Wix Review

Everyone needs a website. Luckily though it’s getting easier and easier to get a website for yourself and your business. Sites like Wix provide an easy to use website design template that provides people with good looking, functioning sites. If you have a bit of time on your hands, a great looking, customized website is just an afternoon away. And best of all, it’s free! There’s additional features you can pay for as well. As far as free website design goes, Wix is definitely a go-to site.

The main feature of Wix is the huge variety of pre-set templates that users have to work from. No matter what kind of website you’re looking to make, you’ll be able to find at least one template specifically for your needs. And even if you don’t particularly like that template, there level of customization you can undertake means you can change up any template’s content to fit what you want. There’s also a few blank templates available if you just want to start from a bare skeleton of a site. It seems there’s a particularly large amount of templates designated for designers, photographers, and artists. I was a bit disappointed in the number of portfolio sites made for writers or editors, however as I said - the level of customizability makes up for it. It is something to keep in mind, though, if you aren’t interested spending a lot of time tinkering to make the website just-so.

The editing tools are quite thorough. It’s not like Wordpress themes where you can only change the font or header image or something. You can change the font, the color, the placement - there are buttons that automatically center or align elements to the left or right - you can basically completely change everything about a template if you really want. Adding your own images and content to the site is pretty easy as well.

In addition to the basic format and layout of the site, Wix also helps out with important website features like SEO. While someone just putting together a website for the first time may overlook SEO, it can be crucial to customers finding your site. Wix asks questions and based on the answers, adjusts the site accordingly. It’s certainly no replacement for a professional copywriter’s SEO contributions, but for an automated site it’s quite good.

Since most businesses are looking for something a bit more than just a landing page, Wix offers an app marketplace full of features different businesses might need. Some of them are really basic like comments, a search feature for the site, or a view counter. But there’s also really useful ones like Facebook Like pop-ups, PayPal buttons, live chat, online shopping, and tons more. A surprising amount of the apps are free, too. Based on my experiences with other sites I expected most of the useful apps to be expensive and was pleasantly surprised. There are certainly some that you can only gain access too if you pay for premium plans.

And that brings me to the pricing options. Wix is mostly free and you can design a really good looking, highly functional and responsive site for nothing but your own time and willpower. If you want a bit extra, the fees aren’t too steep. The most popular premium plan is the Unlimited plan, billed toward entrepreneurs and freelancers. At $12.42 USD per month, you get unlimited bandwidth, 10GB storage, a free domain name, premium support, no Wix ads displayed on your site, and two of the premium-only apps. While self-run sites might be cheaper, this is a great option if you aren’t interested in fiddling with the tech-end of websites and dealing with updates. Not to mention there are cheaper pricing options available (as well as the free option, of course) if you feel that $12.42/month is too much.

Overall I’d say Wix is definitely worth looking into, especially since you get some great looking site templates and customization for free.