Genuine Review of Wix Website Builder in 2026

A decade before building a website was a tech-savvy job. Later, free hosting companies started offering drag and drop builders revolutionizing the accessibility. Now that anyone from a mom, a student to a business owner can have a website. Wix and Weebly are two of the most popular drag and drop website builders that offer free hosting. We use Weebly and Wix many years for building websites. In our earlier articles, we have explained the complete review of Weebly website builder and compared features of Wix Vs Weebly. In this article, let us review Wix website builder based on our experience and usage.

Before Reading Further

Remember, we need to review the stuff within the scope of free hosting services. Platforms like Wix can support smaller websites, say up to 50 pages, primarily focusing on ecommerce features. If you want to go for full-length blogging with hundreds of pages and access to backend hosting server, then Wix is not the place for you. We will not say these are drawbacks of Wix. Instead you need to have correct expectations and look for services like self-hosted WordPress platform. To give you a visual look, below is how the page management of an individual site will look on Wix. It is evident, you can’t deal with hundreds of pages within the small available space and rearrange them.

Introduction to Wix

Wix, a NASDAQ-listed company with over 250 million users, is an online platform designed to help anyone create a website without needing coding skills. It features a user-friendly drag-and-drop website builder based on customizable templates. Additionally, Wix offers an AI-powered builder that simplifies the process even further. With the AI builder, users answer a few questions about their design preferences and the website’s purpose, and the system automatically generates a personalized website. Whether you choose the standard builder or the AI option, you can always adjust and refine your design to suit your needs.

Note: In the past, we were not using Wix because it relied on Flash for website building. However, to stay competitive with emerging technologies and enhance user experience, Wix transitioned from Flash to HTML5.

Basic Features

Wix is really useful for people who want to quickly set up a simple website. However, it has lot of things to offer – packed with features. Here are some of the basic features of Wix website builder.

• You don’t need to be tech-savvy and spend lots of time in configuring server or fixing issues.
• Hosting is free and security is the work of Wix. You can fully focus on creating website and marketing it.
• If you are really interested in coding, then go for Wix Studio (earlier called Wix Code).
• Hundreds of templates available to suit any general purpose requirements.

• You can create sites for blogging, music, restaurant, ecommerce, events, etc. from pre-defined templates.
• It is possible to start with free and upgrade to premium plan. If you are not happy, use 14 days money back guarantee to get your money back.
• Robust help center and SEO capabilities.
• Get hosting, 1year free domain, email, logo, live chat, etc. in one place.
• There are also third-party apps available to integrate from App Market.

Creating Your Website

The process of creating a website is seamless in Wix.

• First, you need to create an account and then login using your email / password.
• You will land on the dashboard section, click the site switcher (next to Wix logo on top left) and click “+Create New Site” link.
• You will be prompted with AI chat box asking whether you want to use AI or setup without chat.

• Let us choose AI builder by clicking on “Start Chat” button. Answer few questions and Wix will generate your site few minutes.

• Once the AI chat is finished, go to dashboard to find the next set of steps to build your content. Follow the checklist to finish the activities like connecting to custom domain, adding payment methods, etc. You can also find quick access links in the left sidebar to add blog and apps from marketplace.

• Click the “Design Site” button to go to Wix editor and you will be prompted to pick a theme for your site. You can manually browse and pick a template for your site of generate a design with AI.

• If AI built the design, you have options to re-built or go to the editor with the generated design.

If you do not like AI, manually adding details and pick up a template is also a straightforward process. In both cases, you can modify each element and fill it with content or perform additional tweaks. For beginners, we recommend starting with manual options so that you can learn how it works. Once you are familiar, you can use the AI builder to start with the skeleton design and then fill your content.

Editing Content in Wix Editor

Wix editor is power packed with features that overwhelm you even you are an expert. You can add elements, sections, pages, apps and customize the design. Since there are too many stuffs, the editor is too slow to load which may annoy you if you are used to work with WordPress or Weebly editors. Good thing is that you have AI tools in the editor also to speed up the design and content creation process.

Click the “Add Elements” icon to insert thousands of elements, click on any inserted element and select “Quick Edit” option to customize its content / design.

Wix Mobile Editor

When you are in the editor, it is possible to toggle between desktop and mobile views. Click the mobile icon (on the top next to page selection dropdown) to open Wix Mobile Editor. You can preview elements and customize mobile specific items to optimize your websites for smartphones and tablets.

Note: It is not possible to switch to different template after the initial selection. This is one of the biggest restrictions of using Wix as you need to recreate the entire website for switching the template.

Managing Websites

After logging into your account, you can view and manage all sites under your account in the dashboard. You can easily choose the site and the preferred action you want to do. For example, with a single click, you can duplicate an entire site. You can also click on the “All Sites” dropdown and select a site to edit.

Wix App Market

You have large number of third-party as well Wix made apps available in App Market. Whether you want to add a blog, store or an online booking system, you need to install and customize that app on your site. You can add apps directly from the dashboard or from the editor.

Note that some third party apps may not work as expected. Instead of adding functionality directly, an app may add an iFrame to your website instead. So, you may not get seamless integration from some apps, because these apps actually work as a separate module on your website. Technically, this will work, but it’s better if apps are well integrated.

Blog and Stores are two of the important apps that you need for your site.

Wix Blogging

Blogging with Wix is easy. You can create a simple or highly multifunctional blog, based on your preferences. It offers many standard blogging features, such as scheduled blog posts, tag cloud, Featured posts, social media integration, templates, comment management and custom feed. Experienced bloggers could access code editing options to further customize the blog design. Wix Blogging includes advanced SEO features to boost positions of your new blog posts. The best part is that you can hide your content behind a paywall and show to visitors by collecting a subscription fee.

Wix Stores

Compared to other website types, eCommerce websites are more complex and can be more challenging to manage, especially when you are dealing with dozens or hundreds of transactions per day. Wix Stores should be ideal for any small or medium-sized online stores.

• Sell digital and physical products.
• It supports all popular payment gateways including PayPal, Apple Pay and Wix Payments.
• The editor allows you to create and customize store pages like products, categories, cart and thank you page.

SEO for Wix Sites

Go to “Pages & Menu” and select a page from “Site Menu” section. Click the three dots icon against the page name and select “SEO basics” option to edit its SEO settings.

• SEO basics – under this tab, you can add title, meta description and hide page from search engines.
• Advanced SEO – under this tab, you can add structured data, robots meta tags and any other custom tags like Open Graph meta tags.

Though you do not need any additional apps for optimizing your site for search engines, there are also many third-party SEO apps available in App Market which you can purchase. You can also learn optimization techniques in a dedicated SEO Hub section.

Pricing Plans

The key question is whether Wix is free to use. Similar to WordPress.com or Weebly, Wix offers a free plan, but it comes with limitations. Your website will be hosted on a Wix subdomain (e.g., youraccountname.wixsite.com/sitename/pagename), and you will only have access to basic features, including 500 MB of cloud storage, while Wix displays ads on your site.

Below are the premium plans that Wix offers and price is on per month basis.

• Combo plan for personal use – $ 17
• Core plan for entrepreneurs & freelancers – $ 29
• Business plan for online branding – $ 36
• Business Elite plan for first priority support with developer platform – $ 159

The most affordable premium plan, “Light”, is designed for personal use and costs $17 per month. It includes 2 GB of storage and a free domain for one year. Higher-tier plans provide additional benefits such as more storage, online store integration, and priority customer support. All premium plans include features like removing Wix ads, increased storage, custom domain connection, 1 year free domain.

Final Words

As mentioned, Wix is the best option available for small online stores. They promise 100 percent convenience and allow users to customize the website from different angles. However, if you are a professional developer or designer or want to build a large website, then you will find Wix severely restricts the freedom to make significant changes to the website features and designs.