Is Wix worth it to build your website, online store, or blog?
Many non-techie people ask this question because they were told that Wix is easy to use for people with no web development knowledge.
But is it really worth it? Or are there other alternatives to Wix to use for building websites and e-commerce stores without knowing anything technical?
The answer is that, for the following six reasons, Wix.com is not worth using anymore, and you can find alternatives that are easier to use and more reliable than Wix for building your online business assets, such as websites, blogs, online shops, and more.
I will tell you here everything in details, and will tell you what to use instead.
6 Reasons That Make Wix Not Worth it Anymore
1 – WP Block Editor & Plugins
One of main reasons why Wix was being promoted as a worthy website builder is that it is easy to use for building and managing websites through a drag and drop visual editor, which is true.
However, even in the past, there were many Wix alternatives that were also easy to use, including WordPress, the open source CMS.
But nowadays, WordPress has released and improved the visual block editor that allows you to create pages and posts, and add different elements such as photos, YouTube videos, tables, …etc., and customize every page with ease, to the extent that it is not worth it anymore to use Wix website builder from now on.
With its visual editor, WordPress now offers more ease and flexibility in building websites and pages, and at a much lower cost that what Wix charges you on monthly basis for any of its plans.
2 – The Rise of Shopify for Ecom
Wix offers business plans that allow you to sell products and receive payments, and it’s quite easy to use it.
However, as Shopify was developed mainly to build and host e-commerce stores, it was created with the right infrastructure that is necessary for hosting successful and reliable online stores, such as:
- The fast servers that are necessary to keep potential customers on your store.
- Lots of apps for adding certain features and functions that help your business grow.
- The availability of many themes to choose from, based on your niche and on your business needs.
- The flexibility in changing the theme of your online store.
- The ability to integrate your store with many different product sourcing and fulfillment options such as dropshipping and POD companies.
- You pay on monthly basis with Shopify, unlike Wix for e-commerce where you pay annually in advance.
And many other advantages that I mentioned in my Shopify vs. Wix Ecommerce comparison.
All of these made the small difference in monthly fee between the two not worth using Wix Ecommerce.
Add to that, the Shopify Lite plan that allows you to pay a small monthly fee, yet enjoy the the different features and apps that Shopify offers, add products, and then embed “Buy Now” product buttons to your WordPress website, or even to your FB page or IG profile and start selling and receiving payments.
3 – Negative Customer Reviews & The Dark Future of Wix.com
If you just go to Google and search for reviews of Wix, you’ll probably find many postive ones that claim to be honest, but they are not.
These are affiliates of Wix.com who would get a commission of around $100 if they get you buy any of Wix plans through the Wix affiliate and partner program.
If you want an honest and unbiased reviews, then you better go to Trustpilot to see reviews by real Wix users.
Wix now has more than 2,450 customer reviews with the overall rating of 1.5 of 5 stars.
And the worst part is that there are many complaints about the support itself which doesn’t seem to support the paying customers!
Add to that, problems with those who are using Wix payments to sell services and products, but the money is being held for long periods of time by Wix without sending it to the Wix site or store owners.
The rating was low a year ago, but not as low as now, and the company doesn’t seem to improve anything to satisfy their angry users.
This reason alone is enough to tell you that using Wix is not worth anymore at all for building websites or online shops.
No one knows where this company is headed.
4 – Expensive
If you want to build a professional website with Wix, then you need to use the Combo plan that costs $8.5/month billed annually in advance.
This means that you need to pay $102 in advance in order to get a professional website.
While with WordPress, you can get a great web hosting service like A2 Hosting for as low as $6.99/month when paid annually (Total of $84).
Not to mention that WordPress allows you to add many more features, and there is much more flexibility in designing your site.
And forget about the basic Wix plan of $4.5, as this one is going to show Wix ads on your site, and you can’t remove them, which makes your site look unprofessional.
This alone makes Wix Premium not worth paying for.
And completely forget about the useless “free Wix sites”, as you cannot connect your domain with this plan, and it shows Wix ads as well.
All of that makes you limited in building your business, and makes you lose potential customers and revenue.
Wix is not free at all, no matter what they say.
5 – Long-Term Downside with The Closed Source CMS (Content Management System)
This is one of the worst things about Wix that makes it not worth starting with it in the first place.
The meaning of “Closed Source CMS” is that you build your website on a software that one company owns (Wix), and you need to keep paying them to host your site.
And if they go bad in service and support (which happened already), then you can’t take your website as it is and move it to another web hosting company, unless you create it almost from scratch with a different CMS, which takes time and costs money, in addition to the problems that will definitely happen.
However, when you use an open source CMS like WordPress, you can choose to host your website on any service that you want, such as A2 Hosting, WPEngine, SiteGround, …etc.
And if the hosting company you are dealing with goes down in terms of quality and support, you can easily migrate your website from that company to another one without having to change or rebuild your website or parts of it.
Even better, many WordPress hosting companies offer free migration that they can do for you if you decide to move your WP site to them.
It is much safer to start from the beginning with WordPress than Wix.
Many of the negative reviews on Trustpilot regret starting with Wix in the first place and say that they now feel stuck with it because it takes effort and money to move their site away from Wix.
And they feel that the Wix company knows that, and tries to take advantage of its customers by keeping the service bad.
6 -Not for Blogging or SEO
Blogging is a mean of getting more visitors to your site who are looking for helpful content and answers to their questions.
And with this concept you can get potential customers in earlier phases of buying something, and you can be the first one to tell them what they need to buy, and therefore, convert them into customers.
And seo is when you optimize the pages on your site to show on search engines such as Google and Bing when someone is looking for what you offer.
And there are many steps that you need to take in order to get this traffic.
But there are also technical stuff that are related to your website and hosting service, which might affect your website’s rankings on the search engines.
For example, if your websites takes too long to load its pages, then people will start bouncing back and look for a different website to find answers to their questions.
And Google doesn’t want to show it its users websites that are slow, because it will provide bad user experience.
And as I have shown in my list of 7 reasons Wix is not good for blogging, the loading speed of some of the blogs that were built with Wix is too low, which makes it really not worth it to use Wix for blogging.
Conclusion – Is Wix Worth it Anymore?
No, Wix is not worth using anymore for many reasons, including the six reasons mentioned above, such as the closed source system, bad support, and unknown future.
The development of the very easy block editor of WordPress totally eliminated the myth that Wix is the easiest website builder.
And the rise of Shopify made Wix ecommerce plans really unnecessary.
And the negative reviews continuously arising from customers show a dark future ahead.
Best Wix Alternatives
If you are already using Wix to host your site or store, then I recommend to move outside it to WordPress through A2 Hosting or Shopify as soon as possible despite the effort it will take, better late than sorry.
And if you haven’t started with it in the first place, then it’s better to never consider starting with Wix for any reason and go directly to its alternatives, especially WordPress, which you can use through a hosting company called A2 Hosting that costs much less than Wix.
I hope this article has helped you take the right decision and stay away from a company that doesn’t try to satisfy its customers.
If you still have any questions, please, let me know in the comments’ section below and I will do my best to help you out 🙂