Wix is a fantastic platform and can make for a great website experience – here are the pros and cons if you’re interested in the website builder.
Free Website
Wix allows you to immediately set up your website without spending a dime. With the free service, you will receive a Wix domain, free hosting, brand ads, 1GB bandwidth, and 500MB storage, which should be just enough for a small operation. Some Wix alternatives offer similar packages but Wix is usually featured as the best website builder in the market.
However, as your business keeps growing, you will probably require additional functionalities, bigger bandwidth, and larger storage. You have the option of upgrading to any of the 5 premium plans offered with prices that range from $4.50 to $24.50 per month.
The premium offerings all come with free hosting, premium support, Google Analytics, over 500MB storage, domain connection, and no setup fee.
Online Store and Shopping cart Functionality
Wix’s eCommerce Module highlights its functionality as an online retail platform. If you subscribe to the module, you can build your e-store that you can use to sell your products complete with shopping cart functionalities such as custom checkout pages; product catalogs; inventory management; direct payment support with credit cards or PayPal wallets; shopping and delivery; as well as tax handling.
Wix will not only help you build an attractive online store but also will do much of the heavy lifting when it comes to your e-commerce business – from ordering to checkout to fulfilment, which makes it an end-to-end shopping cart solution.
Hundreds of Design Templates
If you choose Wix, you will get access to hundreds of templates (500+), for any business you have. Whether you have an online store or business and services relating to design, music, video, photography, events, accommodation, food and restaurant, fashion and beauty, health and wellness, community and education, creative arts, and many more.
Wix has them covered with the designer-made templates that are mobile-optimized and responsive. You also have the option of fully modifying and customizing them with your branding or any other elements you desire such as animation, video, or image backgrounds.
It is worth noting that you must first pick the right template when starting out since once you have chosen the initial selection, you won’t have the option of swapping it completely with a new one. Similarly, if you are serious about branding, you need to develop your own design. After all, free templates must never be your main basis for choosing a platform.
Ideal for Small and Medium-Sized Businesses
115 million people from all over the world use Wix to create their websites as well as manage their online businesses. It is designed to meet the needs of sole website owners as well as small and medium sized businesses that wish to build attractive-looking and responsive websites without spending too much.
Setting up a free Wix website is as simple as signing up, choosing from over 100 designer made templates, using the drag-and-drop editor to change and add website elements, and going live. You can do it all within a few minutes. You won’t even have to worry about complications bogging you down.
AI-Guided Design
Wix lets you create your website in a variety of ways. If you want to do it your way, you can use the Wix Editor, but if you are a professional that likes tinkering with advanced coding features to build your website you can use the Wix Code.
Alternatively, you can go almost hands free by using the Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) that instantly builds a customized website for you complete with professional images, text, as well as other elements depending on your answers to a few questions pertaining to who you are and what you do. If you are satisfied with what was created by the ADI, just click to go live. If you aren’t satisfied, you are free to edit the design anytime using the editor.
The algorithm-created designs are clearly for those pressed for time or beginners and not for top-level designers that need highly advanced tool sets or more technical features.
Extensive Integration
About 200 services and apps integrate with the Wix platform thus making it easier for you to grow your business and build your brand. Wix works with leading analytics, CRM, sales and marketing, e-commerce, accounting, help desk, communication, email, calendar, online storage, social media, order fulfilment, online payment processors and gateway, and many others, all of which can be managed right from within the Wix dashboard.
All the third-party services and apps integrate seamlessly with Wix without any connectivity issues, which gives you one powerful, extended platform.
Reliable Web Hosting and Domain Service
The website you build using Wix comes with free hosting through secure, reliable, and SEO-optimized cloud web servers. Wix web hosting is built with both security and speed in mind, which ensures that your website is up all the time and loads quickly, which is a critical consideration if you would like your visitors to stay on.
You also have the option of managing your online presence by having a custom domain name. Wix actually allows you to choose from 33 top domain names. You are free to choose the domain name that’s right for you. The domain is an important consideration since it gives your business credibility and is the first thing seen by people when they search for your website.
Web hosting is free for all the plans, but you will only get to connect your existing domain if you have one, or get your free custom domain with the premium plans.
World-Class Support
Wix is known throughout the industry for having one of the most professional and responsive support teams that can be reached via phone, email, tickets, or live chat. The vendor has a comprehensive knowledge center filled with training materials, resources, and articles on just about every area of the products, its capabilities, as well as its features. You can see this is the case in this neutral appraisal of Shopify vs Wix.
Mobile Platform
You can also use Wix to design a mobile website too. However, it requires a manual approach to do this. You have to take out or hide elements in the website that clutter the mobile layout, which is why this requires patience.
Perhaps, Wix will soon come up with an automated process that creates a mobile version of your website design and synchronizes both versions whenever you update content. That’s one thing you will notice about Wix, it keeps proactively improving over time.