Wix Website Builder Review
Wix Website Builder Review
Wix Best Website Builder Right Now
Pros
- Remarkably intuitive Editor X interface
- Hundreds of templates for specific businesses and other uses
- Good mobile-site-building tools
- Excellent uptime and customer service support
- Free option
Cons
- No built-in statistics
- The online store not included with
- Doesn't let you switch templates
| Wix Website Builder Specification | |
|---|---|
| Free Version Offered | Yes |
| Web Store | Yes |
| Blogging Tool | Yes |
| Download Selling | No |
| Basic Image Editing | Yes |
| Site Portability | No |
| Site Membership | Yes |
| Unlimited Monthly Data Transfers With All Plans | No |
| Unlimited Storage With All Plans | No |
Wix Website Builder Review
If you want to get a website online with minimal effort and maximum creative freedom, look no further than Wix. It offers exceptional features like online storage for your site assets, e-commerce tools, great video backgrounds, title animations, mobile apps, and even a useful, free service tier. Plus, the new Editor X interface stands tall as one of the most intuitive, slick, and powerful in the ever-growing field of website-building services we've tested. In short, Wix is an easy-to-use, multifunctional tool that's an easy alternative to Editors' Choices alongside Duda and Gator.
Wix Getting Started
Wix is a website builder, an easy-to-use tool that lets you quickly build an online presence via a drag-and-drop interface - no coding or FTP knowledge required. All you need is an email address to get started with Wix's web hosting. If you don't mind ads, 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'll need to upgrade to a paid account. These range from a $14-per-month combo account (3GB storage and 2GB monthly data transfer) to a full, $39-per-month VIP plan (35GB storage, a domain name, unlimited monthly data transfers, a professional logo). , and priority support). Business and e-commerce plans cost between $23 and $49 per month if you want a shopping cart and other money-making features. Lastly, there are enterprise-level plans that require a bespoke quote from a Wix representative and start at $500 per month. For a complete list of account types, see Wix's Premium Account Grid.
That pricing is reasonable. Duda's paid plans start at $14 per month, while Squarespace's options start at $12 per month. Weebly has a free option like Wix, but an introductory-grade personal plan for only $6 per month. Weebly's top business plans are $44, $40, and $26 per month, respectively. A less expensive exception is Gator, which starts at $3.84 per month and goes up to just $9.22 per month for its eCommerce plan.
After you create an account, your search for a common site type - business, designer, event, blog, etc. - and then choose whether you want to use a site template or have Wix automatically use artificial design intelligence. You have to build a site (ADI). About ADI in a bit. There are 12 top-level site types, each with several subcategories. For example, there is a restaurant option with subcategories that include a bar, cafe, and catering. For our Wix testing site, we chose the Blog category, which offers 70 beautiful template options.
Overall, Wix offers hundreds of template options more than Squarespace or Weebly. Many are free, although some business options require an eCommerce level subscription. Each template has a full demo, so you can get a feel for the theme before you start editing. The template preview helpfully shows you how your site will look on a smartphone screen as well.
One downside: Unlike Squarespace or Weebly, Wix doesn't let you switch templates after you choose one. This is a significant detriment against the service because if you want to give your online destination a facelift you need to create a separate site and transfer your files to new pages.
Wix Web Design Options
After you've chosen a template and begin 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 (which gives you third-party site widgets), view your uploads, and start blogging. You can easily minimize or hide these controls if you need to edit the area under them.
Wix includes all the usual options for text, media, social media widgets, buttons, shapes, and more that you'd expect from a website builder. If there's something you want that isn't included by default, check out the App Market. You can also embed HTML, and easily add SoundCloud or Spotify playlists to give visitors to your site a treat to their ears.
Editing the template design is a cinch. Simply click on any element, and you'll see resizing handles and dragging buttons. You have a lot more freedom to place objects where you want them, compared to Weebly or Squarespace. Double-click the text to edit and format it. When you move the object around, guides appear when they are in line with other objects to help with alignment. A toolbar provides tools for resizing and arranging objects, including shape match, alignment, and overlap options. If you select more than one object, you can move them around the page at once. We like that any object on load can be animated, with effects like bounce-in, glide-in, and spin-in. Overall, Wix offers an excellent basic editor.
One thing that impressed us about the Wix site-building interface is that it uses a right-click context menu. Most other builders don't do anything with the right-click, except launch browser options that don't help with site-building. Wix lets you use right-click to convert images or edit text. You can customize the page design to your heart's content, including the number of columns, their size, and their alignment. Additionally, you can easily add new pages, and drag them around to change the navigation hierarchy of the site. Wix lets you password protect particular pages or require subscription sign-up or sign-in to access the content.
Wix Enter Editor X
Wix recently added its new Editor X tool as a website-building option. This feature just came out of beta, so you start with a small number of templates (only 27 during our trial period). Templates are cleaner and more design-focused than their native editor counterparts. More importantly, they are responsive templates that you use with Wix's classic editor interface. There's a built-in demo of Editor X to show you the ropes, as well as a link to the Academy X website. The latter option shows the power at your fingertips via text and video tutorials.
Editor X works more like Adobe Photoshop or InDesign than a traditional site builder. Layers let you stack elements, while Masters lets you quickly copy a design element to other pages. Click on a text element, and you are presented with a series of condensed menu options to change the size, position, anchors, and other items. The right-click functionality of the original editor is replicated here, launching a context-sensitive menu when activated. If you're working on a responsive website, Editor X starts with three different page sizes that you can toggle between to see your site's appearance. You can also add more breakpoints, different resolutions that become part of your toggleable options. Overall, moving elements around on your site using Editor X is much faster, even compared to Wix's already accessible website builder.
Typography and color swatches are available, and you can save your options for designing libraries. This gives you the ability to quickly change the overall color of the page, or perhaps the header text, without losing your previous design choices. Editor X is also built for multi-user collaboration, with a way to let the design library group test different ideas without throwing anything away.
Wix Website Builder Extras
Wix's main account administrative interface is more clear than Weebly's, too, with a full-page list of your sites. Click on one, and the site dashboard appears with a side rail of site options buttons. You also see a feed of site activity, and there are buttons for common tasks.
One disappointment is the lack of included site-traffic reporting. However, you can use the free Web-Stat app or set up a separate Google Analytics account (which requires a paid account level) for this functionality. Web stats are very informative, telling you where the visits came from and what display, computer, and browser the visitor used - even for free users. Premium account holders can add Facebook Pixel reporting.
Wix has several features that improve the hosting experience, including Wix Fitness, Wix Turbo and Ascend by Wix. If you're updating a site that you haven't touched since the introduction of Wix Turbo to improve page load speeds, you'll need to go through a site-updating process. For our 17-page test site, the process took a minute, and the site looked the same after the process. Wix Fitness is a site-building framework that caters to, you guessed it, fitness entrepreneurs. It makes promotion, scheduling, client management and even selling workout videos online easy. Wix Turbo is a performance technology that Wix says will improve site-loading speeds. According to the company, "Wix sites will be optimized for quick JavaScript execution times and use the latest CSS functionality."
Ascend by Wix is "a suite of 20 products that lets entrepreneurs start, manage and promote businesses directly from the Wix web development platform." Tools include chat, site membership, invoicing, workflow, tasks, automation, and price quotes.
Wix Artificial Design Intelligence
We tried using Wix ADI to build a test local business website. It dramatically simplifies site-building, it's surprisingly fun to use, and it offers a lot of handholding. You begin by answering some basic questions about the site's purpose, features, location, and title. It then searches for content related to your business or activity on the web. You can optionally add social accounts like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Next, you choose a style, let ADI create a color palette based on your logo, and click Create My Site.
It takes some time to complete its automatic design. It tells you what it's doing through the process, such as adding menus and customizing your mobile site. We tested using information from a local bagel shop, and ADI created a site that looked better than the actual site in that place! We're also impressed with a site we built for an artist friend, who was impressed with how well the automated design worked. After ADI creates the initial site, you customize things like boilerplate text and sales items. If you're not interested in designing your site, Wix ADI is worth a shot.
Wix Working With Photos and Videos
Wix has one 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 for you. Other services force you to re-upload photos if you want to use them at any other location on your site.
Wix also lets you add pictures from other online sources like Flickr and Facebook. Ditto for the video. You can use video in places where others only let you use photos, such as the main theme background. The service also provides a plethora of stock images and videos to use on your site. Much of this content is free, but you can also purchase reasonably priced stock images from Bigstock.
You get full photo editing and enhancement capabilities with the integrated Aviary Editor. It's easy to add a link to an image, whether it's external or on a page on your site. You can also add borders and animations like fade-in, and choose from resizing behaviors like auto crop, center, stretch, and fit.
You can set the video to auto-play in a loop over and over as the page loads, and as mentioned you can add a video as your background image.
Making Money On Wix
Wix offers rich e-commerce capabilities. The Store element from the main toolbar adds a shop page with a product gallery pre-populated with sample products that you replace with your products. You need an e-commerce premium plan to receive payments. Web stores can have multiple pages of their own, including, by default, a product page, shopping cart, and thank you page. Wix also offers customizable storefronts and recurring payment and subscription options, further expanding your money-making possibilities. There's an extensive product-editing panel, and you can group products by collection, and offer coupons. Credit card processing options include Stripe and Square, and you can accept PayPal and snail-mail cash. You can enter shipping and tax rules, but the built-in store doesn't help you figure these things out with UPS or FedEx integration.
The sale of digital downloads is now embedded in Wix; This is a handy option when you start adding a product to your store. You can also sell music through Wix's Music app without any transaction fees. The app can also play the music on your site, and it accepts MP3, WAV, FLAC, and ALAC file formats.
For marketing your stuff, 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 through forums, chat, invoicing, price quotes, and trigger actions. It also provides workflow organization tools. Ascend Inbox may collect your email and chat messages. Ascend offers SEO, social posting, and video tools as well as email marketing. Its automation includes things like sending customers reminders about outstanding invoices, and workflows are useful for lead follow-up and contact management. Its Task Tool saves you from having to use an external (though excellent) alternative like Asana. Lastly, it lets you create special pages and a members area with features like forums, store accounts, and user profiles. In short, Ascend brings together a lot of useful tools for web businesses.
Wix Blogging Tools
Adding a blog to your site is as easy as clicking a blog entry on the main Site Elements toolbar. You design your blog page layout like any other site page or choose a single-entry style or a no-header style. Subscriptions and comments are options you can offer to your readers. You can tag posts, and even display a tag cloud, RSS buttons, Facebook comments, and Disqus comments.
Wix has a different, simpler blog-posting interface, unlike Weebly, which uses the same webpage interface as for blogging. In Wix, you can add photos, galleries, videos, and of the course text, all formatted to suit your taste. You can schedule any post for later publication and designate it as Featured if you wish. Overall, it is a rich blogging tool with everything you need.
Wix Mobile Sites
Sites created in the native editor aren't responsive in the strict sense (meaning you can resize a browser to see it while squeezing its content to fit a smaller size), but that shouldn't worry site makers. Required: Wix produces mobile versions of your sites. Pass Google's test for mobile-friendliness. Tap the smartphone icon at the top of the site editor, and you can switch to the mobile editing view.
By default, our site had the "Make your site mobile friendly" option checked, and because of this, we didn't have to do anything to get it to work well on phones. Still, Wix gives you the option to edit the mobile view if you're not happy with what it creates automatically. In particular, you can hide elements that you do not want to appear on the mobile screen. You can also add a mobile action bar so that visitors can email or call you with the tap of a finger.
That said, Editor X gives you the ability to design fully responsive sites. Not only are there fluid size options for certain elements, but the breakpoints feature also lets you see how your site looks at any resolution. CSS Grid and Flexbox are also available in Editor X, as well, ensuring that your site transforms on any screen.
On the other hand mobile, Wix offers apps that let you interact with site visitors and edit store items such as products and prices. You can also upload photos from your smartphone, but you can't create and edit sites from the app, as you can with Weebly and Jimdo's apps.
Wix Code
Wix Code allows site builders - even those with no programming experience - to add features to their websites that in the past required familiarity with database development. The feature is still labeled as beta but is available in all Wix accounts. Wix Code consists of five tools: database, dynamic pages, external APIs, forms, and managed JavaScript.
Databases, dynamic pages, and forms do not require formal knowledge of coding. Using these prefab databases is similar to filling in a spreadsheet. Custom forms and user input controls are useful for gathering information from site visitors. For example, a food site might let users submit dishes.
Data-driven dynamic pages look like they're meant for developers, and in fact, using these capabilities significantly increases the difficulty of site design. It simply means that your site's pages are built on the fly based on entries in the table. A college course page designed in Wix can display separate pages for each course, all using the same template. Duda's Insights feature, which lets you send different content to audiences based on criteria such as time of day, date, location, and multiple past visits, offers similar dynamic customization. The Duda feature is easy to use, but it is not as powerful as Wix Code.
Wix also includes new APIs and JavaScript features that let actual web developers use Wix to design sites and then go under the hood to extend functionality. They can do this through a fully managed JavaScript development environment and by calling external APIs to leverage web services and enhance the behavior of the site.
When we first tapped the Wix Codes menu, a panel appeared with an explanatory video and links to resources to go along with the feature. It adds complexity to the site-building interface, adding backend and database entries to your site structure sidebar. Among them, you can add modules and collections respectively. The latter is similar to spreadsheets in that you add specific types of data, such as images or text.
To enable things like dynamic pages, forms, or member-generated content, a wizard helps you fill in the information needed to build a usable archive. You can either add dynamic content to a page, dynamically created pages, or index pages that you draw from a database. While all of this is powerful, it pushes Wix away from the easy site builder category towards being a developer tool. People who like to keep things simple never need to turn on these developer tools. We managed to create dynamic pages with an index for some of our reviews, and while there are a few hoops to jump through, that was the result we wanted.
Wix Excellent Uptime
Website uptime is an important element of web hosting. If your site is shut down, customers or clients will not be able to find you or access your products or services. It is in your best interest to find a reliable web host that can keep your site up and running. Otherwise, customers may go somewhere else - and they may never come back.
To evaluate reliability, we use a website-monitoring tool to track our test site's uptime over two weeks. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings the website and sends an email if you are unable to contact the site for at least one minute. Data shows that Wix, a website builder that also serves as a web hosting provider, was incredibly stable during the testing period. It didn't go down even once. You can consider Wix to be a solid foundation for your website.
Wonderful Wix Support
Wix Code allows site builders - even those with no programming experience - to add features to their websites that in the past required familiarity with database development. The feature is still labeled as beta but is available in all Wix accounts. Wix Code consists of five tools: database, dynamic pages, external APIs, forms, and managed JavaScript.
Databases, dynamic pages, and forms do not require formal knowledge of coding. Using these prefab databases is similar to filling in a spreadsheet. Custom forms and user input controls are useful for gathering information from site visitors. For example, a food site might let users submit dishes.
Data-driven dynamic pages look like they're meant for developers, and in fact, using these capabilities significantly increases the difficulty of site design. It simply means that your site's pages are built on the fly based on entries in the table. A college course page designed in Wix can display separate pages for each course, all using the same template. Duda's Insights feature, which lets you send different content to audiences based on criteria such as time of day, date, location, and multiple past visits, offers similar dynamic customization. The Duda feature is easy to use, but it is not as powerful as Wix Code.
Wix also includes new APIs and JavaScript features that let actual web developers use Wix to design sites and then go under the hood to extend functionality. They can do this through a fully managed JavaScript development environment and by calling external APIs to leverage web services and enhance the behavior of the site.
When we first tapped the Wix Codes menu, a panel appeared with an explanatory video and links to resources to go along with the feature. It adds complexity to the site-building interface, adding backend and database entries to your site structure sidebar. Among them, you can add modules and collections respectively. The latter is similar to spreadsheets in that you add specific types of data, such as images or text.
To enable things like dynamic pages, forms, or member-generated content, a wizard helps you fill in the information needed to build a usable archive. You can either add dynamic content to a page, dynamically created pages, or index pages that you draw from a database. While all of this is powerful, it pushes Wix away from the easy site builder category towards being a developer tool. People who like to keep things simple never need to turn on these developer tools. We managed to create dynamic pages with an index for some of our reviews, and while there are a few hoops to jump through, that was the result we wanted.
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