Creating a Wix Website: A Good Idea?
Last update: 26 August 2022 at 10:23 am
3.00/5Among the different website creation platforms, Wix is a player that is gaining more and more market share thanks to a very aggressive marketing strategy. The platform offers its visitors to create a free and personalized website in just a few clicks, Wix also offers paid packages that allow the user to have more possibilities of customization as well as other services to not only create a Wix website but also to improve their original site.
Is creating a site with Wix a good idea? What are the things to know? We will, through this article, go through the important points to know.
Wix, what is it?
It is a web platform dedicated to website creation and hosting, one of the most popular that advocates the easy and free! The Wix concept quickly seduced most amount of novices all over the world. The latest figures announced 200 million users spread over the five continents.
All the power of drag and drop
Drag and drop, this intuitive technology by which one takes an element and places it at the desired location on the site interface, is probably the key to this success. This success led the Wix company to be listed on the stock exchange in 2013. For the record, the company was founded in 2006 by Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami, and Giora Kaplan and is currently headquartered in Tel Aviv.
Free and paid features
A few drag-and-drop and two-three clicks are enough for Wix to offer you a site in HMTL 5, a professional showcase, or a small e-commerce site quite amazing, and this for free without any technical knowledge. Like its main competitor WordPress, Wix has its App Market which will help you find very practical features to boost your website (integration of a chat, contact form, newsletter, etc.).
However, Premium packages are available for those who wish to access more comprehensive services.
Advantages of Wix
The Wix platform has more than one asset that has won over millions of Internet users and amateur users, let’s discover them together.
- Very easy to handle. Customize colors, fonts, add text and images, and create layouts using drag and drop. Wix is the only platform that has based its use on this technology. If HTML and CSS don’t talk to you, it doesn’t matter, since you won’t have to write in any computer language.
- Totally free. Free “templates” or Wix site templates are available with very interesting designs. You can go to the end of your website creation, until it goes online, without having to pay a single cent: a professional website and design at the key.
- No need to find a host. On Wix, you create and host your website directly on their cloud.
- All Wix templates are responsible and this is an asset, at a time when the percentage of Internet users who surf only on smartphones or tablets is increasing at high speed.
- Possibility to extend the functionalities of the site thanks to the App Market and its 150 applications including the Blog function.
- Websites created on Wix are in HTML5, their natural referencing and their loading time could be qualified as good.
- The Wix paid packages offer a very good price/performance ratio
- An ideal platform to quickly have a showcase site or a small e-commerce
- An extensive French assistance center
Disadvantages of Wix
Considerable improvements have been made to the Wix platform in recent years. Nevertheless, some weak points remain troublesome:
- You will have no access to the code or database. The day you decide to stop hosting your site on Wix, you say goodbye to everything.
- Almost zero flexibility. Your company is in full growth, you need an even more powerful site. Know that migrating your site to another CMS platform such as WordPress, for example, will be a real obstacle course that may discourage you.
- With the free offer, you will always have banner ads at the top and bottom of your site and a domain name that does not look very professional in the form monsite.wix.com. This will take credibility away from your business.
If you find that your business would not benefit from a Wix website, there are always other open-source platforms and agencies specialised in Drupal Development in the United Kingdom or other countries for example.
The interest of CRM for small companies
As a reminder, CRM or customer relationship management in French is a service intended for companies to create, maintain and consolidate a relationship with their customers. In concrete terms, CRM will be your tool to more easily manage communication with your customers or potential customers and develop optimized loyalty strategies. Most of the time, this takes the form of software in its own right, expensive that was not accessible to VSE’s and SMEs.
Several CRM features and a single dashboard
That time is over because Wix now offers in its App Market many CRM solutions from the simplest to the most advanced, such as collecting comments on social networks, creating and sending newsletters, collecting visitor actions on the website, or tracking sales and sending invoices.
The strong point of the concept is the unique dashboard that gathers all the information in one place. With these CRM features very easy to implement and dashboard, Wix scores a point with small businesses and professionals who have no technical knowledge and a limited budget.
Features available
Wix, which is a pioneer in the world of website creation platforms offers a range of clever features in free mode. Thus, you will be able to:
Personalize and play on appearance
- By adding parallax effects
- Allows you to broadcast a different background image for each page of the site
- By activating and editing from a dedicated interface the mobile version of the site
Communicate easily with visitors
- Thanks to the contact form or the chat
- With survey and newsletter features (Wix Shoutout)
- The blog, RSS feed subscription
- Propose social network sharing buttons (Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Google+) and comments
Rely on the “wow” effect of the media
- With full-screen video on the home page
- Thanks to the possibility of creating various image galleries with yours or the free collection of the site
- By importing social networks, your published photos or YouTube and Vimeo videos
Add ultra-convenient features
- Google Maps
- A search engine with the “Site Search” application
- The visit counter
- The countdown to the announcement of a future event
Integrate web marketing-oriented functions
- The creation of landing pages as part of a Facebook or Google Adwords campaign, for example
- Popups to capture the attention
- By adding your Adsense advertising blocks to generate extra revenue.
Wix technical aspects at a glance
Design & template
On the Wix platform, you will have the choice among more than 500 templates. And the least we can say is that Wix strikes hard with superb designs, most of them for 0 €. The models are classified by category and then subcategory according to the type of activity: catering, fashion, and beauty, health, and well-being, service companies, etc.
For ease of selection, you can display only new templates, popular templates, or blank templates. And, when you have selected your template, all that remains is to bring your personal touch with your colors, your photos, your texts, etc.
Page Editor
Wix offers a complete page editor whose only limit is your imagination. You can add a page according to predefined or blank templates, then you are also free to organize the tree structure of your pages as you wish.
After the creation stage, comes the editing of the page itself. You can edit everything: the name, the title, any subtitles, add content (text, images, galleries, buttons, etc..) with the famous drag and drop. Then, each content can be customized from a specific interface. For example, to format your texts, it is like in a Word editor.
Third-Party Applications
The Wix App Market is simply fabulous with more than 160 external applications quite relevant. We find for example MailChimp, one of the most known emailing solutions, Callback, so visitors can ask you to call them back or even appointment managers. Some are free, but the majority of third-party applications are not free.
Wix and SEO
In order to optimize your site for search engines, you will find in the “SEO” tab of each page, the basic tools to edit the title, meta description, and keywords.
From your Wix table, you also have access to an SEO control tool that helps you improve the referencing of your website.
Also, note that the sitemap.xml files and the robot.txt file are generated automatically, they remain viewable, but cannot be modified. However, you can choose whether or not to index a specific page.
Of capital importance for your referencing, the Wix platform gives you the possibility to configure 301 redirections.
And finally, as you know, search engines prefer websites that have a fast loading time, Wix sites are rather in the good average.
Integration of third-party tools
Adding third-party tools such as social networks like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Google+ or linking your website to a Spotify or Soundcloud account is almost child’s play. Other tools such as Google Analytics are available, but only to those who have opted for Premium packages.
Wix for an e-commerce site?
Yes, it is possible, whatever Wix template you have chosen. To add an online store to your site, you should start with the eCommerce package. You will then have access to the WixStores tool that allows you to create an online store, manage your items and categories, configure payments, and of course, manage your orders.
The strong points
- Product presentation
- The setting of delivery costs per item
- Intuitive basket management, the addition of discount codes
- Choice among several payment methods, including offline payment and major online payments such as PayPal
Weak points
- Payment by credit card is not offered
- The tool proposes only 2 variations per article, which is rather restrictive
- There is no default comment area per product
- Manual sending of order validation emails
Different plans for different web objectives
As explained in the introduction, creating a Wix website is free. Nevertheless, the company offers different types of paid plans that could interest you depending on your objectives on the web. These plans, summarized below, differ mainly by the choice of “templates” they offer and the possible personalized hosting offers.
- Connect Domain at 4.08 €/month. The cheapest and most basic offer for a custom domain name, 500 MB storage, and 1 GB bandwidth. Careful, you’ll still have the Wix ad on it.
- eCommerce at 24,90 €/month excluding promotion. Perfect for small businesses that want to have an online store. You will have a domain name, 20 GB of storage, unlimited bandwidth
- Combo at 12,90 €/month excluding promotion. This intermediate offer allows you to have a domain name, 3 GB of storage, and a bandwidth of 2 GB.
- Unlimited at 22,90 €/month excluding promotion. It is a package for self-employed and entrepreneurs with a domain name, 10 GB of storage, and unlimited bandwidth.
Note that these rates are displayed without promotion and that it is important to go to the Wix site to see discounts ranging from -35% to -50%.
Our opinion
Basic features for your business
To create a Wix website, the platform is undeniably a sufficient tool, to have a professional Internet site starting from a responsive template adapted to your sector of activity. The additional functionalities and the natural referencing which are nevertheless basic will be of great help to you and will even allow you to launch your e-commerce site.
Without really being able to exploit the creation of an Internet site with Wix, the result is appreciable to obtain a beautiful image of mark online.
Limited customization
If the company offers you a wide range of templates categorized according to your sector or your type of company, the customization of a Wix website remains limited. Templates are certainly classified by theme, you will certainly find one that corresponds to your activity, nevertheless, customization is very quickly restricted. The platform has been specially designed for non-technical profiles and the possibility of customization is therefore felt.
And as it is impossible to access the source code of the site, no web agency or web developer can bring the personal touch that will make yours a website apart. With a Wix site, unfortunately, you’ll have to say goodbye to custom-made! Your website will remain basic and therefore may not stand out and help you differentiate yourself from your competition.
