Wix Review 2024

Edited by Tony Moles

Updated


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Bottom line: I was originally a bit skeptical of Wix website builder, but I found that Wix provides a solid platform that enables even beginners to create a comprehensive and fairly sophisticated website without any technical background. While its pricing may not be as cheap as some other platforms we reviewed, the features make it a very strong offering in the automatic website builder category

Who should choose Wix? Businesses with limited budgets and technical expertise seeking a fully capable e-commerce website.

What we like about Wix

  • Many templates: While it does not have the extensive template selection you can get from an open-source tool such as WordPress, Wix provides enough choices to satisfy most businesses. There are over 875 different themes arranged into useful categories.
  • Easy to use: Building a site with Wix requires no technical ability. I found that it was simple to put together a professional site using its drag-and-drop functionality.
  • Built-in marketing: Wix seems to understand its users want to run a business. For this reason, Wix has provided a wide range of marketing tools, including SEO, social media posting, and email marketing.
  • Solid security: Wix has provided a secure backbone and employs a large staff of security professionals to ensure your site is not hacked.
  • Significant knowledge base: Many providers often overlook good documentation, but not Wix. Ample information and guidance on using the platform’s wide range of features is only ever a few clicks away; a strong point for Wix’s target customers.
  • Speed: The Wix website builder runs very quickly. Sites created using this tool run at a considerable pace. Considering that a slow website can drive away users, the speed at which content renders on Wix is a definite bonus.

What fell flat

  • Limits to customization: While I like that Wix is easy to use for many people, it can be frustrating if you want to bring your business up to the next level and provide custom development. There’s no real way of getting under the hood. Also, if you wish to change templates, you may discover that content that works under one theme may not easily transfer to another.
  • Cost of good analytics: While there are some good tools for analyzing your site traffic, you will need to upgrade to a more expensive plan if you want detail.
  • Non-transferability: Wix uses a proprietary format for managing your site, so if at some point you want to move your site to a different provider, you will find that this is unfortunately not possible. If you start your site with Wix, you are stuck with it.

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Hostinger

The easiest option

Starts at $2.49 per month

  • Fail-proof setup
  • Great for beginners
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Bluehost

For new WordPress sites

Starts at $2.95 per month

  • Guided onboarding
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  • 24/7 support

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Best security and scalability

Starts at $3.75 per month

  • All types of hosting
  • Enhanced security tools
  • Affordable as you grow

Wix’s Editorial Review

Wix’s website builder is a strong contender for beginners creating a website — it’s a solid website builder with helpful features and good ease of use. 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.

While Wix was a bit weak when it came to support, the documentation on the site was excellent and good enough for many people and businesses to construct a usable and easy-to-manage e-commerce website.

See how we rate website builders.

Plans & Pricing

Jump to Review

  • Combo ($16 per month)
  • Unlimited ($22 per month)
  • Pro ($27 per month)
  • VIP ($45 per month)

Features

Jump to Review

  • Store design
  • Product upload
  • Abandoned cart recovery
  • SEO
  • Payment processing
  • Mobile support
  • Inventory management
  • Email marketing
  • Reporting and analytics
  • Shipping options

Security

Jump to Review

  • Security staff
  • Compliance
  • Physical access controls
  • Secure sites and transactions
  • Monitoring
  • Third-party access

Support

Jump to Review

  • Email
  • Community forum
  • Help center

Improvements

Jump to Review

  • Accept alternate payments
  • Prevent selling out-of-stock items
  • Coupons
  • New SEO learning hub
  • Automatic local business lookup

Plans and Pricing

Wix’s pricing plans are competitive. It is not the most inexpensive platform on the market, but it provides a wide range of features affordable for companies on a limited budget. Look at the details of each plan:

  • Combo–$16 per month
    • Good for: Personal website building
  • Unlimited–$22 per month
    • Good for: Entrepreneurs and freelancers
  • Pro–$27 per month
    • Good for: Small businesses
  • VIP–$45 per month
    • Good for: Small businesses, e-commerce

All of Wix’s website builder plans include hosting, a free custom domain for a year, free SSL certificate, and 24/7 customer care.

Wix plans and pricing

Features

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.

Wix home dashboard

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
  • Online programs

There are also groups:

  • Active communities
  • Restaurant table reservations
  • Food orders
  • Menus
  • Bands in town (for listing live events)
other tools that Wix offers

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 Product uploads

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.

Wix CSV Template

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.

Wix SEO Tools

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
  • 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 Payment processing settings

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 and debit cards
  • iDeal
  • PayNow
  • PayPal
  • 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.

Wix In Mobile View

Inventory management

Wix 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.

Wix Email Settings

Reporting and analytics

Wix 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.

Wix Shipping options

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.

Third-party logistics provider options include:

  • Amazon
  • Shipreadygo
  • Bigblue
  • ShipBob
  • eHouse App

Security

Wix has a wide range of security features, from a strong security team and full compliance with many international standards to physical access controls, SSL, and monitoring.

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.

Support

Wix claims to offer 24/7 customer support, but much of it is handled by documentation and AI. Still, Wix provides some fairly extensive documentation, including text files and video tutorials. But its help center appears to be mostly automated. Connecting with an actual human being appears to be somewhat difficult; there is no direct chat or phone channel.

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.

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.

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.

Recent Improvements

Wix is in the constant process of making improvements to its storefronts and the functionality provided on the “back-end” Wix editor used by merchants. While it’s impossible to list all of its recent improvements, here are a few notable enhancements to the product line.

  • 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) or other sales promotion items at checkout. Coupon promo codes 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 can now find you better with search engine searches.

Compare Wix 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 other website builders. Below you can see how Wix compares against other providers.

Website Builder

Pricing + Basic Plan Features

Wix logo

Wix

$16 per month

  • Unlimited products
  • Free domain for one year
  • 2GB storage
  • Stream up to 30 minutes of video
  • 800+ templates

Consider Wix if: 

You need more design template options. Wix offers far more (and better) predesigned templates to get you started

$23 per month

  • Award-winning design templates
  • Mailchimp integration
  • Access to raw code
  • Marketing tools
  • 0% to 3% transaction fee

Consider Squarespace for: 
Modern templates; easy template switching

$1.95 per month

  • Free domain
  • Basic hosting
  • Free SSL
  • Site analytics
  • Drag-and-drop site builder

Consider Web.com if:
You want an easy-to-use website builder and you are just getting started with your first website or ecommerce store

Frequently Asked Questions About Wix

How much does Wix cost?

Wix has e-commerce plans starting at $16 monthly, though this is only for the base-level plan. You can upgrade to more costly plans to gain access to other features, such as drop-shipping and better reporting.

Do you need to be a designer or developer to use Wix?

Developer experience is not necessary for using Wix. It might be a liability as developers might become frustrated at the inability to truly customize at the code level.

Wix is designed for those with little to no technical background. Designer skills are unnecessary, as you can get a lot out of the basic themes available.

If you wish to customize themes, it might be good to have a sense of what does and does not look good, but overall, you do not need to be a designer.

What do you need to start selling on Wix?

The basic plan lets you start selling your products immediately. However, as with any business, it is good to have a well-worked plan on what you wish to accomplish, for example, a product or service you already plan to offer.

But if you don’t have a clear idea, the mid- and upper-level tiers allow you to do drop-shipping, so you don’t necessarily need to have a product in hand.

Can you use your domain name with Wix if you already have a website?

You can repoint your existing domain to a Wix site. If you already have a business set up, you might find it best to fully set up your Wix site before doing so. Also, remember that because Wix is a closed-source platform, you will be unable to move your site to another host if you change your mind.

How many products can you sell on Wix?

Wix has no limit to the number of products you can sell on your site.

Can you have multiple stores on Wix?

Technically, you can, but each would have to be a different account. Wix does not allow multiple stores under a single domain.

Can you have multiple domains on Wix?

Yes, Wix will allow you to have unlimited domains pointing to a single store. These need to be Wix domains, though you can have up to six domains purchased elsewhere pointing to your site.

How I Rated Wix

At Digital.com, we know how important it is to test products thoroughly and compare how they measure against the industry leaders. I spent hours familiarizing myself with Wix’s dashboard, setup process, website builder, and all of its features. While my definition of “easy to use” may differ from others, I approached this as though I was new to website builders and compared it to my experience with some of the top site builders we’ve also reviewed.

This comprehensive overview of Wix can quickly answer whether it’s the right website builder for you. We also drilled down to specific features, so you can have a more detailed look at features or services. I gave more weight to some parameters, including features, security, support, pricing, ease of use, and how Wix has improved since our last review.

I test website builders based on the following factors:

  • Customization options: Can you change the look and feel of a template or add your own code?
  • Ease of use: Is the navigation intuitive with built-in tools, such as an in-app photo editor?
  • Value: Can you get a free plan or trial to give the builder a test drive? Are there extensive features on paid plans that justify the cost?
  • Security: What does the website builder do to keep your site and your customers’ data safe?
  • Templates: Are the templates attractive, updated, and generally high quality? Can you find many to choose from?
  • Support: Can you get help when needed, whether it’s from a human or support center articles?
  • Recent improvements: Has the builder done anything lately to step up its offerings?

Learn more about our review methodology.

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