Why Wix Is Not a Scalable Option

Established in 2006 by two brothers and their friend, Wix.com has become a popular choice for creating small websites without coding experience. Wix is a cloud-based website building platform allowing users to build a website using drag and drop tools. You can create everything from a personal website and blog to a portfolio and online store. While this platform is simple to use, its lack of hosting, SEO functionality, speed optimization, and customization options does not make it a scalable option for businesses. Thus, I will address the main factors that prevent Wix from being a long-term, scalable option and alternatives to consider.

Lack of Hosting Options

Wix.com does not give their users the flexibility to choose from different hosting services, unlike WordPress.org. As long as your Wix site is active, you have to pay their monthly fee. This is necessary to be ad-free or use premium features, such as for an e-commerce site. Depending on what type of business you have, this lack of hosting packages could be a drawback as it doesn’t meet your specific needs. For example, the monthly cost to host your Wix.com site could be the same price you pay for hosting a WordPress website for a year. Overtime, the savings would be significant. This is something every business can appreciate.

SEO Functionality

Aside from building a user-friendly, responsive website, it’s crucial to optimize your site with SEO. Search engine optimization is the process of improving your site, so it ranks higher for relevant searches and provides useful, accessible content to your users. Unfortunately, Wix is limited on site optimization options needed to improve a site’s SEO. As a result, a Wix site is hard to rank for on search engines. Indeed, this doesn’t help businesses scale on a long-term basis.

Speed Optimization

Wix sites tend to be slow, particularly on mobile devices. Since their sites run a lot of JavaScript (a web language that controls a site’s behavior), load time speeds are much longer compared to a WordPress site that is fully optimized. Studies show that users stay on a website for an average time of 15 seconds or less. This is a short time frame to capture visitor’s interest, which may not be possible with a site that runs slowly. To increase the likelihood that users stay longer, having a site that is fast is a must.

Site Customization

For most site owners, it’s important to customize their site to meet their specific needs. If you would like to improve your Wix site, it’s not easy to transfer content to a new site. Once a site template is selected, users are unable to change it to a different template later on. This lack of customization is not useful when your site needs change. For example, you may pick a business site template, but later want to expand into a trendy e-commerce site. With Wix, you are limited by the template you have chosen and their applications via the Wix App Market. To revamp your site design, you would have to start over from scratch with a new site. This is different from WordPress.org, which allows users to not only browse from almost 57,000 WordPress plugins, but also upload custom built plugins and applications to ensure site owners have complete flexibility in customizing their sites.

For large businesses with over 30 site pages, Wix.com is not the best option. One major reason for this is because Wix only offers a simple site structure. For example, users can only select one sub-level for their site’s navigation menu. This is not realistic for a large site with a complex site structure that needs multiple sub-menus to display their content. As a businesses continue to grow their brand, they need a CMS (Content Management System) that will help their site grow and can handle their site content and storage needs seamlessly.

A Better Option

While Wix.com is a good choice if you need to build yourself a simple site, it is not the best choice for growing a sustainable business site. Wix may be appealing because of the low upfront costs, but it will quickly become a more expensive site hosting option overtime. Additionally, Wix does not offer users the option to fully customize their site compared to a top CMS, such as WordPress. If you would like to learn more about Wix, check out this Wix review. WordPress.org is a cost-effective alternative that offers users complete flexibility in choosing a hosting company for their site, how their site is built (choose a theme or hire WordPress experts), and a huge resource for optimizing their site via plugins, applications, and widgets. It’s no wonder that over 40% of the internet is powered by WordPress.