Many others are telling you to use Wix for creating your website or blog because it is easy to use, but honestly:
Is Wix good for blogging?
Why are others promoting it so heavily?
Is there a better alternative that you can use to build your blog that suits the beginners?
What are the pros and cons of every option?
These questions and more I will be answering here, so, stick with me in order to help you make your decision.
Is Wix Good for Blogging?
Wix is not good for blogging if you want to manage a successful blog that grows and gets good traffic, because it lacks some of the main requirements that you need in order to grow your blog.
There are many specific requirements that you should be aware of if you want to start and grow a blog, and by far, WordPress is better than Wix.com when it comes to providing these requirements.
The following section explains some of the main problems that you might face if you use Wix to create your blog.
7 Reasons Not to Use Wix As a Blogging Platform
1 – Speed
One of the most important elements of having a successful blog is the website loading speed.
Blogging means that you need to get visitors who want to read and educate themselves on the topic you are writing about, and with today’s hectic life, nobody wants to spend their time waiting for a page to load, and they are willing to leave if your blog post’s page takes more than two or three seconds to load.
Add to that, if Google notices that your website takes long time to load, they will start dropping your seo rankings and will show others’ websites to people looking for the info you have already written about.
That’s why you need a fast loading blog.
And honestly, Wix is not the best when it comes to speed.
I know that they might try to advertise their homepage (Wix.com) as a fast loading one, but that doesn’t matter.
You need your blog page to load fast, and not the Wix.com homepage.
To be unbiased, I searched for Wix blogs examples, and found an article from Wix itself titled “15 Outstanding Wix Website Examples That Will Inspire You”.
These are blogs that are built on Wix and owned by different entities, and they are supposed to be among the best.
I tried to test some of them for loading speed, and I was really shocked.
For example, I took a website that is called Raven AI, and tested their home page for speed using the Google PageSpeed Insights tool, and the results were terrible.
I took one of the blog posts on that site, and tested it for speed, and the results were even worse, and the blog post didn’t have that many images!
That’s why I don’t recommend using Wix for blogging.
While when using an open source platform for blogging, such as WordPress for example, you have more control over the speed as there are many hosting companies that you can test and choose from.
2 – Less Design Flexibility
With wix, although they make it easy to create a beautiful looking website and customize it a little bit, but you are limited.
For example, when you start a Wix blog, you need to choose one theme or template, and stick to it.
You are limited to the changes that the theme itself allows you to do, but you can’t change the whole theme.
You can copy some elements from other templates or themes, but you can’t change the whole theme.
While with other platforms such as WordPress (open source), and even Shopify (closed source system for ecommerce), you can change the theme entirely in few seconds, and you have more options to choose from in every niche and industry.
This is important for blogging because after you start getting traffic, you might want to test different designs in order to see when one your audience feels comfortable with and lets them stay on your blog and take the action you want them to do.
3 – Fewer Add-ons
Add-ons are apps that you can integrate with your blog or website in order to add certain functionalities such as: adding and email subscription box, showing pop-ups to readers, creating custom sidebars or top banners, adding a booking system, …etc.
And Wix have these apps that you can add, some paid and some free.
But there are limitations to what you can do and to the options available for each functionality you want to add to your site.
Just as an example, here’s a screenshot for the difference in the options available for adding a pop-up to your Wix hosted blog compared to the options available for adding the same functionality for a WordPress blog.
This means that you have more options to choose from in case that you decide to build your blog with WordPress rather than Wix, and this competition between the developers will ensure that there would be high quality add-ons on WP compared to Wix.
This will negatively affect your Wix blog’s monetization & conversions!
You want to build a blog primarily in order to make your readers engage with your brand and take the actions that would make you money with your blog.
That could be driving them to buy affiliate products, buy your products, book an appointment, join your email list, and more.
And because Wix is limited when it comes to the add-ons you can use, and to the changes in the look that you can do, that might cause loss of opportunity for you to make money.
Add to that, as I pointed out earlier, the loading speed might piss off people and cause them leave your Wix blog without reading your content and taking the action you want them to take.
That’s a major reason why Wix.com is not recommended for blogging.
4 – Risky – It’s Hard to Move Your Website Away
Wix is a closed CMS (content management system), which means that when you build your blog on Wix.com, you need to keep it there, and you can’t easily move it to another CMS or hosting company easily.
This will get you locked-in with Wix, and if there service gets worse than it already is, or if they decide to increase their pricing, you will need to stick to them and accept whatever they throw at you.
You still can move your blog from Wix to WordPress, but it takes some hassle and costs more money compared to moving a WordPress blog from one hosting company to another.
If you have already built a blog with Wix, I highly recommend that you migrate it to WordPress even if it takes some work.
And if you haven’t started yet, then I recommend that you start directly with WordPress and save yourself the trouble.
5 – Unprofessional (Wix Ads)
One of the worst things that come with using Wix for blogging is that if you choose the lowest plan, which costs $4.5/month when billed annually, they force you to show their ads on your blog, to your audience!
And worse, they don’t pay you!
Imagine that you do all the work to create content for your blog, you market it, start getting traffic, and you hope that someone will buy an affiliate product that you promote, buy your product, or join your email list, and then Wix shows them ads that belong to Wix and distract them from taking the action you want them to take!
And you are already paying Wix for the plan you are using!
It will be like working your butt off in order to help Wix generate more money from your audience after you have already paid them the hosting fee.
And you can make them remove their ads from your Wix blog, but you need to pay for the next plan, which costs almost double than the basic plan.
6 – Expensive
The lowest Wix plan for starting a blog costs around $4.5/month when paid annually, which is reasonable, except for the fact that they show their ads on your site!
And if you want them to remove the ads, you need to pay for the next plan that costs $8.5/month in case that you pay annually in advance.
That’s very expensive!
For a WordPress hosted blog, you can get a reliable hosting from A2 Hosting for example for around $5.99/month when billed annually, and they don’t show any ads on your site.
That’s already more viable than using Wix to create your blog.
Even better, you can pay for 3 years in advance and the fee will become $2.49/month.
Add to that, if you want to sell something (a digital product or merch) on your Wix blog and receive payments, you need to get the professional plan that costs $17/month when billed annually.
But if you want to do the same on a WordPress hosted blog, you don’t have to upgrade to any other hosting plan as you can add a free plugin that will allow you to receive payments and sell the products you want to sell.
7 – Support & Wix Negative Reviews
Wix is not the best, nor even close, when it comes to keeping their customers happy.
Just a look at the customers’ reviews about Wix.com on Trustpilot, you will see that they are really pissed off due to the bad service and support, despite the expensive fees, which led to the extremely low rating that Wix has (1.5 of 5 stars!).
And worse, many of these angry customers feel stuck because it takes work to move a website from Wix to another CMS such as WordPress, which makes them feel as if Wix is taking advantage of this problem and think that customers won’t leave anyway, so, why to try to make things better?!
Now this is even worse when it comes to running a blog that have a lot of articles on Wix compared to running a simple website with free pages.
A blog needs continuous content publishing, and the more content you have on your Wix blog, the more hassle it will take to move out.
That’s another reason not to choose Wix for blogging in the first place.
But Is it Not Easier to Use Wix Than WordPress for Blogging?
Not really.
Wix might be easy to create landing pages, but it comes with many limitations and unnecessary additional costs and issues.
But when it comes to blogging, WordPress is actually more efficient and time-saving compared to Wix.com.
And even recently, WordPress has issued the block editor that allows you to easily create beautiful pages using blocks, and you can switch between the old classic editor and the new block editor forth and back easily.
WordPress was created for the non-techie people, and it gets easier to use everyday.
So, forget about the myth that says that Wix is better for beginners.
Others are heavily promoting it because the Wix affiliate program pays them a high commission ($100) if they bring them a new customer.
WordPress is much better than Wix for blogging and it is my recommendation that you never rely on Wix for building and maintaining a blog.
Conclusion – Never Use Wix for Blogging
That’s my recommendation.
Wix is not good for blogging for the many reasons mentioned earlier in this post: speed and flexibility issues, very risky, bad support, high cost, …etc.
Even others on Reddit are advising not to use Wix for blogging for the same reasons.
Best Alternative to Wix?
My recommendation is to start a WordPress blog instead, using any of the great companies, buy mainly A2 Hosting (best price for guru support and reliable servers) or SiteGround.
I hope that this article was helpful.
If you still have any question regarding blogging with Wix, or regarding anything mentioned here, please, let me know in the comments’ section below and I will be happy to help you out 🙂