Wix review

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Israel-based Wix is a giant of the website builder industry, and undoubtedly one of the best web hosting services around, with over 150 million users worldwide. Despite being founded in 2006, the company hit its first million users in 2009 and today it has 2,770 employees with offices in Israel, the US, Lithuania, Germany, Brazil, Ukraine, Ireland and Canada. 

Unlike traditional website hosting services such as GoDaddy or InMotion, Wix is a website builder first with free web hosting thrown in as an added bonus. The decision to bundle its plans with free web hosting fits perfectly with the company’s goal to enable anyone to create a professional website quickly and easily since its customers won’t have to spend time shopping for a web host and can instead focus on building their sites. With Wix, users can build their site using the company’s drag-and-drop editor or they can even have it created automatically by using Wix Artificial Design Intelligence.

So let’s take a closer look at the service’s plans, features and pricing to see if this website builder is the right fit for your website.

Image credit: Wix

Costs and what's covered

While Wix does offer a free plan that gives you access to hundreds of templates, unlimited pages and top graded web hosting, the company’s premium plans give you even more.

Wix’s premium website plans start with its Combo plan for $11 (about £9) per month, which gives you 2GB of bandwidth, 3GB of storage, the ability to connect your domain, 30 video minutes and a free domain for one year.

Next up we have the ‘Unlimited’ plan which is geared towards entrepreneurs and freelancers. This plan costs $14 (about £11) per month and includes all of the features of the combo plan as well as unlimited bandwidth, 10GB of storage, one video hour, $300 (about £270) in ad vouchers, Wix’s site booster app and its form builder app.

Wix’s Pro plan costs $19 (about £17) per month and includes all of the features of the Unlmited plan as well as 20GB of storage, two video hours, events calendar, professional logo and social media logo files.

Finally, we have Wix’s VIP plan, which includes everything the Pro plan does, but also comes with first priority support.

It is also worth noting that the company’s free and Connect Domain plans include Wix branding at the bottom of your site. However, Wix’s premium plans don’t include any branding at all.

Signing up

Once you’ve chosen your plan, Wix asks you to enter your email address and a password. The company then runs you through a series of questions to determine what kind of site you want to create and who your audience will be. Once you’ve completed the questionnaire, you’re then asked whether you would like Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) to build your site for you or if you would prefer to create it yourself using Wix’s drag-and-drop editor.

If you’re still not sure which option is the best for you, Wix does have an article in its help center titled Creating a new site: Editor vs ADI that could help point you in the right direction.

Overall though, Wix’s signup and account creation process are fairly straightforward, and the option to connect your Google or Facebook account (as opposed to making an entirely new one) is a nice touch.

Image credit: Wix

Creating a site

As we mentioned before, you can use either Wix’s regular editor or ADI to create your site. ADI lets you create a site in almost no time at all but the editor is much simpler. All you have to do is tell Wix the type of site you want to create, the features you need (selling online, taking appointments, getting subscribers, a blog etc), import some of your social media and contact details and ADI quickly creates a site to match.

The regular editor takes a much more manual approach. You start with a template which you can customize by dragging and dropping the full set of Wix components onto the page or adjusting the elements you already have.

This approach gives you more control over the layout of your site but there is also a significant drawback. ADI allows you to change your layout after you’ve created your site but once you have selected a template in the standard editor, you’re unable to switch it later.

One of the best things about Wix is its polished user interface. All of the design elements in its editor are available via a toolbar to the left while importing media and accessing settings can be done via a toolbar at the top of the page. There are also guidelines down the center of each page to help you line up your content accordingly.

Wix is a very design-focused company and you can tell that just from visiting its website. It’s great to see that this attention to detail carries over to its website builder as well. If you’re an experienced user, you’ll be right at home and if you’re a beginner, you’ll be able to pick things up rather quickly especially since help is available right from within the editor itself.

Even if you’re just a beginner when it comes to website building, we still recommend using the regular editor as the learning curve is not too difficult. However, if you need to get a site up and running immediately, then ADI might be the better option.

Performance

When reviewing a website hosting service or even a website builder for that matter, the first thing we do is to look at the support options on hand. Thankfully Wix has a lot of built-in support. For example, left-clicking any object in the editor displays a toolbar with a help icon and a help menu is always visible in the editor’s own toolbar.

If you do access help from within the editor itself, it will be displayed in a small pop-up window which is quite handy as it doesn’t take you away from the work area. However, you can also go to Wix’s Help Center via your web browser to sell all of the articles and commonly asked questions in a full browser window.

Wix’s knowledgebase provides users with a number of useful articles on a variety of topics including the Wix Editor, domains, mobile, SEO, Wix Stores, ADI and more. These articles are presented well and many include animated GIFS to help illustrate interface actions for those who need extra help. Wix’s support articles are also tailored to both beginners and experienced users.

If you need further help, customer support is available via a ticket system though unfortunately there is no live chat option. Telephone support is also available, but your only option is to request a call-back, which can be frustrating when you’re in the middle of troubleshooting an issue.

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