Wix website builder review (2026)

Wix may be the biggest name in website building, but is it right for you? Our Wix review helps you get all the information you need to make an informed decision.

We’ve extensively tried and tested 80+ website builders and found that Wix consistently beats competitors in important areas including tools and features, ease of use, and price. In fact, Wix features heavily across all our buying guides and has maintained the #1 spot in our list of the best website builder platforms for some time.

Wix is an all-in-one website builder that combines pixel-perfect drag-and-drop design flexibility with a massive suite of built-in business engines. From simple personal blogs to complex ecommerce platforms, Wix gives you full creative freedom without touching a single line of code.

During my testing, I found Wix to be ideal for small business owners, creative artists, service providers, and growing ecommerce merchants who want complete control over their brand’s aesthetic. With the addition of Wix Studio, it also caters directly to agencies and freelancers managing client sites.

Due to the way Wix combines flexible templates with intuitive design tools, it is suitable for both beginners and expert developers. That's why we've designated Wix as our "best website builder overall" in our buying guide. Give it a try to see if it's a good fit for your website-building needs.

If you decide that Wix is the website builder for you, you can now save on your subscription with our list of the best Wix promo codes.

Wix review: Overview

According to BuiltWith, Wix has a massive 33% share of the market, more than any other commercial website builder. It's closely followed by Squarespace at 26%, with GoDaddy and Weebly trailing further behind in 2026.

What’s the secret? Some website builders focus on newbies, others on experts and the most demanding sites, but Wix targets everyone. Whether you’re a first-timer looking to build a simple personal site, or a company launching a new web store, Wix has the tools and technology to help. We signed up and built a stack of test sites to find out more.

Expert Verdict: Wix

Expert Verdict: Wix

Owain Williams

I speak from experience when I say Wix is a great website builder. I have built several websites for my own businesses on Wix including a website for taking online bookings and payments. There are 3 things that really impress me about Wix that keep me coming back. First is how easy it is to create something very professional-looking with very little effort and time. I also love the additional tools it offers businesses such as built-in email marketing and booking features. Finally, I’ve always received a speedy, professional, and helpful response from the Wix support team whenever I have had a problem.

Wix pricing & plans

Wix offers several tiers split across standard website plans and ecommerce/business plans.

• Free Plan ($0): Generous for building and testing, but includes Wix ads, a Wix subdomain, and no online payment capabilities.
• Light Plan (~$17/mo): Perfect for personal portfolios and simple sites. Connects a custom domain and removes Wix branding.
• Core Plan (~$29/mo): The entry point for ecommerce. Unlocks basic online payments, store features, and marketing tools.
• Business Plan (~$36/mo): Adds advanced ecommerce features, expanded cloud storage, and multi-currency support.
• Business VIP Plan (~$159/mo): Offers unlimited storage, priority support, advanced reporting, and custom automations.

Wix: Hidden Fees

While core features are included, watch out for add-on costs—something to be wary of with many business solutions. For example, users of Wix should note that many premium third-party apps charge separate monthly subscriptions, so be careful when you're browsing the app market for add-ons. In addition, a free domain is only included for the first year, so renewing your web domain will require additional funds

And, as with any kind of solution that uses external payment gateways, such as PayPal or Stripe, third-party platforms charge their own fees. These are likely to be standard merchant processing fees, but they are still worth keeping in mind when you're budgeting for your website builder.

Value Comparison

Compared to closest rivals like Squarespace and Hostinger, Wix has slightly higher prices for its mid-tier plans. However, the sheer density of native features—like built-in CRM, email marketing, and scheduling—means you rarely need to buy separate software subscriptions, making it a great value overall.

Real-world testing

In my 30-minute test build, I generated a three-page site for a local coffee shop. Using the conversational AI builder, I had a custom layout with tailored copy, images, and a functional menu in just a few minutes. This meant I felt as though I had ample time to customize colors, add product images, and adjust mobile breakpoints. Essentially, I could spend the time saved in setting up the site for fine-tuning - ensuring everything looked as I wanted it. Ultimately, I published a completely polished, production-ready site well before my 30-minute timer expired.

Editor

Using a drag-and-drop editor, Wix offer users unmatched design flexibility. Unlike grid-bound editors (such as Squarespace), you can place any element anywhere on the screen down to the exact pixel.

However, this freedom is something of a double-edged sword. Absolute layout flexibility means you have to manually adjust elements on the mobile preview screen to ensure mobile responsiveness. Additionally, once you choose or generate a site structure, you cannot switch templates mid-way without rebuilding your content.

AI

Wix’s suite of AI tools is genuinely impressive. Testing the conversational AI site builder, I provided a single prompt outlining my business type and style preferences. The AI asked intelligent follow-up questions about my target audience and branding before building a complete three-page site with tailored layouts, images, and copy in under three minutes.

Beyond initial site setup, Wix includes two flagship dashboard AI assistants:

• Kleo (AI Marketing Assistant): Designed to streamline promotion, Kleo automatically generates marketing plans, writes brand-consistent social posts across multiple channels, creates email campaigns, and manages paid ad campaigns without requiring external tools.
• Astro (AI Business Assistant): Accessible directly from your dashboard, Astro acts as a 24/7 operations partner. You can ask it to generate sales performance reports, analyze traffic trends, optimize SEO settings, add new product listings, or guide you through platform features using natural language prompts.

Standout features

Examining the most impressive features, it's a good idea to differentiate between Wix's business engines —the native, built-in operational and commerce modules that power your day-to-day operations and Wix Studio—the advanced web creation and agency workspace where you'll actually build your site.

Wix's business engines contain native tools for Events, Bookings, Restaurants, and Stores that are all integrated seamlessly without requiring third-party plugins. Wix Studio, on the other hand, boasts custom CSS, fluid typography, and multi-developer live collaboration.

Features

Wix ecommerce feature

Wix bests many general site builders by offering a fully featured ecommerce engine out of the box. Setup is guided by a step-by-step wizard, backed by interactive tutorials that animate the actual dashboard to guide you through payment and shipping configuration.

Key ECommerce Capabilities:

• Product Variety: Native support for physical goods, digital downloads, service subscriptions, appointments, print-on-demand, and dropshipping.
• Multi-Channel Selling: Sync inventory and sell directly across Amazon, eBay, Google, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest.
• Payments: Wix Payments accepts credit cards, Apple Pay, and Google Pay with competitive transaction fees (2.9% + $0.30 in the US), alongside support for 80+ third-party gateways including PayPal and buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) options.
• Store Management: Includes automated abandoned cart recovery, multi-currency display, customer reviews, and integrated loyalty programs on higher-tier plans.

Creating a blog with Wix

Wix is one of the best blogging sites on the market. Adding a blog section takes a single click, and the editor provides structured post templates for common formats like "How-To Guides," "Product Reviews," and "Recipes" to keep formatting consistent.

Wix Blogging Highlights & Limits:

• Rich Media & Monetization: Posts support embedded video, image galleries, downloadable files, tables, and paywalled subscriber-only content.
• AI Assistance: Includes inline AI tools for blog post outlines, topic brainstorming, image generation, and SEO optimization.
• Post-Publishing Promotion: Instant social sharing and email newsletter templates allow you to promote new articles immediately upon publishing.
• Limitations: Unlike WordPress or Squarespace, Wix does not support assigning multiple authors to a single blog post, and its automated WordPress import tool can be inconsistent.

What video features does Wix have?

Wix offers built-in video hosting capabilities that rival dedicated media platforms. You can upload video files directly (up to 15GB per file), pull media from Google Drive or Dropbox, or embed streams from YouTube, Vimeo, Twitch, and TikTok.

Storage scales generously across plans—ranging from 30 minutes on free/entry plans up to 10 hours on Business plans, with unlimited storage on top-tier accounts. Unusually for a site builder, Wix also supports direct live streaming (up to 3 hours per session on paid plans) with monetization options for pay-per-view access or recurring channel subscriptions.

We did, unfortunately, notice some issues. When we chose to ‘stream now’ from a mobile device, for instance, Wix could only point us to an iOS app; Android users are left out. Streaming from a desktop takes some work, too, requiring you to install and set up an encoder. And although the Support site does a fair job of walking you through the desktop process, it ignores mobile streaming entirely.

Still, most website builders offer far less video streaming support (and regular web hosts rarely allow it at all.) If you’ve big video plans for your website, Wix’s flexibility and range of tools make it well worth a look.

Wix app market

The Wix App Market offers over 500 apps to extend your site’s functionality—far outstripping competitors like Squarespace. The capabilities covered by the solutions on the Wix App Market include everything from live AI chatbots and social feed integrations to advanced shipping, barcode printing, and specialized CRM software.

What's more, many apps offer free tiers or basic plans, with premium options ranging from a few dollars a month up to full software subscriptions. If budget is a concern, it's also worth noting that some third-party tools offer discounted micro-plans exclusively when installed through Wix, making premium tools more accessible for small businesses.

While the catalog is massive, many apps serve highly specialized niche scenarios. However, for general growth—like auto-posting blogs to social media or expanding marketing automations—the App Market offers unmatched scalability.

Overall, the Wix App Market is a big plus for the service, both because it has many ways to help you build your initial site, and it also gives you a lot of scope to grow later. If you’re at all interested in third-party apps or integrations, browse the App Market before you sign up, find out what could work for you.

SEO on Wix

Building a great website isn’t just about stylish templates and quality design tools. The site should use core SEO (Search Engine Optimization) principles to automatically boost your Google ranking, as well as allowing experts to fine-tune everything for the best results.

Wix provides an exceptional suite of SEO tools that caters equally well to beginners and experienced marketers. On a foundational level, the platform takes care of essential technical SEO automatically behind the scenes. While you build your pages, Wix generates XML sitemaps, manages your robots.txt file, sets default canonical tags, and optimizes site speed by serving WebP images via its global content delivery network. To speed up content optimization, a built-in AI tool analyzes your page content and search intent to automatically suggest relevant meta titles and descriptions.

If you need more, there are a handful of useful SEO tools in the Wix App Market, including a couple of decent options in Rabbit SEO and rankingCoach.

To get an understanding of how Wix handles SEO, we used SEO checkers seobility and SEO Site Checkup to analyse three Wix templates. Although this could only tell us about the default Wix SEO setup (it can’t account for what you might do later), we were interested to see how a Wix site might perform if you don’t make any SEO changes.

The tests delivered decent results overall, essentially scoring a B grade: not perfect, but no fundamental SEO problems, and there are plenty of tweaks you can make to improve results.

Overall, Wix offers a strong set of SEO abilities which delivers reasonable baseline settings by default, and includes many more advanced options which experts can adjust to suit their needs. That makes the service one of the best small business website builders and a great option for start ups, although if you’ve complex needs, using WordPress gives you even more tools and control.

Wix also recently launched a new analytics tool that helps websites better understand how much traffic they are driving via mentions on AI tools.

Wix security and safety

Wix manages backend security automatically across all sites, eliminating the need for manual maintenance or security plugins.

• Data Protection: Every site includes an automatically assigned SSL certificate, full PCI DSS Level 1 compliance for payment processing, automated DDoS protection, and continuous malware monitoring.
• Site Restores: Wix automatically records your site history, allowing you to roll back to any previous version with a single click if something goes wrong.
• Account Access: Account logins are protected by 2-Factor Authentication (via SMS, email, or authenticator apps) and a transparent Login History log. For team collaboration, the "Collaborator" feature lets you invite staff members with custom, role-based access permissions.

Wix mobile apps

Running busy websites is a 24/7 business, but Wix, Squarespace and some of the other top website builders try to help by offering custom Android and iOS mobile apps with assorted site management tools.

Features include the ability to create blog posts, handy as a way to keep productive while you’re on the move.

You can respond to visitors via your site’s Live Chat, if you’ve enabled it, or post replies in your web forum.

The real value of the app, though, is its ability to manage your online business. You can check appointments made on the site, take payments, view the latest sales figures, and explore a bunch of other surprising extras. (If you’ve created an event and issued tickets, for instance, you can scan those tickets with the apps and check those visitors in.)

It’s not all good news. Despite the relatively high app ratings (4.7 for iOS, 4.3 for Android), recent reviews consistently report poor speeds, unreliable blog features, and a host of usability issues.

If you really need to edit your website while on the go, you might also be a little disappointed. Squarespace and Jimdo have apps with a fair amount of editing functionality, but Wix only allows you to tweak its most basic sites.

Overall, the Wix app delivered the functionality we think most people need, allowing them to chat to visitors and keep up-to-date with website stats. But it is a very complex tool with a lot of features, and if mobile functionality is important to you, we’d recommend you give it plenty of testing time before you buy.

Final verdict

Wix may take the title of best website builder overall, but this doesn’t mean it's right for everybody. If you feel you’ll never need more than the very simplest of websites, for instance, then there’s no point paying Wix for features you’ll never use. Hostinger website builder could give you everything you need for a fraction of the price.

And if you’re at the other end of the requirements spectrum, building the most demanding of high-traffic business-critical sites, Wix probably won’t give you the control or hosting power you need. Instead try Managed WordPress and our Best Dedicated Server Hosting guide, instead.

But if you’re anywhere in between those two extremes, Wix’s blend of power and ease of use makes it an excellent first choice. And if you’re unsure, sign up for the free plan (no payment details required) and browse the templates, editor, and feature list for yourself.

Choose Wix if you want total creative control over your site's visual design alongside built-in business automation tools like online scheduling, ecommerce, and CRM.

Skip it if:

• You want a structured layout editor that automatically reflows content when edited.
• You plan on changing your template design every few months without starting over.
• You run a massive enterprise store with hundreds of thousands of SKUs (where a dedicated platform like Shopify might fit better).

Wix review: FAQs

How do Wix prices compare?

Wix prices are very similar to Squarespace. Wix's entry level plan starts at $17/mo and Squarespace's just $1 cheaper at $16/mo. Both also have more powerful plans in the mid $20’s which can build very capable web stores.

We worked through the small print, and noticed some significant differences. Squarespace wins out on the $16 plan by offering unlimited storage (Wix only gives you 2GB); but Wix is better for the cheapest ecommerce plan as it doesn’t have a transaction fee (Squarespace charges you 3%, although it drops this on higher plans.)

The differences are more obvious if you’re looking for a high-end ecommerce plan. Wix’s high-end Business Elite is stuffed with ecommerce features, but it’s $159 a month. Squarespace’s high-end Ecommerce plan is less capable, but only $49 a month. And Shopify’s mid-range Shopify plan also can’t match Wix for features, but it’s only $105 a month, and it saves you money with cheaper US credit card fees (2.6% + $0.30 vs. 2.9% + $0.30 for Wix and Squarespace.)

Overall, Wix is at the higher end of the website builder price range, but we think it’s worth it. The mix of power and simplicity means Wix will help you build a better site and save you time, probably justifying any extra cost all on its own.

Note: If you’re looking for something significantly cheaper, take a look at the Hostinger Website Builder. It has only a fraction of the features of Wix, and it’s based on more limited shared hosting technology, but you can get an ecommerce-capable plan from $3.99 a month for the first four years - although it does climb to $13.99 after that.

You can also find great Squarespace promo codes that will make your Squarespace subscription much cheaper for an introductory period.

Does Wix include hosting?

Wix is an all-in-one service which helps you build your website, and hosts it for you on its own servers. You don’t have to pay for a separate hosting service.

This approach makes life much easier. Go shopping for hosting and you have to think about all kinds of technicalities, from whether there’s free SSL, to if there’s a speed-boosting CDN, and what hosting control panel do you get? With Wix, every site automatically gets SSL for security, a CDN for extra speed, and other hosting essentials, so you can focus 100% on building your site.

One issue is that, even if you register your custom domain with Wix and buy a premium plan, you don’t get email included. Wix offers a Business Email plan (which is Google Workspace), but it’s a paid extra, and costs from $6 a month.

There can be disadvantages for expert users, too. The lack of advanced hosting options keeps Wix simple, but it also means you can’t take full fine-tuned control of the hosting to suit your own needs.

You also have relatively limited upgrade options. If you’re using WordPress on shared hosting and need more speed, you can usually upgrade to faster VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting from just a few dollars a month. With Wix, all you can do to get more resources is to sign up for one of its more advanced ecommerce plans (even if you’ll never use any of the ecommerce features.)

Does Wix offer free domains?

Wix offers a free domain for one year with every Premium plan.

You don’t have to choose a domain name when you sign up, good news if you’ve not chosen one yet. When you buy a plan, Wix gives you a ‘1 Year Free Domain Voucher’, and you then have up to two months to redeem it.

Beware: the voucher isn’t valid for all domain extensions. You can use it for .com, .net, .org, .biz, some country-specific domains (.com.au, .co.uk, .com.br, .de, .nl) and more modern extensions such as .blog, .fitness and .shop. But you can’t use it to register .ai, .site, .tv and many other domains.

Check the Free Domain page on the official Wix support site for the full list.

What does Wix charge for domains?

Getting a free domain with your Wix plan sounds appealing, but remember, it’s only free for a year. It’s important to look at what you might pay for a domain long-term.

Wix doesn't spell out its domain costs up-front, so we tried purchasing a few sample sites to get an idea of its prices.

Our test .COM domain was available for $17.35, dropping to $16.35 if we paid for two years up-front, or $15.35 on the three-year plan.

Our test .NET and .CO.UK domains were a little cheaper at $14.95 on the one-year plan, $13.95 over two years, and $12.95 per year over three.

.SHOP domains always go for a premium price, and it's the same with Wix. Our domain was $45.95 for one year, $44.95 per year over two years, $43.95 over three.

Wix offers partial privacy protection for free, masking your name, address, phone number and email address in the WHOIS database. That's good news for individuals, and enough to help you avoid most domain-related spam. But if you're a business, or just want to be thorough, a Full Privacy Protection option also hides your country, state/ province and organization for an extra $9.90 a year.

These prices are more expensive than most, and there are big savings to be made if you get your domain elsewhere. Namecheap charged $10.28 for our .COM domain ($13.98 on renewal), only $6.98 for our .CO.UK ($7.48 on renewal) and only $1.78 for the first year of our .SHOP, then $30.98 afterwards. Full privacy protection is free forever with Namecheap, and you can lock in these savings by purchasing the domains for up to 10 years.

Our advice: take your free domain from Wix, but transfer it to a cheaper registrar towards the end of the year to get the best possible deal.

Does Wix include email?

Wix doesn’t include email as standard with its free or Premium plans. To get email with your domain, you must either buy one more Wix Business Email (aka Google Workspace) accounts at a cost of $6 a month, or use a third-party service from the best email hosting providers.

This isn’t just an issue for Wix. Squarespace doesn’t include free email, either, and although GoDaddy includes free professional email for year one, you’ll pay on renewal.

Does Wix have a money-back guarantee?

If you sign up with Wix and it doesn’t work out, you can cancel within 14 days and get your money back.

The good news is this applies both to monthly and annual subscriptions. Many hosts (including Squarespace) only refund annual plans.

There are some exclusions, but nothing we haven’t seen elsewhere. Wix won’t refund domain registrations or other third-party products, for instance, so be careful when choosing your perfect domain: there’s no changing your mind later.

What payment methods does Wix support?

Wix supports payments via card and PayPal.

Is Wix better than WordPress?

Wix makes it quicker and easier to build your first site than WordPress. Spend just one or two minutes answering some questions and Wix can create a very capable custom website for you, even including a working web store with a built-in shopping cart.

Signing up with Wix is also more convenient, because the service includes web hosting, and Wix will put the site online. Choose WordPress (we’re talking WordPress.org here, not the hosted WordPress service at WordPress.com) and you’ll have to choose the best web hosting service for you, then install WordPress yourself. That’s not difficult, even for newcomers, but it does take more time and effort.

WordPress wins out if you’re more interested in power and features. Wix includes hundreds of apps to add design, marketing, SEO and other tools, for instance, but WordPress offers tens of thousands of plugins which can handle just about any task you can imagine.

WordPress is also far more customisable, and you’re free to use whatever HTML, CSS or JavaScripts you need.

The bottom line: Wix is best for users looking for a quick and easy way to build a professional website or web store, without requiring any web design knowledge of experience.

But WordPress is best for more complex or demanding websites where you need the maximum control and configurability.

How fast is Wix?

The speed of a website varies according to all kinds of factors, from the type of hosting, to the number and size of the files used on each page, and exactly what the size is doing (downloading someone’s full Instagram feed will be much, much slower than displaying a couple of paragraphs of text.)

We can’t give you a definitive verdict on Wix performance, then, but what we can do is use some of the best web benchmarking tools to check the speed of various Wix templates, and report on the results.

Pingdom awarded our Wix sites a performance grade of B, with a score of 84. The site did well on five out of seven performance areas, but Pingdom rated it only a C for the number of HTTP requests (which means pages are slowed down by loading too many files), and a bottom-of-the-class F for not using gzip compression.

GTmetrix also found our site had some room for improvement, partly because its large number of files (675) and some marginally slower-than-usual stats (360ms time to first byte, 1.4s time to first byte, 2.8s time to interactive and 7.3s overall load time.) But the overall GTmetrix verdict was positive, with our site earning the best possible Performance Grade A, with a score of 91%.

Catchpoint essentially said our site wasn’t bad, but did have room for improvement. The details broadly matched our other tests, with GTmetrix reporting that the site was slow to connect and deliver the initial code, also suggesting this might be down to the number of files and scripts.

These results are broadly similar to what we’ve seen from Squarespace and the top competition. Wix doesn’t offer leading-edge server speeds, and (like all website builders) it’s weighed down a little by the sheer number of scripts and CSS files. But it’s more than powerful enough to handle some very large and feature-packed sites, and most users are unlikely to have significant performance problems.

Do big companies use Wix?

Some huge names use Wix - music video platform Vevo (26 billion views a month) is one of the best known - but they’re in a minority, and that’s no great surprise. If you’re in the Fortune 500, you’ll probably want maximum control over your website and hosting, and you’ll have no problem at all finding the funds and expertise to make that happen.

But, Wix is recognized everywhere as a great way to rapidly build amazing-looking websites, and it’s regularly used by some very big names to run their latest web projects.

Booking.com’s Sustainability subsite, for instance; the UN’s Human Rights and Digital Technology hub; TED’s leading-edge AI event site; Unicef’s Core Commitments For Children site ; Live Nation’s user support portal , even the PBS Kids store, are all powered by Wix.

That doesn’t necessarily mean Wix will be right for you, but it does show the service is widely trusted by some very expert users, and that’s a very positive sign.

What are the disadvantages of Wix?

If we leave out the limited free edition, the main disadvantage of using Wix is the lack of mobile-responsive templates. While Wix templates are mobile-friendly, you’ll have to work with the mobile view editor to make sure your site looks good across all devices.

Also, once you choose a template, you can’t simply go back and swap it for another one. No, with Wix you’ll have to start building your site from scratch.

Is selling on Wix worth it?

If you’re wondering whether Wix charges additional transaction fees, the answer is no. However, there’s a standard processing fee for using Wix Payments to process orders and it’s 2.9% of the transaction amount plus $0.30 for the USA. For UK citizens it’s 2.1% of the transaction amount plus £0.20. And if you want to check the processing fees for other countries, check the “Wix Payments Processing Fees” section on Wix’s official site.

So, is selling on Wix worth it? Yes, it probably is. Wix provides all essential (and some additional) ecommerce features and everything else an online store should have. It’s also powerful, superbly secure, and a scalable solution excellent for any ecommerce business.

Is Wix good for SEO?

Wix has a wide range of great SEO tools to help websites rank well in search engine results. Wix gives you the ability to customize your website’s meta tags, URL structure, canonical tags, structured data markup, robots.txt file and more.

Can you switch from Wix to WordPress?

There are two ways you can convert your Wix site to WordPress. The first way is by using an automated migration plugin and the second is by using the RSS feed to import all your posts then manually migrate your pages, images and other content on your website. Website owners who built on the New Wix Blog can use an automated migration plug-in by CMS2CMS.

Do Wix sites show up on Google?

Wix websites are search engine friendly, with Wix guaranteeing that all of your website content can be crawled and indexed by search engines (e.g. Google and Bing) whether you have a Premium site or not.

Is Wix payment secure?

Yes, Wix Payments are secure and complies with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI DSS).

Why is Wix so slow?

If you are experiencing a slow loading time on your website, this could be down to the images and media used. If you've chosen high-definition images and videos, it takes up a lot of space. The server first loads the image before loading the site, thus those high-quality images and videos will take more time to load.