Learn/Free-Wix-Websites:-Pros-and-Cons

By [[User:|]] on This article is a work in progress. Have suggestions for this article? Email me.

Is the Wix Website Builder right for you?

When choosing a tool or content management system to build your website with, there are many things to consider. In addition to considering the price and how easy it is to use, it's important to know how much control you will have over your website and whether it will allow you to create a website that can rank well in search engines and follow SEO best practices.

Recently, I've heard from several people who built their websites using Wix.com, also known as the Wix Website Builder. These people had used our (AboutUs.org's) SEO analysis tools (like the Site Report or Home Page Analysis) and read our how-to articles about important SEO elements on a website like H1 headings or meta descriptions, and were desperately trying to figure out how to take our advice and make changes on their website to improve their SEO. Not being familiar with the Wix Website Builder, I sought out in search of instructions to help them and advice on whether Wix was right for them and their business.

Here's my review and analysis of Wix:

Pros:

Wix is a free way to create a website, and host it. It's hard to beat that price.

It's easy to create a website. You don't need to know any code, and it's a drag-and-drop interface to make a site.

Creating the attractive website you picture in your mind is simple.

You can ~~buy~~ lease a domain name (like YourBusinessName.com) and set your Wix website to live at that URL, instead of a URL like wix.com/yourpage or yourpage.wix.com.

You can add H1 headings (which can help your SEO) to a Wix website in a manual, non-coding way by placing it higher on the page and making it a large font. See for more instructions.

Cons:

Free Wix websites carry a small ad at the bottom that says it was created using Wix.com, and linking to Wix.com. You can see this at the bottom of this website.

Despite many claims on Wix.com that it creates search engine-friendly websites, it does some things that aren't:

In your Wix website, you can only set one title tag and meta description that applies to all of your website's pages. Duplicate title tags and meta descriptions aren't good for your SEO, and they're a missed opportunity to optimize each of your pages for the most appropriate keywords. For more info, read why duplicate meta descriptions and duplicate title tags aren't good.

Wix creates Flash-based websites, which aren't great for SEO because it's hard for search engines to see or read the text that's there, because it's often hidden in an image or animation. For more info, read our article Flashy Website Can Be Too Hot For Bots.

Wix has been around since 2006.

Want help using Wix? Visit Wix.com's support page.
Have a question about Wix? Post in their support forum.

Alternative Free Website Creators

There are many other free website builders out there. Compare Wix to others:

WordPress.com can be a good solution if you want more power to improve your SEO, and you still want a pretty easy tool to create and update a free website. Read WordPress: Built for SEO for more information. I would say that it isn't as easy as Wix or other drag-and-drop type website creators, but WordPress is still fairly simple to use.