Reasons to Avoid WIX

Ten Reasons to Avoid WIX

Website builders such as WIX, Weebly, SquareSpace, and others make it terribly easy to build a good-looking website but it’s equally as easy to build a poorly performing website so I’ve been encouraged to write up ten reasons to avoid WIX. We’ve had a few clients come to us recently (after they used WIX) asking for some help to improve their website by making it look smarter, more modern or just to get better search results – and there’s the problem.

Reasons to Avoid WIX

What’s worse is once you’ve chosen a template with WIX and published your website you’re stuck with that design unless you want to lose your content, so we’re stuck with the job of telling you your website is not fit for purpose. We’ll talk more about that in a minute as we’ve compiled a list of TEN reasons to avoid WIX or any other website builder.

You’ve probably seen an advert on TV and now you’re thinking about using one of these DIY website packages, but please stop and think again. I’m a web developer, not a designer so if I need something designed professionally I outsource the work to a professional designer.

If you’re not a web developer or have no experience in digital marketing please don’t think you can build a website that will get the results your business deserves.

Struggling with WIX?

At Prize Pig Media we don’t work with any of the services mentioned above and we have our reasons but that’s not to say we can’t help you if you’ve gone down this route, so if you’re struggling with a WIX website please contact us. Here are our top 10 reasons why we think these services are not a great option for your business website.

10. It’s ‘Easy’ To Build A Website

Why is this a negative? Surely if WIX makes it so easy then this must be a good thing, right? Wrong! If you start this process with the attitude that it’s going to be easy then you’ve got the wrong idea and a bad attitude. We like a bit of attitude, you’ve just got to apply that energy to the right ideas and focus on what you enjoy and what you’re good at, which is running your business.

It’s like I started to explain above; While I understand what good design looks like I’m by no means a graphic designer and I would never try to sell myself as one so the point is, please don’t try and pretend to be a website developer, SEO or digital marketing expert. Your business deserves better and your income depends on it.

9. Bad Asset Management

Squarespace, Weebly, WIX and other alternative platforms all make it extremely difficult and in some cases quite literally impossible to remove, edit or even find certain objects like images or text boxes. This can become an ever increasing problem the more your website grows and you’ll find it hard to remove old and outdated content.

8. Poor SEO Tools

A few years ago website builders (including WIX) were a complete joke with messy URLs, no way to add ALT tags or meta data to posts and it used to run on Flash! But we have to give some credit to WIX as they’ve come so far over the years. That said they’ve still got a long way to go before the professional SEO community jump onboard.

Whilst there are some basic SEO (search engine optimization) elements build into these website builders they just don’t have the powerful tools you need even when compared to the likes of more open platforms such as WordPress or Joomla and the problems around bloated code and website speed still remain.

Quite simply you won’t be ranking as high as you could be in search engine results. There are so many factors that google takes into consideration when deciding where to rank results and one of them is website speed. WIX websites are bulky and usually have longer load times. Check our article (coming soon) on the ten ranking factors you need to know to help improve SEO.

7. Most Marketing Agencies Won’t Want To Work With You

Most marketing agencies prefer to work with websites that use an open platform like WordPress, since there is much more room to build a professional, SEO-optimized, extensible and scalable website. If you use Wix, Weebly, or Squarespace, you’ll find it harder to partner with a marketing agency.

6. Wix Isn’t Free! It’s actually more expensive than you think…

WIX does offer a free plan and usually I’d say something like “you get what you pay for” but in this case it’s not even worth paying for and the free plan is definitely no good for any kind of professional website.

If you decide to stick with the free plan you’ll have to use a WIX domain name and you’re also required to show ads on your website, all of which you have to pay a premium to avoid thus making the whole service overpriced for what you’re getting.

Although the premium plans won’t break your bank, starting at only £3 a month and going up to £18 a month, when you compare this to the cost of a domain name and a hosting package (which can be as little as £2 a month all-in) and combine that with the fact WordPress is FREE and WooCommerce is FREE – there’s no argument!

Over time WIX will prove to be quite a significant investment and guess what? You can’t take it away from WIX! It’s theirs!

5. Poor Site Speed & Code Bloat

study from 2018 observed the performance of 25 different CMS platforms including WIX, Weebly, Squarespace and 22 others with WIX sadly proving to be worst of them all. If you right click on the website and click View Source on a WIX site it will probably look like the matrix if you’re not familiar with looking at code but for those that are you’ll notice a huge amount of unnecessary code. There’s loads of JavaScript an unorganised <div> structure and on page CSS, add all this together and it’s the perfect recipe for long load times and weak search engine results resulting in a poor performing website.

4. Wix Hides Complexities

This sounds like it could be another benefit I hear you saying! Some people will like the fact that they can’t break their website but the truth is hiding complexities when it comes to web dev is not always a good thing. What you’ve got to remember is that what we see when we look at a website isn’t what Google sees.

Google does consider UX as a ranking factor so sure things should look nice and be user friendly but Google also cares about page structure, page titles, and what these details tell about the pages however most WIX websites have the same problems. Search engines like Google don’t care how nice your button looks and that your image has the latest filter on it.

By hiding complex options it focuses your attention on making your new website look really nice and you’re really proud of all your hard work so you go and shout about it to all your friends and family and then share it to the world. Well I hate to say it but you better keep shouting because it will be the best way to get visitors to your website because I don’t think Google will find it very easily.

3. Zero Flexibility

For those of you that do have a bit of experience in building websites you’ll soon notice just how frustrating the limitations of WIX can be. Right down to the smallest of edits like changing font or page layout design are all really difficult tasks when all you’re trying to do is edit the look of your website. This has to be one of our main reasons to avoid WIX but we’re not finished yet.

2. You’re Locked In

Probably one of the biggest reasons to Avoid WIX and any platform like WIX is because you’ll be locked in and stuck with them! It’s quite simply impossible to move your website from one of these website builder platforms to a different one or even to a platform like WordPress so unless you decide to start from square one again you’re stick with the template you choose because you can’t even change this once the site has been published.

1. You Don’t and Won’t Own Your Website

Finally, let’s finish off with a BANG! The number one out of ten reasons to avoid WIX. This really is a big problem and by far the number 1 reason to look for a different solution when developing a website. WIX is closed-source and commercial. You will never own your website and it will always be the property of WIX. You simply have a license to use WIX designs and when you stop paying the fee that license is taken away. On the other hand what would happen to your website if WIX goes bankrupt? Yep, you guessed it. You’ll either have no website or you’ll be stuck with whatever WIX decides to do next.

It goes without saying that the internet has come on heaps and bounds over the years and the rise of these DIY website builders has led to an increase of users (often with no or very limited technical experience) building websites in no time at all and while these might be suitable for the hobbyist or casual bloggers they’re completely unsuitable for any business use.

Bonus: WordPress is just Better AND it’s FREE!

Ok, so what are my options? What do you use? We highly recommend WordPress. There are other options again such as Joomla, Magento, or Twitter Bootstrap but none of these come with the same level of community support as WordPress. 35% of the internet is powered by WordPress! It really is easy to get started on your own and the beautiful thing is WordPress has the power and flexibility to handle any website build from a simple blog to a subscription members-only site.

The great thing about WordPress is that it’s open-source. You own the website files. Your work is yours and you have the freedom to change web host, modify any part of the website right down to the original code and do whatever you want lastly, guys like us are easy to come by – you won’t ever have a problem finding someone that knows how to work with WordPress.

WordPress allows more digital marketing efforts such as local SEO, video marketing, and blogging to be successful simply because of the way they’re built.

Do you need help building a website? Contact Isca Brands now. We’re a branding and digital marketing agency and we can help you with everything from domain names, hosting, and web development right to business strategy, content marketing and much more…