Pros & Cons Of Wix Website Builder For SEO
Wix reviews about how good Wix website builder is are aplenty…
What those Wix reviews fail to mention are Wix SEO shortcomings.
If you are thinking of launching a blog or a website for your business using Wix website builder, optimize your Wix website for users and search engines…
Then I strongly recommend you take the time to read this Wix review and learn whether Wix is the right website builder for you or not…
and whether it will work for you or against you when you decide to work on your SEO marketing campaign yourself.
Even if you decide to hire an SEO company to promote your Wix website, I stil l recommend you read this Wix review.
Wix Review Table Of Content
- About this Wix review
- What is Wix
- Is Wix the best free website builder
- Is Wix good for SEO
- John Mueller’s statement about Wix and search engines
- Pros and Cons of Wix
- My beef with Wix SEO
- What about Wix SEO Wizard
- Wix vs WordPress SEO
- My 17 Wix SEO tips
- My Wix SEO review conclusion
About This Wix Review
If you came here looking for a biased Wix review that only praises Wix and tell you how good and easy Wix is for a beginner…
This is not the Wix review you were looking for.
This is a review about Wix SEO!
This Wix review focuses more on Wix and SEO than how easy it is to design a stunning website using Wix and its drag and drop feature.
I must however mention the many extremely bad experience I had with Wix (multiple times) when a good client of mine decided to transfer his domain from Wix to another hosting.
I can tell you that transferring a domain away from Wix is not as easy as Wix would want you to believe.
If you decide to transfer your Wix site to another host and expect the process to be easy, all I can tell you is…
Good luck with that!
What Is Wix
Simply put, Wix website builder is a cloud based web development platform developed in 2006 that allows you to create an HTML5 based web site easily through drag and drop.
With Wix website builder, you can add features such as e-Commerce, social media, contact form and marketing to enhance the functionality of your Wix website.
However…
some features will come at additional costs.
And that is why I am sharing my 2018 Wix review with you.
This Wix review is worth reading if:
- You believe you can design a website at a minimal cost
- Your readers and search engines are important to you
- You want to boost your Wix website’s visibility in search results
- and increase sale
Is Wix The Best Free Website Builder
Ask anyone ‘what is the best free website builder’ and they will recommend Wix in a heartbeat.
But one thing they will not mention about Wix site builder are it’s SEO shortcomings…
Not because they don’t want to share Wix pros and cons with you, but because they themselves don’t know about Wix SEO nor read any Wix reviews about Wix and SEO.
If you want to build a great website that is optimized for search engines and users plus has fast loading pages…
Then this Wix review is a must read.
Is Wix Good For SEO
If you are just getting your feet wet and don’t have experience in web design but still want to create a stunning website for your business or a blog in no time… Then Wix will help you do just that. However… if achieving optimal site speed, boost your visibility in search engines and increase sales, you must continue reading this Wix review. Ashley Pettit asked John Mueller of Google the following question:
Hello everyone, Sorry if this is not the best place to ask, but it’s hard to know what is correct or false when I search for information. So I thought I’d ask this forum, some expert may be able to help me. I am looking to create my own website, I am thinking of using WIX, but I have read that google does not like these sites and it ranks poorly for SEO and so other issues that google has with WIx. I know wordpress is good, but it’s more complicated to get started. Are the myths about WIX real? thanks ash.
John Mueller’s Wix Review or Statement Regarding Wix SEO
WIX websites work fine in search. There are a lot of different setups for new websites. I wouldn’t focus too much on a single provider, but rather think about the bigger picture: which will make it easiest for you to maintain your site (adding / changing content)? If you’re getting help from others for your site, is there one that they have experience in, which might make it easier / cheaper? Which one offers the features that you think you’ll need in the mid-term? There are probably a few options that could work for you, so maybe it makes sense to just try some of them out and see which one works best for you — websites are websites for Google :).
Look closely at the beginning of John Mueller’s comment/statement about Wix and search engine. ‘WIX websites work fine in search‘.
The important word to take in consideration here is…’fine‘ “Fine” just doesn’t cut it with today’s competitive world and it should cut it for you neither if you don’t want your competition to take your customers away from you.
To me, ‘fine’ doesn’t mean Good and when SEO is very important to me (and it always is), ‘fine’ means ‘bad. Now, go ahead and read some users’ response to John Muller’s statement on Wix and SEO‘. Then come back, continue reading my Wix review and share your comments about what you think of Wix with the rest of us – I would greatly appreciate it.
Pros and Cons Of Wix
No matter which website design platform you use, it has its own pros and cons. Before you start designing your blog or website for your business, you first must choose a design platform. There is more to a successful online presence than just having an online presence.
There is the important part of your website being either visible to your readers or potential customers, or…
A website that doesn’t exist because it can’t be found in search engine result pages.something called Visibility. However, when it comes to Wix, there are more cons than pros.
My Beef With Wix SEO
After testing Wix and optimizing many Wix websites for users and search engines, my beef with Wix SEO grew many folds.
The most important Wix SEO cons (at least for me – and I don’t care what John Mueller of Google says) are:
- SEO
- Speed
Wix SEO
If you’ve read a review or heard someone say ‘Wix SEO sucks’…
You’re not alone.
From my experience in optimizing many Wix websites, I can say that Wix and SEO can play together, but…
Not as good as they should.
Also, the good Wix reviews I read online never mentioned the cons of Wix SEO. And I am not talking about the old issues Wix had such as:
- Bad URL structures
- Inability to add images Alt attributes
- Inability to optimize the blog title tag, URL and your blog article meta-description
- The use of Flash technology which is actually very bad for SEO. Thank God this was fixed
Wix is still lacking on other ranking factor such as site speed (see below), especially for mobile users.
Wix Speed
Not only Wix has a slow editor, every Wix page I tested was slower than the slowest snail or any other slow critters that exist.
Why You MUST Make Page Speed An Important Part Of Your Design…
Recently, Google has stated that page speed will become a ranking factor in mobile search starting July 2018.
This new ranking algorithm called ‘Speed Update’ is designed for mobile search and will only impact pages that deliver the slowest experience to mobile users.
Check out the FAQs regarding the latest Google Speed Update.
I’ve recently worked on a Wix website ‘The Medicine Shoppe Pharmacy Of Shillington, PA‘ and after performing an SEO audit and a long discussion with the client, we both agreed we should transfer the domain away from Wix.
By looking at the two below screenshot, one showing GTmetrix performance result of the client’s Wix website, and the second screenshot show GTmetrix performance report for the same website after moving away from Wix.
Wix Website GTmetrix Speed Test
GTmetrix Speed Test After Moving Away From Wix
Note – The new WordPress based website had more content than the old Wix website and is way faster.
There are plenty of videos on YouTube about how to speed up Wix website…
But unfortunately, they only mention Wix basic SEO features, Wix SEO Wizard and how to optimize images to also improve Wix page speed even further. Don’t just take my word for it…
Check out SimplerWebs’ great article about Wix and SEO.
Wix SEO Wizard
Several years ago, Wix introduced a tool called ‘Wix SEO Wizard’ aka ‘Wix SEO Wiz’ in the hope of helping inexperienced SEO users improve their search engine optimization campaign. However, Wix SEO Wizard only covers the very basics such as;
- Title
- Page description
- Page analysis that checks whether your keywords are withing the content or not
- Word count
- Image name and Alt attributes – Doesn’t always work
- Whether the page title is unique or not
- Duplicate page descriptions
To me, the above fall under the very basics of SEO. I was not impressed. For someone who’s just starting, Wix SEO Wizard is not bad.
Wix vs WordPress SEO
I get asked ‘Is Wix SEO better than WordPress SEO?’ a lot and to answer the question, I’ve looked at many popular drag-and-drop site builders.
And my answer has always been…
‘If optimizing your website for search engines and your readers is very important to you, then go with WordPress.org’.
Note…
Using WordPress Does NOT mean you’ll improve your search engine visibility automatically.
Why WordPress SEO is better than Wix SEO you asked?
- WordPress has a cleaner code – Faster page load
- With WordPress, you have full control over every on-Page SEO elements
- WordPress has Minimal JavaScript requirements compared to Wix – Less JavaScript means a faster page load
- With WordPress, you can minimize and combine JavaScript using free/paid plugins
- You can also minimize and combine CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) using free/paid plugins to improve page load time
- You have control over .htaccess to further tweak your site and improve your search engine optimization (SEO) campaign
- Better control of your Robots.txt
- NO conversion tracking with Wix
- Better personalized URLs – Wix adds short string to your blog or product page (eCommerce) – For SEO, it is NOT ideal
- You can customize headings (H1 – H6) in WordPress pages or post unlike posts in Wix (H1 and H2)
- You have better access to your sitemap if you want to customize it. Wix creates a sitemap automatically and you’ll have no access to it in order to customize it
- Unlike WordPress, Wix mobile editor for tablet isn’t mobile friendly (can’t customize)
- Even though Canonical tags is part of advance SEO, Wix doesn’t offer this feature (at least since the last time I checked)
- and much much more to mention all of them here
From a technical SEO standpoint, WordPress is far more better than its Wix counterpart.
My 17 Wix SEO Tips
If after reading my Wix Review you still want to use Wix website builder for a blog or give your business an online presence, then let me share my 11 Wix SEO tips.
- Logo – Create and upload a great and high quality logo (don’t forget the ‘Retina’ version). Make sure you name the logo accordingly (don’t use the word ‘logo’ in the filename for it is not needed)
- URL Structure – Structure your Wix website in a way that is SEO optimized to help search engine bots easily crawl and index your pages
- Template – Wix offers many stunning template you could choose from but this is where you must pick a lightweight (if one exist) template for better page load time sake
- Features – Your readers came to your site for content and most of them won’t care a bit about features that will make them stare at your page while it’s loading
- Wix SEO Wizard – While Wix SEO Wizard gives offers basic SEO features, I still recommend non-SEO experts to take full advantage of Wix Wiz
- Content – Content is king but great content is GOD. Your Wix website might stand a chance to achieve good visibility in search results if it offers great content
- Update – Make sure you keep your Wix site fresh with new content
- Share – Share your content on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn (especially for a business) while making sure you link back to the content
- Anchor Text – Depending on the content and the page you’re linking to and your inter-linking strategy, use a variation of anchor text (keyword, URL) to link to other related pages
- Hide Non-Important Pages – There are pages you wouldn’t want them to have a spotlight so hide them (Wix offers this feature) in order to prevent irrelevant pages from competing with your most important pages
- Image – Before you upload your image to your Wix website, make sure you resize your image to its intended dimensions, give it a descriptive file name and optimize it for improved speed
- Image Alt Tag – Write a short and sweet description for your image alternate text using your keyword
- Keyword – Use long tail keyword and make sure that each page is targeting one keyword
- Title – Write unique title containing your long tail keyword and make it enticing
- Page Description – Even though page description is no longer a ranking factor, it is what I call an ‘enticement factor’
- Sitemap – Even though you don’t really have to submit a sitemap (search engines will still find you pages), I do recommend that you submit Wix generated sitemap to Google, Bing and Yahoo
- Directory Submission – Not all directories are created equal. Choose and pick which directory to use to promote your website. Check out this ‘free places to promote your business‘ post.
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Wix Support – Good Luck With That
Ah… here comes the fun part of transferring your domain away from Wix if for any reason, you’re not happy with Wix support or service.
To transfer a client’s (mentioned above) domain away from Wix, I had to update the default Admin contact information to the client’s email because the domain was purchased through Wix…
Only to find out that after 60 days, the admin information remained the same.
Wix Support Phone Number – MIA
Contacting Wix support is another huge obstacle that it just impossible to climb and overtake because there is no phone number (there used to be one but I guess because of the too many complaints, they decided to remove that option).
Even though their phone system tells you you have the option of having someone call you back, there was none.
Opening A Wix Support Ticket
Opening a Wix support ticket to transfer client’s domain away from Wix is the most difficult process I’ve even seen.
You first have to select a category or a topic (the type of support you need). Then from that category, you have other options to select from.
They made it easy to transfer a domain to Wix, but transferring a domain away from Wix option was nowhere to be found.
Transfer Domain From Wix
Want to transfer your Wix domain from Wix? According to Wix, it’s easy and simple… So it seems. If you decide to transfer your Wix domain away from Wix, you have to go through the below easy steps (according to Wix).
- Login to your Wix account and go to ‘My Domains‘ page
- Choose the Advanced tab
- Click Transfer away from Wix
- Click Send Code
Easy peasy right?
You would think so but…Not quite
The ‘Transfer away from Wix’ option in the Advanced tab does not exist (at least when I tried on 04/2018). If you have a set of full hair, the whole process of transferring a domain away from Wix can make you loose your hair from the constant pulling.
Changing the email addresses for the admin and registrar was useless because after 60 days, we could still see the old contact information.
That is when I recommended to client to change the DNS (A Record, plus MX record) so everything will be served from the new website IP, and then deal with the transfer later on.
Just Because Something Looks Good, It Doesn’t Mean It is
You can have the most expensive website built and the best written content money can buy and still achieve poor ranking in search engines and have no sales.
To me, SEO is an important part of my clients’ success and if the site builder doesn’t permit me to take full advantage of implementing every SEO techniques and tweaks to improve my clients’ website visibility, I would never recommend it.
Wix can help you create a stunning website with all the bells and whistles (many at additional cost), however, looks are not everything. recommend to move on to a better website design platform such as Joomla, WordPress, Magento or Drupal (depending on their needs and type of website)
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My Wix Review Conclusion
I am going to make my Wix review very simple, short and sweet.
Before you start using Wix website builder for your website, you have to sit and think of any possible plans you might have in the future.
Unfortunately, I see many small business owners regret choosing Wix as their website builder for their small or mid-sized business because they’ve realized that transferring their Wix website or domain away from Wix was more difficult and challenging that they believed it would be.
I’ve decided to write this Wix review not to compete with other online Wix reviews but to warn any blogger or small business owner whose promoting their website for users and search engines is of an out most importance.
Did you have a bad experience with Wix? You’re not alone. Use the below form to tell me about it and include it in this Wix review post.
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Reading This Wix Review Might Make You Think Twice Before Choosing Wix Website Builder
