Wix User Reviews & Opinions

… and I am now going to be building, a friend’s business website with it.

And no I am not a coder, or someone with ‘real-world’ website building experience.

I did a bit of coding on my first website, about a decade ago.
And more recently, have built my other business’ site (www.darkpopchris.com) … with another industry specific website builder.

On building my latest site, I did some homework, looking at reviews of products, and then started to build my site, using trials of two competing website builders. I quickly realised that I was making quick progress with Wix, and not the other one (which I really wanted to like).

So I just continued with Wix.

My only gripe, and I’m sure it’s down to user error, and that means me, is some weird spacing behaviour, when editing the size of strips, and then comparing the zoomed in version, to the zoomed out version of the editor. Like I said, it’s probably me not grasping how this actually works yet, still, I managed to build a site for my new travel related business with it.

Very Happy.

I used Wix to build my own site and several site for customers. I have used other platforms but I prefer working in Wix. It is easy to use, the designs are great and you can customize them to anyone’s taste. The customer service has been excellent and the price can’t be beat for what all you get.

Redesigned a website previously written in Joomla. Able to create a quality product with limited website tech knowledge. Experience with Photoshop, Illustrator probably more helpful.

Excellent web-builder for the novice. I’m building an online shop for silk scarf accessories and I found the interface user-friendly and instinctive. I tried 3 others prior to this and was thinking I’m too old for this malarkey! Proud of what I’ve achieved.

Very easy to use, it automatically formatted the text and color scheme to match our company logo.

Very affordable gave our website a professional appearance without breaking the bank.

The initial editor I believe they call it the ADI is much easier to use than regular editor, so I would recommend building and editing as much of the site as possible before publishing it. The regular editor isn’t difficult it just has so many options to change that you won’t have to fiddle with if you take the time in the ADI to lay out everything first.

I tried to design a website to embrace both my graphic and fine art endeavors. I have yet to really push people to my site because I am still not sure which art form I want to lead with.
I got feedback from trusted friends and family, but have not started the seo because I have yet another art form I want to introduce to the world and I am busy working on that. The cost discount it offered was crucial to me choosing wix. I researched a lot of options.
I looked at customer support as a crutch I could do without because hands on experience worked so well. I like the feeling that I can redesign things as my needs change and don’t have to rely on anyone else.

So this is my very first attempt at building a website. I had no clue on how to do it. I was referred to Wix by other attorneys who built their website using it. I am not a very computer savvy person so I was a little nervous going in. I like the basic preset designs for legal websites on the Wix program. However, I got stuck a few times just trying to edit text, changes things around and add background colors. I got some good pictures to add to the site. I finally got someone else to finish the website for me. I then went back and added another page which was frustrating at times due to the text color changes I wanted to make, but found difficult to do. Some of it is my own inexperience and some of it is the Wix editing program which is not always user friendly. Overall, it got the job done.

I am very glad to have chosen Weebly. It is easy to use. One can learn it simply and quickly. They have thought it through to the very last detail. You can easily find answers on the net or directly from Weebly staff when you get stuck. I highly recommend Weebly.

Wix has the most infuriating “Help” ever. Tech support isn’t good.

Know what your needs are before paying for the service. It has many nice features, but if you have a glitch, don’t expect help with it. Tech support is via email only and if you read on, you’ll see why it’s problematic.

Time and again I receive responses to my problems that show they clearly have not read my detailed explanation of an issue. Tech support is strictly via email. There is no one to call. When I ask a question they don’t know the answer to I either get a response that does not correlate with the question, they tell me to create a wish list of new features (I’m really not asking for anything wildly unreasonable, just general functionality of existing features) or I wait for 3 or 4 days before getting an answer that does not resolve the issue.

Boxes are lined up in the editor, when saved, they are misaligned. I explain what I’ve done and what’s happening. The response I receive is to resize the boxes. Seriously?

I ask why a website like LinkedIn is not accepted as a link (it will not allow it to be selected or loaded). They say it’s probably blocked by LI, but other websites have no problem with this.

I ask why Facebook pages won’t load as links. Ooops, sorry. We don’t know.

Newsletters
The Shoutout newsletters seem attractive on the surface, but if you’re sending more than a paragraph or two, prepare for frustration.

There is no undo button. If something disappears, as it often does, you have to retype it.

There is an option to load links, such as for including a news article. The font color cannot be changed and it’s white. This severely limits the background color to something you can read white links on. Since text is more often than not black, this makes for a very unattractive newsletter.

If the text you type into a box is too long, maybe a few paragraphs, and you want to edit, you’ll have to click at the top and use the arrows to move your way to the part you want to reach. You cannot click on the section you want to revise.

You are allowed 3 Shoutouts per month. Let’s say you have 3 new subscribers and you just sent out a newsletter. You’d have to send it to them from your own email because to send the same newsletter to the 3 new people means you’re down another Shoutout. The same goes for their “thanks for subscribing” email option. They frequently remind you that if you pay for their service, you can get unlimited Shoutouts. Why would I pay for this?

Blog

You cannot set up more than one blog. Why would you want to? The format is much better than the lists you can use for events or news items.

If you set the default text, it doesn’t work. You have to change the size and style of the font every time you use it. Colors and/or text styles revert at will while in use.

The blog has choices for colors and shapes, but if you want a sleek, sophisticated appearance, it’s not easy to get.

Price, special offers, renewal

These are just a few of the many glitches. One of the most annoying things is that Wix will send you messages of offers of specials on websites or upgrading. Here’s the catch – it’s only for first year users. Unless you start an entirely new website every year, you’re out of luck. There are no sales, discounts or specials. You’re obligated at the full price rate.

Text design limitations

I moved to Wix to save time on doing my own website. Wix does reduce my time with design and has some nice features, but they have their limits for sure. You cannot rotate text or do any text warping, shapes, etc. You would have to do that in another app. You can make text fade in or out, move in from different directions, but you can’t track is across the screen or make it move about the page at all. Animation is pretty basic.

Images

When you load images, you have to drag them into specific boxes to try to reorder them. Trying to find an image previously loaded is often frustrating.

Boxes that say it has all images used on the site, does not contain all of them.

Important note: If you have several sites with Wix, all of your images and files are loaded in one place, not separate ones for each site. This can be very convenient or really annoying. You can use the same image on multiple sites easily, but you cannot copy and paste information from one to another.

Photo galleries

There are some really nice image galleries you can use. Some work better than others, but you do have nice options. Yup, I have a problem with this too. If you look around the web you’ll see that a lot of websites set up news boxes on their home page or on other pages. They have a title, subtitle, text and an image. When you click on the image or text, it takes you to the news article or to your full post. There’s no way to do this on Wix. You can have a photo box with a title and text, but the only way to add a link is to add it to the image. IF the visitor double-clicks the image open, they’ll find the link. If you put the pink in the text, there’s no way to make it live. Basically, you are unable to make links to images by clicking on them. You can rig it up by combining an image with text and a link in the text or a link to the image, but it’s time consuming and it wasn’t user friendly. Another failure.

Text

If you enlarge or reduce text size or at seemingly random moments, words will be separated. Half of one is on the first like and the other half on the next line. There is no space between them. Delete the word, re-type it and you get the same thing. Back up and little and now you have line after line, word after word that is out of format. You cannot cut and re-paste it without having the same problem. You are forced to go line by line to respace the text. Needless to say, it’s very frustrating and time consuming.

There is a nice choice of fonts, but I wouldn’t say the have much functionality. For instance, I can choose from 7 effects, but I can’t combine them or change the colors when I use the effect. If I wanted a pink font with a blue glow, highlight, shadow, blur, I can’t change that. I can only click on the option (they’re unnamed) and like it or lump it.

Text features are inconsistent from one feature to another. You have some options on one feature, not on others. The way they work is different on various features.

You can set a default font and size for some things, such as the blog, but not others. It doesn’t matter though because the defaults don’t work. I have a default font and size set on the blog, but every time I post I have to highlight everything after typing and change the font and size. Yes, you could do it before you start typing, but the font and size can inadvertently change and you end up readjusting it again.

Text wrap

Wix does not wrap around images. Hard to believe, but true. You can add an image and have a text box above, below or to the side, but the image cannot be in line with the text and text won’t wrap. This becomes particularly annoying when you have multiple layers or are using images to describe a process. But wait, there’s more. If you put the text on a box, because you cannot give your text box a solid background (more on that later), when you align everything and save it looks great. Go to your website, it’s not aligned. Contact Wix, they tell you to realign it. Useless.

No background for text

There are many options for lists such as to post articles or events. The problem is that you cannot change the color of the text and there is no way to set a background color. Unless you use a solid white background, as many now do, you have to set a box, strip or other background so it can be read. You can set the size of that box, but every time you add more text or another article, you have to go back and stretch the box again to fit. The image on your screen may not be the same when published.

Backgrounds

There are many wonderful backgrounds to use, but as stated above, if you want text over your background and you want people to actually see it, that seriously restricts you to background that allow text to be read over them because you can’t set a text background.

I have used video backgrounds. Some work well. When I use others I get emails telling me it takes a so long to load, they left the site. They don’t seem to be well-compressed.

You have to set a background color behind an image background or it will set one for you and you’ll get a random yellow, green or other background color flash as the page loads. Fortunately, you can change that background color.

Opacity

I like that I can change the opacity of theme boxes and strips. I use this feature often. The problem is, you can change the opacity of images. If you wanted to make an image fade into the background, you’ll have to change the opacity in Photoshop or another photo app until it’s at the sheerness you want. It can be a lot of back and forth.

Animations

I like that I can animate text and text boxes to fade in, turn, come from the sides, etc. There are quite a few options and I use these features. I would really like a way to combine these choices. For instance, I’d like to have a video or photos show on my home page and then fade out and be gone. I can’t do that. When the website hosting is more expensive than most, you expect a lot.

Header – Footer

It’s great that I can choose a page and turn off the header-footer (both on or both off). I created an entry page for my site with out the H-F. It’s a great option. Sometimes the footer can be quirky and you get a white line at the bottom of the page. I’ve looked this up and others have the same issue. Wix tells people to just ignore it. They say it’s only in the editor, but it is indeed also there when published.

Apps & website sales

Not all apps are free to users. Most have limitations unless you purchase them. I found it easier to set up my own Google calendar on a page than to use their app. This doesn’t work with everything because it won’t allow you to embed some links.

Social media

The social media apps that would show the feeds on your sites work for a short time and then expire and have to be reloaded.

Domains

Wix offers a free domain registration with hosting. After having a different domain registrar refused to allow me to transfer my domain elsewhere (they had no phone support and took over my domain and tried to sell it back to me), I have been very wary about companies that offer a free domain. I purchased my own domain with Dyn, and that has worked out well. On two websites I have two different domains. I had to disconnect and reconnect the sites over several days to get the domain I wanted to be the primary with the second domain as a redirect. There was no way to do it except disconnect and reconnect until it worked.

Build a free site first

Wix gives you a lot of options, but they’re less than perfect. There are so many glitches, I can’t remember them all, but you get the general idea. I’m sure that Wix is not the only service with a far-from-perfect editor and tech support. It feels like different teams work on different features and have no communication with each other. If I wasn’t experienced with designing websites, I might get pretty frustrated.

I strongly suggest you build a free Wix website before signing up and see how that goes before paying for the service. No service is perfect, but when you have to pay full price, you expect more. The free website is a hook. They’re banking on the fact that once you set it up, you won’t want to do the work again and register it. Look for websites you like, and features you want. Take your time if you can.

On a positive note, they do upgrade features from time to time. If you’re going to set up a website and not have much in the way of regular changes, or you’re doing it for an event or family and you’re not that fussy, this is perfect. You get out-of-the-box predesigned options that anyone can use. Hope this was helpful!

Super easy to make a great looking website! The previewer is fantastic, you can check how it will really look when published.

Wix is the only one that has made a start to build a website for small hotels and if they continue with adding features for the reservation part it can be a very competitive for cloud PMS systems. They have still a long way to go for that but the start is very promising.

Wix is great and the only website builder with an online booking engine for small hotels or vacation homes that you want to rent out.

They even have an integrated channel manager (extra) giving you the opportunity to update your availability calendar (through iCal feeds) on the most popular online holiday portals like Booking, Expedia, HolidayLettings, etc. It all works but has his limitations, especially when you have a complex with several similar room types and each room type does need it’s own iCal calendar making it a bit odd to have for instance 10 rooms advertised on Booking and Expedia instead of 1 room type with an inventory of 10.

Also the blog future in Wix is great, except that you can not modify the URL blog for each post in the way you want it as it always starts with ‘single-post’.

Wix support can sometimes be frustrating, slow and extremely poor. I recently had an issue causing my website not to work properly anymore for more than a week and they just did not reply. They even had not the dignity to investigate properly and at least to inform me looking for a solution or even give useful info for a solution. Fortunately I found a solution myself by deleting part of the website and rebuilt certain elements from scratch and replacing them.

Another concern could be the speed of sites developed in Wix, I have done everything needed to optimise loading times but still speed tests are not giving me the results I would like.

Templates in Wix do also work on mobile platforms but you always have to use the mobile editor in order to make sure is displays properly on those platforms.

Also the SEO in Wix works and there tutorials gives a lot of information how to optimise it and when you follow there tips it really works.

In general I’m happy with Wix and I was amazed what I could accomplish in just a short period of time, keeping in mind that I had never done it before and have no real technical background at all.

It does everything we required easily, efficiently. Support from Wix was great. We are able to make changes with non-technical staff. We use almost all features such as calendars, blogs, etc. offered and it runs seamlessly. Price is very reasonable.

I am a counsellor, life coach and hypnotherapist so as I am not trying to sell anything apart from my services my website is fairly simple. That said I spent days sorting out the basics until I finally got the hang of it. I thought I must be stupid until a builder friend told me he had completely given up and paid somebody else to do it for him because it was far too complicated.

Having chosen Wix I didn’t look at any other website builders but I can’t imagine they will have more to offer as Wix seems to have all the buttons and bells you could possibly need and now that I’m more in the swing of things I’m very happy with it and also quite proud of myself for persevering. I would certainly use Wix again.

After a long time thinking about making website, bewildered by the multiplicity of options choices, providers. etc., I finally took the plunge without clear intentions. Made good progress with the basics, but need to return soon to continue expansion. Appearance an accessibility are key points for me as a vehicle for my photographs, sorting and editing those are big questions that I have to ask myself independent of the website. A Work-in-Progress. 🙂

Reviews on websitetooltester.com led me to wix.com, and I was very pleased with the result. We needed to update the website for a charity race run by our Rotary club, and to forward people from the website to a separate registration system. Design of the site was extremely easy; it was absolutely intuitive. The only issue we had, which a knowledgeable friend helped resolve, had to do with simplified URLs so our partners could directly enter a page on the site. (Since then, wix has resolved this.) I highly recommend wix.

After a few false starts, I was able to get the hang of things, finding it quite easy to use and easy to update after publishing. What I found challenging initially were that the icons, etc. weren’t always as intuitive as I would have liked. That being said, after wasting 30 minutes, I finally understood how to navigate, design and edit. I have no tech experience beyond normal PC use in business, so I was quite pleased in the end with Wix.

I found Weebly to be user friendly. The drag and drop option is amazing. I know a little HTML and CSS, but I really did not need it. The custom themes are also a plus.

Redesigned my website in 24 hours, but the second language was problematic. They say it’s ready, but it’s not… I can’t use the automatic menu because of the second language and had to create a menu with buttons – same with the mobile version. En up paying more because they will not host .ca sites.

Armin from WebsiteToolTester.com: The Wix AppMarket provides an app that allows you to create a multilingual website. It’s available in the free version.

I have chosen to use Wix, and overall I like it. I did have Weebly but I didn’t like all the limitations that Weebly had. Weebly didn’t have any themes that sported a small business , let alone beaded jewelry. I like how Wix covers all this and gives me a stock inventory as well as other things.

I built a Wix website using one of their templates. Templates were varied and one of them was very close to what I wanted. As a sole trader therapist I wanted to create a site that looked good, was non-flashy and was easy to navigate and browse. I found it relatively easy to do this with Wix. My new site has been live now for a few weeks and, if I want, I can still easily edit and change it. Costs were very low – less than $100 in total. For a price comparison, I called a local website designer here on the New South Wales Central Coast and was quoted approximately $1000 to create a similar live website. So quite a cost saving. The WiX Help online Guide was very good and so I didn’t need to call or email them in any way throughout the process of creating the site and bringing online.

Overall, very good.

Built artist gallery and bio-site.
WIX has real issue with SEO. Google ok, other options a real SEO choice.
Better display options for galleries needed.
Now I know basics, looking for CD program to build better visual and self owned site.
Then I can find better server.

Comment from Josep, WebsiteToolTester:

Thanks for your review! Wix isn’t absolutely great for SEO but it does the job. In case you need more information about SEO & Wix you can check our SEO guide.

The only other builder I’ve used is WordPress.com and I found it very difficult to navigate and support always came back in “computer greek” as I call it and sometimes up to a week for a response which was too slow. I have a site with them which took me a lot of blood, sweat and tears to do but I’m not 100% happy with it and would like to try again with WIX.

Wix has super response times and usually good answers that I could understand when I put in a ticket. Their builder was very user friendly compared to WordPress.com and offered much more for a free site. Not sure how the pricing compares to other sites for what you get. I would love to see a detailed glossary of all the terminology used for building a site so when a response or instructions says to do this or use this I know what the word means. I find that people who build these sites forget that many of us want a website but don’t know a thing about so the language is foreign and they assume that everyone knows what an “interface” is ?? or and “icon” for example.

I built a website for an NGO. Although there weren’t many templates for our needs, it was easy to make some. With a little bit of work (read: a few hours) and a dash of creativity and attention to detail, our website has come out beautifully.

I am surprised with the level of features this website builder has as I was initially expecting to be quite limited. I haven’t tried other builders but Wix never left me feeling like there was anything missing which I needed.

One element I will complain about; the price. The price is quite high for a website (144 USD a year! and only 10 GB space for it!) but I guess that’s the payout for ease. It gets worse when the only email option is google apps for work which is quite a hefty price itself ($50 per year per account).

Customer support is another weak area, because wix does not respond via chat, and only allows you to submit “support tickets” when you need help, which isn’t much use in an emergency situation (or even when you’re feeling lazy!) because it requires very lengthy and tedious forum-like back and forth

Overall, I’d recommend Wix but it would be a much better purchase if it was cheaper. Try and fish around for Wix deals and coupons for a good purchase.

Feedback from WebsiteToolTester: Thank you very much for this detailed review. Just one thing to think of: do you really need the Unlimited package? I could imagine that the Combo plan works just fine if you don’t need a ton of web space. Also you could get around Google Apps if you use Namecheap for email hosting for example. They have much more affordable prices, however, it’s not quite as powerful as the Google solution.

Wix was easy to use and made the process of building a website less intimidating.

I recommend wix to anyone who wants to build a website but doesn’t know code. Wix makes it easy to build a website even for people of all skill levels.

I’m still working on my website only because I’m multitasking, that being said, it’s been really easy to just jump back in, do a few changes and back out. I tried EHost but immediately (within 10mins) realized it was not as user friendly as I expected and the pricing changed once I signed up. So I cancelled immediately and went to Wix: VERY user friendly & efficient for a small business owner that doesn’t have the hours to dedicate to website.

If you have options, use them! Let Wix be the last one you try!
And one more thing: I dont know how are things in other countries, but I am from Romania. Virtually nobody knows Wix here, so nobody can give advice. Not a good choise for Romania!

Wix made it easy to upgrade our company website from something that was looking very old and outdated to sharp and professional. Had some issues getting the new website up and live (not Wix’s fault), but with help from Wix and giving that info to our ISP we got it fixed. Would recommend WIX. I had no web designing experience and if I do say so myself I think my first attempt came out pretty good.