The Top 5 Misconceptions of Wix
Together with my team, we have designed over 200 websites, on Wix, and even outranked major brand names.
Before we get into the actual misconceptions, first of all, I want you all to empty your mind and get rid of any outdated perception of Wix you have. Start off from a blank page as though you know nothing at all about Wix, and I'd like to try and change your mindset and change your perception of Wix from a negative into a positive.
Misconception 1: Wix is just a DIY template design system
Just like WordPress sites, Wix do have templates you can use. They even go one step further. If you know absolutely nothing about building a website, they have the Wix ADI, that will create your website for you.
You can also choose one of the many pre-built templates they have that match your industry so you can simply change the images and text building your own website that matches your business.
However, a lot of people don't realise with the Wix website builder, you can actually design your website from scratch. Starting off with a blank page throughout your website. This means you end up with a website designed and tailored to your individual business.
So literally, start with a blank page and design exactly what you need. Our own Talk About Digital website is built on Wix. It's a custom design and we've never used a template. Since launching TAD into the digital marketing industry, we've had nothing but complements about the website.
We've not used any fixed layouts or any fixed modules. It's literally been built and designed from scratch.
Misconception 2: Wix is just a DIY website builder for startup business owners
Yes, there are millions of startup business owners that have used Wix to design their own website as money is very tight when first starting out in business and many start-up business owners do not have the investment level required to get a website designed and built by a professional design agency.
There are however hundreds of thousands established businesses that use Wix. Here are some names you might recognise…
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Unilever - https://www.unilevercareersvietnam.com/
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Walmart - https://www.storeno8.com/
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AEW Wrestling - https://www.allelitewrestling.com/
All used the Wix platform to design and build one of their websites.
Planning a website on Wix is no different from planning a website on any other platform or CMS system. You still need to do the wireframes and you still need to understand your audience.
Many WordPress lovers say that Wix don’t have a professional community. That is where you are wrong. Wix have and a really friendly partner community of Wix design experts. The partner community is made up of highly skilled individuals at the top of their game. Most are highly qualified graphic designers, website designers, business professionals and marketers. It just so happens that they design and build professional websites for their clients using the Wix platform.
Wix even have a marketplace on their website so anyone who is struggling to build their own website can post a request in the Wix Marketplace and Wix Partner Experts who match their criteria will be contacted to price the job up.
Now the beauty about being a Wix partner is, Wix send you these leads on a daily basis for free. They don't charge anything to the agency. The agency gets free leads. There are many digital marketing and web design agencies within the partner community who turn over a lot of money each year based on converting these free leads into paying clients.
Misconception 3: Wix websites are not responsive
Wix websites built on their standard builder are what's called ‘adaptive design’, not ‘responsive design’. This means you build your website on desktop then you click the mobile tab and you can tweak the layout on the mobile section. This means as long as you stick within the design guidelines when designing your website, it will look just fine on a desktop, tablet and mobile.
Now, people say that's not good enough, all website should be 100% fully responsive. Wix listened to everyone and they've solved that.
Wix has launched EditorX. This is a 100% fully responsive drag and drop website builder. You can literally design what you want, make it look exactly how you want, make it perform exactly how you want in all the various design breakpoints. You've got all the functionality and responsiveness you could ever want in EditorX without any of the technical headache.
Misconception 4: You cannot code/develop on Wix
The truth is…
Developers do not like Wix because they think they can't do anything with it due to not getting access to the raw code. If the agency decides to start building all their client’s websites in Wix, it'll put them out of a job.
That is not true.
Wix has the functionality where on any website you build, you can write custom code in JavaScript and simply add it to the website. This means developers are still very much required.
When building your website on Wix, you can actually custom develop ‘any’ application you want and make your website function exactly as you need it to, totally bespoke to your business using Wix Code/Corvid (With an R). The beauty is, development time is a lot faster.
On our own TAD website, we required some extra functionality that doesn't come out of the box in Wix, so Chris (our co-founder) wrote the code and hey presto, it does exactly what we want.
When COVID-19 hit all of us, being a bricks and mortar businesses, it had a detrimental impact on the revenue of our business. Being a large group of independent opticians, we rely on people walking through our front door to get an eye test and purchase a new pair of glasses of sign a subscription for contact lenses.
When the shit hit the fan, I sat down with my digital team and said…
“Look, we need to do something about this situation and do it fast so all the businesses in our group can still generate sales.”
Literally, within only two weeks we custom designed and developed an online catalogue system from scratch and launched it on all the 100+ independent optician websites. This meant that any existing patient could go online and purchase a new pair of prescription glasses and sunglasses which allowed each independent business within the group to tick over until the law allowed it feasible for patients to go into the practice.
For anyone new to developing with Wix Code/Corvid, there is a fantastic online tutorial resource - Totally Codable which one of the Wix coding expert partners has put together. You can go through Totally Codable and basically get development tutorials and code templates on how to build certain functionality and how to make things work, without using pre-built plugins that are out of the box.
Misconception 5: Wix websites do not rank - They are not SEO friendly.
As a professional SEO trainer and speaker, myself this must be the biggest Wix misconception for me personally and I would just like to start by saying…
It is UTTER GARBAGE.
The truth is, Wix SEO has all the SEO settings that other CMS platforms have. Here is a list of all the SEO functionality you can tweak, found within your Wix dashboard as default…
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SEO friendly URL’s
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Meta title
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Meta description
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Image ALT tag
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Auto smush (resizing/resampling) on all images
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Image description
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H1, H2, H3, H4, H5 and H6 tags
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P tagging for content
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Set links as ‘nofollow’ if required
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Noindex individual pages
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Structured data
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Canonical tag
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OG tagging
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Add custom meta tags to each page
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Add custom meta tags sitewide
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AMP integration in Wix blogs
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Set SEO patterns
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XML sitemaps
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URL redirection manager
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Robots.txt file editor
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Ability to request the Log Files
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All sites are SSL (HTTPS) by default
Here are a few websites that the Wix partner community have built that rank very well…
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Steri-Fab – Multiple No.1 National rankings in the USA
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The Cocktail Delivery Co – Multiple No.1 National rankings in the UK
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Inner West Pest Control – Multiple No.1 rankings in Sydney, Australia
Now for the ultimate Wix SEO experiment…
I migrated my own personal website from WordPress to Wix
Many of you may have seen my documented Wix SEO case study. Go and read it if you haven’t already done so as it may just shock you. As a brief summary, the impact of migrating my website from WordPress to Wix was…
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My website visitor numbers tripled!
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I retained my No.1 ranking in the UK for both ‘SEO Speaker’ and ‘SEO Trainer’
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My mobile conversion rate had a dramatic boost
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I started to receive a lot more training and paid speaking leads
And just to make sure it wasn't a fluke, the owner of Qualls Law Firm in the States read my case study and asked me to help him migrate his own website from WordPress to Wix. Let’s just say that he was blown away as he sent me an 800+ word testimonial as a result of this impact…
After only one week of migration:
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35% increase in online exposure
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Ranking for 25 additional keywords
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Bounce rate is way down
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New visitors are way up
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Ranked higher than I was with my old WordPress site
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Enquiries shot up
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New business acquisition through his website tripled
Go and read his WordPress to WIX migration review to see for yourself.
Outranking major brand names
I hope that I have dispelled any notion that Wix websites do not rank, but for those of you who are still a little sceptical, here is an example of our Wix websites outranking Specsavers.
As you can imagine, Specsavers have a massive marketing budget, and a massive marketing team that we just don't have, and we've still outranked them with a Wix website.
Wix blogs
Let’s now talk about the ranking capability of Wix Blogs as one misconception is that Wix blog posts do not rank just because they use ‘/posts/’ in the URL.
Well, just to smash that misconception out of the water, here is a screenshot of one of our National websites. As you can see, over a 30-day period, one single article on this website has generated 3,105 new users.
If the Wix Blog was no good for SEO, how on earth has one single article generated 3,105 landing page (the first page on the website they viewed) visits? This has also been achieved without running any link building campaigns and zero paid spend. 100% organic.
We hear it from the horses mouth!
Last year when people actually went to events in-person, I got the chance to ask john Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google…
“Hi John, Are Wix websites SEO friendly?
John answered...
"WIX used to be bad for SEO but they have changed things and now a well-built WIX website containing quality content can rank just as well as any other platform. It's about the content, not the CMS.“
Speed, speed, speed
I must be a mind reader as I can hear what you are saying right now…
“The performance and speed of Wix sites are really bad.”
I totally agree, especially now Google have confirmed that Core Web Vitals will become a ranking factor, having a website that loads fast is a priority.
Wix also agree with you. Their whole performance team have been working day and night to bring all Wix websites up to speed. In fact, Wix have started to roll out their new performance update across the whole website estate and aim to have this completed before this new ranking factor comes into play.
The screenshot above shows a score of 98/100 on Google PageSpeed Insights when checked using their new performance test environment.
As you can see, Wix are very much on the ball when it comes to SEO.
There you have it! The top 5 misconceptions of Wix answered.
TO GET FROM WHERE YOU ARE NOW TO ACHIEVING YOUR ONLINE BUSINESS GROWTH GOALS, YOU WILL GET THERE FASTER, EASIER AND CHEAPER WITH WIX!
As a final thought, I'd like to ask you one question.
“When was the last time you heard about a Wix website getting hacked?”
Wix have security totally nailed down at their end for all of us. They have a 200+ person team who take care of all the backend stuff for us, so we can concentrate on doing what we need to – Pushing our businesses in the right direction.
Give Wix a test drive
I hope I've managed to put a few of your misconceptions of Wix to bed and have changed your outdated perception of Wix.
I would just like to ask one small favour...
Go and create a free Wix account and give it a test drive. You've nothing to lose. Create a website, use one of the templates or built a website from scratch. If you have development knowledge, just turn on the ‘Dev Mode’ at the top of the editor and start coding.
If you do that, the next comment or article you read about Wix, you will at least be able to make an informed decision based on FACT!
About the author
For the past 20 years, I have founded and grown three agencies, personally trained hundreds of professional marketers and have spoken on a few stages around the world, besides writing a best-selling book. Today, I am a professional SEO trainer and speaker.