Wix and SEO

Do you have a Wix site or considering getting one for your business website? We’ll run down who should or should not use such a service, and why.

If you don’t know what Wix is, they market their do it yourself website design services along the lines of “everyone deserves to have their own stunning website with no coding or special design skills needed. Better yet, it should be free!”

We had a client come to us seeking SEO for his Wix website. We told him it is possible to do SEO, but Wix sites are terrible on so many levels, that you put yourself at a real disadvantage to rank in Google if you use such a service. He said he would try anyway. For results of what happened, see below.

But first, let’s look at the advantages and disadvantages of the Wix service:

Advantages:
1. It is fairly easy to set up a basic website.
2. Fairly cheap
3. Save on professional design fees

Disadvantages:

1. It is only free if you let them advertise on your site.
2. A Wix site without their ads actually costs money, paid continuously.
3. They’ve made it so idiot proof/restrictive that it does not let you do much, in fact it lets you do very little at all
4. They have taken away basic features even the most amateur websites can use to improve their SEO and search engine rankings.
5. Often their sites are made in Flash (which is mostly unreadable to Google), or more recently HTML5, which is a terrific improvement, but still the underlying code is convoluted, and problematic for SEO.
6. Their “SEO” features are barely more than a nod to good SEO practice. The things they won’t let you do far outweigh the things you can do, making it much more likely to cause major problems if you seriously tried to rank such a poorly search engine optimised site.
7. Page load times tend to be extremely high (The easiest way to lose you a lot of business)
8. A professional coder can’t fully edit the website code, meaning only basic settings can be changed, and you can’t do much else, nor can even the world’s best website designer on this very limited platform.
9. Advanced features are practically impossible (very easily completed with standard website), such as being able to advise Google what country your site is based in.
10. Altogether unprofessional, restrictive and problematic.
11. You might save money using Wix by avoiding paying someone to help code/create a much better site, but the likelihood that your Wix page will rank well or ever be seen my many people is extremely low, so in the end you are wasting a lot of time (and money) on your business. Instead of saving a few dollars, you could have avoided all this trouble and invested in a professional website and SEO that is likely to convert many more sales, and rank much higher on Google, resulting in many more visitors and sales.

If you run a business and your website is not ranking well/is poorly made/unprofessional, then you may as well not have a website.
The whole point of having a website is for it to be found and seen, our SEO is what can help get you there. If you don’t care about your business, then perhaps Wix is for you.

Back to our client. After warning him against Wix for the above reasons, he wanted to try our SEO regardless of our recommendations, mostly to avoid “costs” of recoding the website. We ran SEO and link building on his Wix site for approximately 2 months, with (as we had warned them) underwhelming results (around page 5 if at all). We then recoded and transferred their site over to WordPress, with essentially the exact same content as they had on their old Wix page, and the same pages as the old site, just coded better, and better access to SEO features/coding/full HTML/PHP access. Within a week, the site shot to Page 1 for their most desired keyword.
It is understandable that people always want to skimp and take the cheapest option, but the cheapest option more often than not costs you a lot more in the long run if you get no value back from it. The perception that a professional website is an avoidable cost was blown out of the water, and we showed that the “cost savings” of using a cheap website provider were actually costing them a lot more money due to lost opportunities of not ranking as well as we could have ranked them from the start, if only they had a site made by us earlier.

Moving from Wix to WordPress made this business go from nowhere to Page 1 in a week.

The only people the Wix service suits is someone such as a young child, looking to make a hobby site. Even then there are much better options, and cheaper.
There are similar fairly easy to use design platforms, yet far better alternatives to Wix, such as WordPress, Joomla and Drupal, that are completely free, without ads and industry standard for many big company websites, yet easy enough for novices to manage.

If you want to sit on “the kid’s table” of online websites, get a Wix site, if you want to be a professional, use almost anything else except these too good to be true fool proof webpage design tools, including the DIY ones offered by Melbourne IT or any other company that does not let you or a coder fully and easily access the complete website code for editing and optimisation for SEO. Even plain HTML created in a basic desktop WYSISYG HTML design program (such as Dreamweaver or Microsoft Frontpage) is going to have the ability to be many times more powerful and professional, with the ability for a good coder to come along and tweak it as they see fit.

If you value your business and require help in making the best possible website, or getting your existing website to the top of Google, contact us now for help.

Comments 3

  1. You broke it down very nicely! I wish I would of came across this post when I was writing my own post about Wix and SEO. I basically analyzed the “html” alternate source code Wix redirects Google to, and found the HTML5 source code isn’t exactly SEO friendly.

    Lots of basic SEO 101 standards that weren’t getting followed. So outside of the very good points you made about not having control over any real code and being very limited. The final output code isn’t even close to being or having the very basics of SEO standards.

  2. Thank you for the comprehensive pros&cons comparison on the Wix platform.

    I am considering on purchasing a DIYThemes WordPress theme that also cannot be accessed for code tweaking. However there are plenty of successful websites and businesses running on the Thesis platform. Moreover diythemes claims that they optimize their coding for SEO. What would be your recommendation on it?

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