In this week’s blog, I will be highlighting the pros and cons of using Wix to design a business website for yourself. The quickest answer to give is that it depends on what kind of business site you want and its scale. Let’s take a deeper dive into this.
Pros
Wix has some great pros, such as an “easy to use” editor allowing you to customise a design with ease, access to lots of different templates to build your website from, and it is reasonably priced. By doing it yourself you can be free to express your business exactly how you want, provided you have a creative mind and know how to replicate your ideas within the Wix builder, which does take some technical knowhow.
Cons
One of the cons of Wix is its bad loading times. Wix hosts your website for you which can be good, as you don’t have to worry about it. But this can also be an issue as once you are with Wix you are almost stuck with them, with additional costs pilling up to further professionalise your website. Transferring a Wix site elsewhere can also be tricky to migrate over if you don’t know what you are doing, this becomes an issue when your business scales and your website needs to scale with it.
Making your website yourself comes the time and effort you need to put into it, ensuring the backend of the website is set up correctly and also ensuring your website looks good. Although companies like Wix advertise as “make your website in less than 1 hour” that isn’t too a full extent true, as building a website isn’t quite that straight forward, otherwise there wouldn’t be thousands of blog posts on search engine optimisation, content structures, on and off-site reputation management and website optimisation. This is the large downside to doing it yourself, as most of the time it isn’t done correctly. Which is why in most cases we would recommend paying to have your website made professionally for you.
What business’ benefit from Wix
The main conversation of this blog is whether Wix is suited to your business. Wix is great at making small business websites with tonnes of templates to choose from in a range of different industries with access to different add-ons to make your website experience better for your customers. However, any large business would want to look elsewhere as the larger the scale of the website the longer the loading times will be, meaning the overall quality of your website will drop.
For individual websites, Wix can be very good as it’ll be a smaller site where you can set up the site yourself on a cheaper plan and follow a template design. If your individual website is for a portfolio, we wouldn’t recommend Wix due to the loading times with high-quality images of your work which you would want to show off proudly. A WordPress site would be better matched for this.
Wix is known for its poor load time which is why we would only recommend it for small businesses, individuals & mico-organisations which use their website as a place of information, not as a large site or as an eCommerce store.
When selling products online we would recommend Shopify, if you’re selling a larger quantity of products. If your selling only a few products then a WordPress website with WooCommerce would be well matched for this.
If you have any questions or would like us to design your website for you, please get in touch.
