Video: Wix Review

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Video transcript

Hey all, Matt here from Style Factory, the go-to site for website building and ecommerce advice.

In this short Wix review, I’m going to break down the key pros and cons of the platform, giving you five key reasons to use Wix, and five key reasons to avoid it.

And at the end of the video, I’ll highlight some key alternative platforms that you might want to consider if you feel that Wix isn’t the right choice for you.

But before I dive in, I’d just like to invite you to like this video, hit subscribe and click the notifications bell. This helps us out and gives you easy access to a host of useful website building resources.

Ok, so let’s dive in with a look at the five key reasons to use Wix.

One — you can use Wix entirely for free

Unlike a lot of competing website building tools, Wix can be used for free indefinitely.

Now to be fair, the Wix free plan is pretty basic — you can’t sell products with it, it doesn’t let you make use of a custom domain name and it places Wix ads prominently on your site.

But it does nonetheless let you build a simple online presence for free, and gives you an easy way to try the platform out.

Two — a huge number of templates is available for Wix

When you create a website with hosted solutions like Wix, you typically use a predesigned template or ‘theme’ as the starting point for your design.

The good news is that Wix gives you far more templates to choose from than most other website builders. There are over 800 templates available from Wix, which is significantly more than the number provided by key competitors Shopify, Squarespace and BigCommerce.

Three — Wix gives you a good range of ecommerce features

Although Wix started life as a website building tool rather than a dedicated ecommerce platform, its ecommerce feature set has grown considerably over the past few years and it now gives website owners a pretty good set of tools for selling online — and at a competitive price point too.

You can use Wix with a wide range of payment gateways; it lets you display product prices in multiple currencies; it has a good abandoned cart saving tool; and it facilitates dropshipping.

Four — Wix gives you free email marketing tools

If you want to promote your business effectively, you’re going to need an email marketing tool.

The good news is that Wix gives you one for free — you can email 3 newsletters to up to 5,000 subscribers every month as part of your Wix subscription.

If you need to send more email campaigns, you can upgrade to one of Wix’s Ascend marketing plans.

Five — Wix lets you translate your site into over 100 languages

Unlike several key competing platforms, which either charge you extra to translate your website, or don’t offer the option to do so, Wix lets you translate your website into over 100 languages. You just add the free ‘Wix Multilingual’ app to create different language versions of your website.

Ok, so those are the 5 key reasons we think that you might like Wix.

But why might you want to avoid it?

One — Wix doesn’t use responsive design

Websites that use responsive design automatically resize themselves to suit the device they’re being viewed on — mobile, tablet or desktop.

Responsive design makes building websites easier, because you are only dealing with one version of your site. It is also encouraged by Google, and sites using it can receive preferential treatment in search results.

Now, although Wix lets you create mobile friendly sites easily enough, they’re not truly responsive.

In Wix, you’re dealing with two different versions of your site — a desktop one and a mobile one. This means that you’ll always have to check that both designs are working properly.

It would be better — as is the case with other platforms like Squarespace and Shopify, if Wix used responsive templates.

Two — multi-currency features could be better

Although displaying product prices in multiple currencies is possible in Wix, it doesn’t facilitate full multi-currency checkout.

This means that although your store visitors will see the prices of your products in their own currency when browsing your store, when it comes to actually buying them, the prices will be displayed in the store’s default currency. This can cause confusion and more abandoned carts.

So if international selling is important to you, there are better solutions available, especially Shopify. You’ll find a link to our Wix v Shopify comparison in the video description or click the link at the top right hand corner of this video to access it now.

Three — you can’t switch templates once you’ve built a Wix website

You’ll have to tread very carefully when selecting a Wix template because after you’ve picked one, you can’t switch to another one.

Although you’ll be able to change the color scheme and typefaces of your Wix template, if you want to change your design in more radical ways using a different template, you’ll need to rebuild your entire website.

Four — it’s not easy to export website content with Wix

It has to be said that the export options aren’t great in Wix. Although you can export products from your Wix site, there’s no easy way to get pages and blog posts out of the system.

This may cause headaches if you outgrow Wix and need to migrate to another platform down the line.

Five — there are storage and bandwidth limits to consider

Unfortunately, all Wix plans place limits on file storage, and its cheaper ones place restrictions on bandwidth too.

So, if you are planning on making large files available to your site visitors, or expect a lot of website traffic, watch out for that.

So those our are 5 key reasons to use Wix, and 5 key reasons to avoid it.

If Wix sounds like the right platform for you, you’ll find a link to its free plan in the video description.

If you’d like to check out some alternatives, there are lots to consider.

For a really good ‘general’ website building tool, we’d suggest taking a look at Squarespace. It creates fully responsive websites, its interface is intuitive, and it comes with some simple but very user-friendly ecommerce features too. You’ll find a link to the Squarespace free trial in the video description.

For more serious ecommerce projects, you might want to take a look at BigCommerce or Shopify. Both these platforms come with an excellent range of selling tools, and facilitate full checkout in your visitors’ own currency. Again, you’ll find links to both these platforms’ free trials in the video description.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this short Wix review — but there’s lots more about the platform to discover. You’ll find a really in-depth review of Wix on the Style Factory website — check out the link in the video description to access this.

But before you go, please do subscribe to our channel and hit the notifications bell.

And if you have any questions about Wix, just leave them in the comments section. We read them all and will do our best to help.