wix ADI to the Wix Editor by hovering over the “Site” menu at the top of the ADI interface and then clicking on “Go to Editor.” You can also switch back from the Editor to the ADI site, but changes you make in the classic Editor won’t be applied to your ADI website.

No matter which editor you use, you can’t change templates without starting a new site, and transferring content by switching templates will result in deleted content. You can get around this by creating a new free Wix website, editing it, and transferring your domain name once the new site is ready. Despite this hassle, Wix still ranks as one of our top website builders, mainly because of its design customizability.

Wix’s huge app market filled with over 300 popular third-party apps

Wix reviews indicate its top draw is the amount of customization you get through intuitive design tools, native functionality, and the hundreds of integrations available in the Wix app marketplace.

With more than 300 Wix plugins available, you’re sure to find the features your website needs. Keep in mind that as you start to build your Wix website, these apps won’t be available to you if you use the Wix ADI.

Here are some popular apps you can download on Wix:

• Restaurants: DoorDash, Wix Restaurants Orders
• Blogging: Wix Blog, Comments, Site Search
• Travel: Vacation Rental Booking
• Ecommerce: Wix Stores, Wix eCommerce
• Dropshipping: Modalyst, Sprocket, Printful, Printify
• For marketing: 123FormBuilder and Payments, Mailchimp
• Gyms and fitness professionals: Wix Fit
• Service-based businesses: Wix Bookings

You can also add code to your Wix website (with a coding feature called Velo by Wix), and you can embed widgets and custom elements onto your website. However, these features stop short of allowing you to change your site’s HTML. While your site’s features won’t be as advanced as if you used a content management system like WordPress, with Wix, you get the most design and feature customization of any website builder available today.

Access an individual page’s SEO settings in the Wix website builder

Admittedly, in prior years, website builders weren’t the best for search engine optimization (SEO). However, today, Wix has solid SEO features, making it one of the best site builders for SEO. If you’ve dismissed all-in-one site builders for this reason before, now is the perfect time to see how much progress they’ve made as far as search engine optimization goes.

Basic SEO tools are built in to all Wix websites without the hassle of coding or plugins (like with WordPress). With the Unlimited or Basic Business plan and above, you get advanced SEO features and site boosters to help your site rank higher in Google.

To help you out, the Wix SEO Wiz provides a step-by-step guide for optimizing your website to get it to rank on Google. It includes everything from setting your homepage’s title to connecting Google Analytics to your account. Also, you can easily access the SEO settings of any page on your website from the site editor.

Focus on these Wix SEO features:

• Create title tags: Create descriptive, short, and memorable title tags for each page on your website through the page’s SEO settings.
• Add meta descriptions: Access meta descriptions via each page’s SEO settings. Meta descriptions appear in search results, giving people reasons to click on your listing. Include relevant keywords and keep each meta description between 140 and 160 characters long.
• Change page slugs: The page’s SEO settings will also enable you to change its slug. The slug is a page’s unique identifier in a URL (e.g., the word “slug” in the URL “www.yourwebsite.com/slug”). Change it to something specific, easy to type, and identifiable, like “store” for your shop, or use keywords to improve SEO.
• Connect your site to Google Search Console: Accessed automatically through Wix’s SEO Wiz, connecting your site to Google Search Console allows you to track your site’s traffic and resolve issues.
• Submit your sitemap to search engines: Unlike with WordPress, accessing your sitemap on Wix is incredibly easy. A sitemap is a directory of your pages, which you can then submit to Google Search Console, Bing, and other search engines for indexing. To access your sitemap on Wix, simply add “/sitemap.xml” to the end of your main domain URL (e.g., “www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml”). Your first sitemap is automatically uploaded to Search Console through Wix’s SEO Wiz.
• Create redirects: Redirects are the pages your visitor will automatically be sent to when they land on an incorrect page (such as an old page being deleted or updated with a new URL). Setting up proper redirects decreases bounce rates, which in turn boosts SEO for your Wix website. To do so, access SEO Tools through the dashboard below Marketing & SEO, click on “URL Redirect Manager,” and then set up the redirect.
• Check your mobile website: Over half of Americans shop via mobile devices, and fortunately, creating a mobile-optimized Wix website is easy. All Wix templates are mobile-friendly, and changes on your desktop editor will automatically be optimized for mobile. To ensure this, click on the mobile editor and then on “Page Layout Optimizer” in the left menu bar.

Wix’s SEO features will help your website grow and scale, including the SEO Wiz, which walks you through the basics of optimizing your website. Even if you’re not a local SEO expert, Wix’s offerings are more than enough for your website to rank in search results. Before you launch your site, use our website basics checklist to make sure it’s fully set up for success.

Build a sleek-looking store with Wix

Wix’s cheapest ecommerce plan (Business Basic, which costs $27 per month) is a great value for the money, even compared to competitors. For example, on its most basic ecommerce plan, you get features like abandoned cart recovery, social media integration, the ability to sell an unlimited amount of products, and dropshipping via integrations.

Comparable features with Squarespace, for example, would cost $49 per month. In addition, the Business Basic plan includes niche features that would require you to purchase an add-on with Squarespace or subscribe to higher ecommerce plan tiers with Weebly or GoDaddy. For even more advanced features like marketplace selling and advanced shipping, upgrade to Wix’s $32 per month Business Unlimited plan.

Paired with Wix’s web design capabilities and other integrations, either the Business Basic or Unlimited plan gives you a beautifully designed store. You’ll have all of the features you need for small to mid-sized ecommerce, service-based businesses, online ordering, subscriptions, memberships, and more.

For most small businesses, these features are more than enough. However, to get scaled-up ecommerce features like customized analytics and reports or priority service, you’ll have to upgrade to its Business VIP plan, which is fairly pricey at $59 per month. For online sellers needing these tools, Shopify could be a better choice.

In short, Wix’s ecommerce capabilities are great—to an extent. If you’re a small business with a decent budget, Wix’s Basic and Unlimited plans offer good ecommerce features along with amazing design. However, for businesses on a tight budget, there are cheaper alternatives like Weebly, or for large ecommerce businesses, we suggest heading straight to Shopify instead.

Aside from being able to sell online, upgrading to a Wix Business plan opens you up to nifty tools. Among these is an appointment booking system that integrates seamlessly with Wix Payments, and Wix Fit, with business tools for fitness professionals or gyms, to name just two. These are all native features that can help a variety of businesses grow.

If you fall into one of these categories, you’ll get access to very useful tools by upgrading to Wix’s Business Basic plan:

• Service businesses: Wix Bookings is a native, integrated booking system that lets your customers book and pay for appointments online. You can also create services for one or multiple providers, or extend classes, memberships, or subscriptions.
• Gyms and fitness professionals: Wix Fit is an online fitness management software complete with streaming services, scheduling tools, staff management features, an online store, and the ability to sell memberships and packages.
• Restaurants: Wix Restaurants is a tool that helps you create your own menus, take online orders and reservations, and receive payments.
• Events: Wix Events is ideal for businesses needing tools for event RSVPs, ticket selling, event promotion and management, and check-ins.
• Hotels: Wix Hotels is an all-in-one booking system for hospitality businesses that helps you manage your guests and your rooms, take reservations, and accept online and offline payments. It’s wonderful for managing vacation rentals as well.
• Artists: Aside from building membership-only pages and selling subscriptions, Wix allows you to sell digital products, like your artwork, or stream music and videos.