Disadvantages Of Wix: Is It As Good As Advertised? | Rockstar Marketing (2024)

Website builders have been around for a long time now. At first, they weren’t sophisticated and offered little to no customisability. Fast forward to today, however, and you have yourself hundreds of different site builders, each with its unique set of capabilities and features.

Amongst these site builders is Wix, a platform that is used by over 200 million people around the world to express their ideas and build their online presence. Surely you’ve heard of them. Their ads are basically everywhere, but primarily on YouTube.

Today, Wix is one of the leaders in website creation for good reasons. They are one of the most versatile and advanced web builders on the market.

Still, our focus today is not going to be on the pros of using Wix. Instead, we’ll take a look at the disadvantages that a regular user might face when using the platform. Keep reading for more.

First off, what is a website builder?

Before we get into the cons of using Wix to build your website, let’s first briefly explain what a website builder is.

A website builder, as the name suggests, is a platform or service that allows you to create a website with little to no coding experience. You see, websites are nothing but a bunch of code, and back in the day, most websites were created by coders from scratch. Examples include GoDaddy, Weebly, Squarespace, Wix (of course!), and many more.

Then came the website builders and saved freelancers, small business owners and regular users a lot of time and money. You see, such solutions became so popular to the point where the website builders’ market was valued at around USD 1.46 billion in 2019. And it’s only going to rise by 2027.

The flexibility and customisation that is offered by these builders are simply unparalleled in the field. You can just drag and drop bits and pieces of the interface and create a good looking and well functional website.

All good, right? Not quite so…

The disadvantages of Wix

The disadvantages that a business owner or freelancer might face when using Wix can be significant. But this does not necessarily mean that you should not use Wix. Some of what we are about to discuss are issues that other website builders have too. Others might just be Wix-exclusive.

Without further a due, let’s get into the disadvantages of Wix.

1. Free plan’s Wix branding

We understand that in the world of website building and hosting, nothing is really free. However, if you happen to go with Wix and you decide to stick with their free plan, there is a catch, two actually.

The first is that your website domain name will include “Wix” in it. That is an understandable compromise for some small businesses, although we wouldn’t recommend it. The second catch, however, is that free hosted sites are forced to carry a Wix branding. That includes ads on every page of your website.

Imagine our website through a Wix free plan for example. For starters, our URL would be like this: rockstarmarketing.wix.com. Plus, each page on our website would include the following banner up top: This site was designed with the Wix.com website builder. Create your website today.

Now, if we’re being entirely honest, this is nothing obnoxious for any potential visitor of your website, but it is annoyingly obvious. So, if you’re serious about your business and its online presence, this is definitely a drawback.

2. Disadvantages of Wix: No interchangeable templates

Some might consider this nit-picking, but we do find it inconvenient that you can’t transfer content from one template to another on Wix. This isn’t exactly a serious problem. However, you should know this before you delve in and use the platform.

Make sure that whatever template you pick is your go-to because if you happen to change your mind later, you will have to manually transfer all of the content you have created initially from your old template to the new one.

3. No free tracking & analytics

Any reasonable website owner will often check to see how well their website is performing and one of the best and easiest ways to do this is by using Google Analytics or other similar tools.

Unfortunately for you, however, Wix only allows you to use these if you upgrade your plan. Yes, you’ve heard us right. Something as simple as a Google API connection can cost you a plan upgrade.

4. Hard to migrate data

Migrating data is one of the most difficult things that any webmaster might face when running a website. Even if something extremely small goes south, you might end up with a huge problem because of it.

Wix does not make this process easy for you. Instead, they make it more difficult than it actually is. Many people on the Internet believe this to be intentional, with the goal of keeping users on the platform.

With Wix, you’re going to have to migrate through RSS and manual save each image, then upload them to your desired CMS. Such a process can easily be automated with a plugin on a platform such as WordPress.

5. Disadvantages of Wix: Lacking SEO features

Wix allows you to access an SEO Wizard that supposedly helps you to maximise content optimisation. However, the amount of work or progress that this wizard is able to accomplish is very limited.

This is mainly due to the fact that Wix’s search engine optimisation features are a little behind in comparison to other means of website creation. The basics, such as page titles and descriptions, are there, but, other than that, there’s nothing to write home about.

Ahrefs, one of the leaders in the SEO and PPC market, conducted an interesting study where they compared Wix’s SEO with that of WordPress. They studied 3.2 million Wix websites and 3.2 million WordPress websites.

Their conclusion? 46.1% of the WordPress domains get organic traffic while only 1.4% of Wix domains get it. But they also do mention that there is no relationship between the platform used and a site’s ability to rank on Google’s SERPs. So, what’s what?

Well, such results are simply because people who use WordPress tend to do more SEO than on Wix, and the latter is partially to blame for that.

How is that, you ask?

For starters, Wix does not support the Hreflang tag, an important component that allows webmasters to run a multi-language website. And many websites out there run in more than one language. Some run on two, while others feature as many as five different languages.

Additionally, the whole premise of website builders like Wix is to transform your drag and drop actions into code. Unfortunately, while doing this, Wix produces a lot of code bloat, most of which is in JavaScript. And what does code bloat cause? It slows down your website. And in the eyes of search engines such as Google, PageSpeed is an important ranking factor.

Lastly, Wix does not allow users to modify other technical aspects of SEO, such as Robots.txt. This file is important because it can help you to instruct the Google Bot (“Crawlers”) on which page to index and which to avoid, which helps to ensure that only quality pages are indexed.

6. Disadvantages of Wix: Hidden fees

One of the most convenient things about Wix, according to Wix themselves, is the fact that its premium plans are relatively affordable. Indeed, their entry-level premium plan is just $4.50 a month, and their most advanced plan (for businesses and eCommerce) is just $35, currently with a 50% off discount at the time of writing this.

This sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, here comes the first caveat to this: those prices are for yearly subscriptions. In other words, you’re going to have to pay 12 times the amount, in full, at the time of purchase.

You start adding somewhat necessary third-party apps to the mix, and what happens? Things start adding up. Google Ads, for instance, will cost you a whopping $75 per month to integrate into your website. That’s like 3 times the amount of their most expensive plan.

To clarify, Google Ads costs money to run, that’s a given. However, if you want to add it to your own Wix website you’re going to have to pay $75 extra per month.

Well, no one said anything about anything being free. However, we do find it somewhat shady that Wix advertises itself as an all-in-one package kind of subscription. And many other subscription-based online services do this, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s wrong, especially for small business owners.

7. Poor customer support

Wix.com currently has a 1.7 out 5 stars score on Trustpilot, and if that doesn’t tell you something already, then you should take a look at the reviews themselves. One of the most common issues that people have with the platform is its bad customer support, amongst other things.

This is quite sad since customer service is perhaps at the core of any company out there. Without it, no customer with a functional brain will stick around with you. And Wix doesn’t seem to understand that, apparently.

8. It’s limited compared to WordPress

Using WordPress, you can achieve pretty much any tweak or optimisation using plugins. Unfortunately, Wix doesn’t offer that option.

Plugins are especially useful for SEO. Using Yoast SEO or Rank Math, for example, you can easily optimise your content for search engines. In contrast, SEO features provided by Wix are pretty limited.

You don’t have to deal with the disadvantages of Wix

Wix, like any other site builder, has several advantages and drawbacks. To use such a platform, you’ll have to go through a learning curve – one that can seem steep to beginners. If you don’t want to deal with the hassle of building your own site, book a discovery call with us today, and one of our experts will contact you shortly.

Disadvantages of Wix – FAQs