Although it is straightforward, the incredibly popular website development platform may not be the right option for your online business.
Creating a website for your company may be daunting, especially if you’re a small business lacking related experience.
Many solutions have emerged in recent years to alleviate the overwhelm that many aspiring entrepreneurs feel when it comes to the technical aspect of launching an internet business, for example: SquareSpace, Weebly, and Wix.
If you’ve spent any time in the internet business sector, surely you’ve seen an advertisements for one (or more) of these services.
Typically, these advertisements claim that their services are so simple to use that even the most technically inexperienced persons can have a site up and operating in a matter of hours.
These claims can be true. All these tools are quite simple to use, but they frequently have a slew of downsides.
In this blog post, we will focus on Wix specifically because it appears to have a significant advertising presence in the online business community.
As one of the most well-known drag-and-drop website builders, Wix has been around since 2006 and has amassed a sizable audience since.
While Wix is a terrific tool for quickly creating a personal blog or brochure-style website, the program has flaws that make it unsuitable for a company with growth at heart.
It may be more expensive than you think.
While Wix has a free plan, it is not suitable for business use.
For starters, you must utilize a Wix.com subdomain (e.g. www.example.wix.com). You’ll also be compelled to put Wix adverts on your website, and your functionality will be limited.
To remove this branding, use a custom domain name, and use the platform’s full features, you’ll need to upgrade to a premium subscription.
The most affordable premium plan is $11 per month, while the most costly plan is $29 per month.
This is not at all pricey. However, it is still significantly higher than the cost of a normal shared hosting package from a provider like HostGator or static-site hosting like Netlify or GitHub Pages.
Over time, this might add up to a large cost.
It is not search engine optimized.
Wix has long had a bad standing in the professional SEO world. To its credit, Wix has gone a long way in the last few years — albeit it’s still not up to par for most businesses’ SEO needs.
Wix was a complete farce three years ago.
It used unusual and unneeded characters in its URLs and would not enable users to add ALT tags to photos or meta data to blog articles. And it used to be powered by Flash!
While Wix has considerably improved on all of these flaws, a number of critical issues, such as site performance and code bloat, remain.
Check out this Search Engine Journal infographic from September 2018 that rates four of the major website platforms in terms of "first contentful paint" (FCP) — or how quickly a site loads useable content to users.
Source: www.searchenginejournal.com
These data are for desktop sites, but SEJ’s mobile statistics show comparable results.
Furthermore: This research compared the performance of 25 various content management systems, including Weebly, SquareSpace, and others, and discovered that Wix performed the poorest.
What is the reason behind this?
Viewing the source code on any Wix website will reveal (among other things) a large amount of JavaScript, on-page CSS, and a jumbled div> structure — all of which will slow down loading times and result in lower search engine results.
You Might be Stuck With It
If your company outgrows the Wix platform, or if you decide to switch platforms for whatever reason, you may be out of luck.
While competing platforms, such as Webflow, offer for easy HTML export on their commercial subscriptions, Wix presently does not enable you to export your data to another platform.
According to the Wix Help Center, your Wix site and all of its content are exclusively housed on Wix’s servers and cannot be exported elsewhere.
Your Wix site and all of its content is hosted exclusively on Wix’s servers, and cannot be exported elsewhere.
Specifically, it is not possible to export or embed files, pages or sites, created using the Wix Editor or ADI to another external destination or host.
If you embed a site into an external location, Wix is no longer in control of the way that your site appears or functions, and therefore, cannot provide support. In addition, Google Analytics and search engine crawlers are not able to work properly with an embedded site.
This implies you’ll either have to rebuild your entire website from the ground up or hire a developer like Alstra to do it for you. Which might have been a better option for you in the first place.
To utilize Nate Shivar’s helpful analogy: It’s like attempting to move into a new house with the restriction that you can’t bring any of your stuff with you. You may either stay put or move into an empty house.
So, unless you are madly in love with Wix and have no intention to grow your website in the near future, we would always recommend exploring other options.
You Won’t Be able to Own Your Website
This is big, and arguably the most crucial reason to seek for a different option when establishing a website for your company.
You will not own our website if you create one using Wix. You will not be able to claim ownership of your design. You are only one of thousands of Wix platform subscribers who have been issued a revocable license.
In fact, when you join up for Wix’s services, you must consent to all of this.
If Wix goes bankrupt, shuts down their platform, or removes certain templates/features/functionalities, you’ll have no choice but to move on to whatever Wix decides to do instead.
Otherwise, you’ll be left in the lurch with nowhere to turn.
You never want to be thus dependent on an outside firm over which you have no control as a corporation.
Without a question, the internet has gone a long way in the last several years.
The development of all-in-one website builders such as Wix has enabled an increasing number of individuals (sometimes with no technical skills) to quickly create websites in a matter of hours.
While these tools are fine for bloggers and hobbyists, they have a number of faults that make them unsuitable for corporate requirements.
Wix, in particular, does not match the affordability, SEO, flexibility, and ownership needs of most modern-day business owners. As a result, it would be better to consider alternatives.
If you are a small to medium-sized business owner seeking for a more robust, performative, and customized solution for your web presence, contact us to receive a free quotation for your next design project.