Is Wix worth it for a small business?

Wix removes the technical work from having a website. Hosting, security and updates are handled. Pages are built by dragging elements into place. The settings search engines read are all there to be filled in. A business can have a respectable site in days, without hiring anyone.

For a business whose customers come from referrals, a shopfront or social media, that is often all a website has to be.

Two limits appear when the business starts to depend on search.

The first is speed. A Wix page loads the platform’s own code as well as the page’s content, and Wix says it cannot optimise the third-party apps that many business sites rely on. The owner can trim the page, and cannot change how it is built.

The second is ownership. Wix states that a site built on its platform cannot be exported or hosted elsewhere. Everything built there stays there. Leaving means rebuilding.

Each of these is a sign that the site is now costing more than it saves.

• The site is still slow after you have followed Wix’s own speed advice.
• Competitors with faster sites sit above you for the searches you want.
• You pay for advertising that sends visitors to pages that load slowly.
• You need a feature that only arrives as another app, and each app slows the site further.
• You want the site, and the work put into it, to belong to you.

Leaving Wix is a rebuild, and a rebuild done properly keeps what matters. The domain moves with you. The content is copied across. The rankings are kept by redirecting every old address to its new one. Our guide to moving a Wix site to another host sets out the order.

Do not decide on reputation. Measure. Follow how to speed up a Wix website, then test your pages against your competitors’. If you can match them, stay and spend the effort on content. If you cannot, the platform has given what it can, and a rebuild is an investment in everything the site does afterwards.