What Is Wix?
Wix is a flexible website builder that allows you to create highly customized websites. It’s one of the most user-friendly CMS available and is suitable for both novices and experts alike. Established in 2006, Wix quickly became a leader in its domain and is now popular in nearly every country worldwide.
It offers users a holistic, single platform to create responsive websites and manage your online business. Also, it helps small business owners capture leads, build customer relationships, integrate payment gateways, and grow the business organically. It’s also highly scalable, which means you can continue using it as your business expands, fostering long-term, sustainable partnerships, and never need toswitch.
As of now, there are more than 330,000 Wix ecommerce users. It also enjoys a user base of more than 150 million. Over 21 million mobile sites also use Wix today, which also speaks volumes about its multi-platform compatibility. Much like Shopify, it’s now widely used across industries by both small-scale companies and large corporations alike.
A Brief Overview of Wix.
Wix is an Israeli software company built by a group of technology entrepreneurs in 2006. It’s one of the most popular, free, and a user-friendly website builder that doesn’t require any technical know-how.
As a result, ever since its inception, its growth saw a steep rise. It acquired 1 million users in 2009 and 10 million by 2011.
After that, the company expanded into 9 countries like Brazil, India, Ireland, the US, and Ukraine, to name a few.
They went public in 2013 and raised millions of dollars in IPO since then. By 2017, it had 100 million users. As of now, it acquires 45,000 new users every day.
One of the reasons for its appeal is its intuitive user interface and an easy to use drag-and-drop builder, which create great websites without prior experience or exposure to coding knowledge.
Even statistics suggest that 37% of businesses that use simple website building technologies prefer Wix.
No wonder Wix continues to appeal to businesses and website builders and is now the go-to CMS for multiple businesses across the world.
Here’s a visual of how Wix managed to expand its global CMS market share and numbers over the years:
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0.1% in 2013
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0.2% in 2016
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0.4% in 2018
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1% in 2019
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1.3% in January 2020
As a result, Wix managed to grow over 220% within two years. It’s no mean feat, considering the presence of mainstays like WordPress in the global CMS markets.
You can read my full Wix vs. WordPress comparison for more info.
One of the winning points about Wix is that it offers a freemium business model. It earns the majority of its revenues through its customers upgrading to premium plans.
By the end of 31st March 2020, the revenue of Wix was $803 million, a 25.39% increase over the previous year. This speaks for itself about the customer loyalty it has managed to generate in just under 15 years of existence.
Wix Features Overview.
Wix provides a host of features for professionals from all walks of life.
Here’s a list of some of them :
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Intuitive user-interface and drag-and-drop builder
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Optimized mobile view
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100s of attractive templates
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Marketing tools
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Contact Management
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SSL Certified
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Social media marketing tools
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Professional mailbox
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Wix app market
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Personalized Google Mailbox
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Analytics & Reporting tools
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Free & reliable website hosting
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Social media buttons
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Text Editor
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Free fonts
Wix Ecommerce.
Wix offers a feature-rich online store builder to create a stunning storefront design and grow your ecommerce business.
The ecommerce website builder provides features like :
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Allows you to sell on multiple platforms
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Integrates with secure payment gateways
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Manages end-to-end fulfillment
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Conversion-optimized shopping cart and checkout
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Provides advanced marketing tools
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Drag and drop functionality
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Mobile responsive templates
Wix also allows site owners to add product videos. This helps them provide a more engaging shipping experience and provide information about listings.
You can also use ‘Wix Multilingual’ to create different versions of pages with multiple languages.
One of the biggest expectations from a capable ecommerce platform is its ability to deliver customer satisfaction. Wix enables you to sell anything – from podcasts to hand-made goods. You can also leverage the Wix Booking application to take online bookings.
A clumsy zoom of product images or a distractive layout can drive away your customers easily. Wix offers attractive and engaging design templates to help you set up a stunning online store. It also lets you add up to 15 product images.
For a global business, it offers over 15 payment options, including Stripe, PayPal, Square, and more. All Wix-enabled ecommerce sites come equipped with SSL to help you facilitate secure online payment.
Wix inventory management is not the best in the market. However, it allows you to sell unlimited products. You can also import products in bulk through a CSV file instantly.
It also supports product management to help you manage inventory, automatically mark items as out of stock, and track product numbers. You can easily track all your orders from the dashboard and set shipping and tax rules for your products delivered to different areas.
Around 70 percent of customers leave your site after adding all the products in their cart. To help you recover some of the lost revenue, Wix offers an abandoned cart recovery feature, helping you to automated emails for a polite followup.
Wix doesn’t offer multichannel selling on platforms, including Pinterest, Amazon, and Facebook. However, you can easily integrate with any third-party app like Ecwid for multichannel selling and to add extra features.
It’s also decidedly easy to start your ecommerce store with Wix.
Best Features and Pros of Wix.
Wix won numerous awards in 2019, including the ‘Best ecommerce Software,’ ‘Expert’s Choice,’ and ‘Great User Experience’ awards from FinancesOnline.
Here’s are the key features that make it stand head and shoulders above its peers most of the times
1. Wix Editor.
The Wix editor is pretty straightforward and easy to use. On top of that, it customizes your website design and provides you full control over it.
You can also start from scratch and get to choose from over 500 responsive, pre-designed templates.
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Sign up with Wix or log in to your existing account
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Choose a Wix template for your online store (from over 500 pre-designed templates)
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Use the drag and drop editor and other tools to build and customize your store’s design
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Add products to your online store
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Integrate it with a payment gateway and set up the shipping process
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Select a custom domain for your store
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Finally, make your ecommerce store online
The drag-and-drop features make it especially easy to personalize the websites you’re building. It allows you to play around with the attributes available, get valuable hands-on experience, and try out the various combinations possible before selecting one.
The Wix editor is for people who want to build websites manually, even without any technical knowledge.
The USP of Wix is that it lets you do things your way.
They also keep on updating their customizable features. For instance, they recently introduced badges in the aftermath of the COVID onslaught to help businesses relay messages like they’re open, available online, taking orders, and more.
Wix Editor Templates
The editor also lets you refurbish your SEO plan, helping you increase your website’s search engine visibility.
For instance, Wix editor lets you change the URLs pretty easily, which helps you modify your search rankings.
What’s more, the editor automatically optimizes the screen display for different devices like mobiles, PCs, laptops, and tablets, making it compatible across multiple platforms.
The editor also allows you to add a new dimension to your design by adding animations, videos, photos, and unique scroll effects. These scroll effects can work in multiple ways.
For example, you could add new dimensions to your website by using effects like parallax, reveal, zoom-in, or fade-in scrolling. You can also take your expressiveness a few notches higher by doing away with words, choosing from over 100 in-built fonts, or even upload your own. The Wix editor also enables you to display an array of your videos, text, and images.
All in all, Wix Editor’s sleek functionality is pretty impressive and makes it stand out amid its competitors.
2. Wix App Market.
Wix app market is another amazing feature by Wix that provides impressive apps to grow your business. All these apps let you add different features and functionalities to your website.
The market comes with over 300 apps. You have apps for just about everything – from event management software to SEO tools to boost your search engine rankings, to online survey tools for your website, and more.
Let’s say you need help with an upcoming event and its management. With the help of an event management app from the store, you can holistically provide end-to-end solutions throughout the entire event lifecycle and concentrate on the main event yourself.
This app can also help you with many other activities. Some of them are:
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It allows you to live chat with your customers. With a carefully curated strategy, you can engage the customers 24*7 and address all their needs comprehensively.
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Customers also like to communicate with their peers. The app lets customers access a forum where they can chat, brainstorm, and solve problems for each other.
Wix market also provides an app to help you set up your online store easily.
Let’s look at the Online Store app
The Online Store app lets you sell a maximum of 10 products. Plus, the premium plan gives you access to a lot of other features like abandoned cart recovery, bitcoin acceptance, direct bank payments, and more. This app lets you sell not only on your website but also on Amazon and Facebook, which multiplies your outreach to prospective customers.
3. Wix ADI (Artificial Design Intelligence).
Wix Artificial Design Intelligence (ADI) is a unique platform that enables the use of AI to design beautiful websites.
It’s also a direct competitor of the Wix Editor. However, the Wix ADI is a quicker and smarter version of the Editor and
has a lot of advantages. It minimizes all the manual work and helps you get your website online faster than the manual editor.
The ADI asks a few simple questions to gauge your business requirements and then instantly designs a stunning website accordingly. Questions usually include your choices about the features, functionality, and the intended name of your website.
You still have control over the appearance and details of the website, which you can manipulate by customization.
For instance, you can easily add a new section to your website page. For that, just click on the ‘Add’ dropdown option and select ‘Section to Page.’
And sometimes, you may require to add more pages to your website or to add multiple sections to a single page.
There are 2 ways to do that:
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Create a one-page website with multiple sections
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Create a multi-page website
This means you can segregate your content and adjust it on your website as you see fit.
Apart from this, there is a lot more scope to modify the physical appearance of your website. You can modify the fonts, themes, texts, colors, and much more.
The ADI also lets you add animation to parts of your website.
This feature is decidedly helpful since statistics suggest that videos and animations get processed 60,000 times faster than text, which comes in very handy when businesses are trying to communicate with leads within a short period. They can also increase the conversion rate by nearly 86%.
Not many website builders provide you the option to add animations or the opportunity to boost conversions, so Wix stands out in this regard.
Apart from this, it’s also possible to integrate existing online information with the ADI. It has the power to incorporate it into the website it’ll build.
Here are some of the key features of Wix ADI:
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Tailor-made content for your website
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Original and unique website design
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Mobile friendly
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It gives smart tips
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Allows you to customize colors and fonts
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SEO friendly
However, there are some drawbacks to ADI as well. For starters, you won’t find any templates while you’re using the ADI. Secondly, the ADI relies on a set of questions and your responses to them to design your website. It also limits the number of embeddable apps and features, differentiating it from the Editor.
When you’re using the ADI, your access to the Wix mobile app market also gets constrained. Unlike the Editor, you won’t have the luxury of choosing from hundreds of apps. Also, you can’t directly manage specific URL pages from ADI, unlike the Editor.
4. Email Marketing.
Wix offers one of the most impressive email marketing services as compared to other website builders. Businesses can create and share newsletters, sales promotions, invitations, product updates, and more with their leads and prospective customers.
You also get access to a great variety of backgrounds, colors, and fonts, allowing extensive customizability and control over the physical aspects of your emails.
It also offers users a plethora of templates for use in case you don’t want to build one yourself.
One of the main advantages of Wix is that you can integrate it with any third-party platform easily. You can also easily add external email marketing platforms like AWeber, MailChimp, ConvertKit, or GetResponse to your Wix site using an HTML code.
The feature also makes it easy to get access to all of your contacts via seamless in-built integration.
For example, you can configure your account in a way to view all of the email addresses you collected through your website and from external providers like Gmail and Outlook on a single database.
You can also add social media buttons to your email newsletter quite easily.
It also comes with a highly detailed statistics dashboard to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing activity.
Here’s a brief overview of all the email marketing features by Wix:
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Numerous email templates with customizable styles
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Social media tools
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Statistics tracker
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Hand-picked templates
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Easy contact integration
5. Google Analytics Integration.
Wix, like many other website builders, also provides easy integration with Google Analytics with the help of the GA tracking key.
It’s an easy process, and you just have to follow some simple steps to do that:
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Sign onto the Google Analytics account
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Click on the ‘admin’ option at the bottom
Next, it opens the following window:
Next, click on the ‘Tracking Code’ option at the bottom of the center and copy the same. All you now need to do is paste it to the text editor in ‘Marketing Integrations’ and click on the ‘Connect’ option to access Google analytics.
This feature allows you to track important metrics and KPIs of your business, including the number of visitors, pages viewed, location of visitors, how long they stay, the CTRs, the most common keywords used to find your site, and more.
It also allows you to derive more nuanced insights, such as how you’re running the website, how you’re driving customer engagement, and more. Moreover, it helps you plan on what changes you could bring about to improve your business at the strategic and tactical levels.
6. Wix SEO.
Wix comes with professional SEO tools to make your website rank higher and to boost your visibility. The good news is that it’s easy to set up. You only have to answer a few questions about your site, location, and anticipated keywords.Wix’s built-in SEO features ensure that your websites always stand out on the internet right after you make it online. It ensures a rapid load time that will help retain customers. According to statistics, 57% of customers leave a page that takes more than 3 seconds to load. Websites can achieve a 24% increase in sales by working on their SEO.Even Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites. This is where Wix’s SEO tools come in handy.Furthermore, Wix can create and maintain accurate XML sitemaps that make it easy for search engines to track your site and display it higher in search engine rankings. Another essential feature is that it creates a unique Robots.txt file, which also enables search engines to tag and locate them immediately.Wix also creates individual metatags by default for every site. Each metatag accurately describes your site content to search engines, making it easy to retrieve relevant information.
Here’s a brief overview of all the advanced SEO features by Wix:
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Rapid load time
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Mobile optimization
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Quick Google indexing
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Secure hosting
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XML Sitemap
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Robots.txt
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Default meta tags
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Canonical URLs
Some of the features, including adding 301 redirects, setting canonical URLs, editing page information for social media, are essential considerations for any search engine. Wix is one of the few website builders that addresses all these requirements comprehensively.
Quick Facts About Wix.
I tried to be as comprehensive as possible while reviewing all the prominent features by Wix. In case you missed something, here are some brief facts about Wix and its features:
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Sign-up Process – Simple, 3-step sign-up process.
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500 Templates – There’s a wide range of options for every business.
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Good SEO features – Answer a few questions and get your website optimized in 30 seconds. Plus blogging capabilities.
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Multi-platform Compatibility – You can run your website on PCs, tablets, mobile devices, & laptops.
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SSL Certificate – In-built in every Wix website.
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Personal Domain – You must be on a premium plan to get one. Free domains and web hosting come with every annual plan. The cheapest is $156 for the yearly ‘Combo’ plan.
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Ecommerce Features – Strongest online store capabilities out of the best website builders, including Squarespace and Weebly.
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Ease of Use – Very simple and intuitive interface with no backend coding knowledge or coding skills required.
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Payment Integrations – Via PayPal or credit cards.
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Drag-and-Drop Editor – Build your website from scratch with no prior experience.
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Google Analytics – Measure your business performance and get better.
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Third-Party Integrations – Hook up your own website to marketing tools and widgets to extend the functionality of your site.