About Wix.com
Like WordPress, over the last few years, Wix has become somewhat of a household name. It's a true giant in the website building industry, and one of the go-to options for many inexperienced web designers.
Wix reached over 180 million users in 2019, making it one of the most popular choices on the market. The tool is best known for its smooth and intuitive drag-and-drop editor that allows users to build a Wix site fast with zero prior experience.
Wix caters to a wide range of markets, with over 500 templates to choose from, and each template explicitly designed for a specific industry or style, entrepreneurs are bound to find something to suit their niche.
Each and every one of Wix's features are designed to be as easy to use as possible to get your website up and running ASAP. It's also easy to expand upon Wix's core functionality with its extensive app store; there are hundreds of add-ons for you to download and use.
Main Features
When you choose a website builder, you need to ensure it has everything you need to build, manage, and scale your site. So, let’s take a look at Wix’s core features:
Templates
As we've just said, Wix has over 500 templates to choose from. So, there's no shortage of designs to inspire you as you start your website design journey.
There are several template categories on offer, including:
Business websites and services, specifically for brands in the following industries:
- Restaurant and food
- Travel and tourism
- Fashion and style
- Health and wellness
- General business
- Beauty and hair
Online store templates, with presets for:
- Fashion and clothing
- Jewelry and accessories
- Arts and crafts
- Home and decor
- Beauty and wellness
- Food and drinks
- Sports
- Electronics
- Kids products
- Books and publishing
- Pets and animals
Creative templates, including portfolios, for:
- Photography (events, portraits, editorial, travel, and documentary)
- Music (singers, musicians, DJs, music industry, producers, bands)
- Design (graphic and web design, art, illustration, fashion, branding)
- Resumes and CVs
- Video (film and TV, vlogs, education)
Community templates:
- Education (schools, universities, classes, and courses)
- Communities (religious, non-profit, online forums)
- Events (weddings, holidays, conferences and meetups, event production)
Blog templates for:
- Personal blogs
- Food and travel
- Art
- News and business
- Fashion and beauty
- Sports and wellness
- Podcasts
All templates are mobile responsive and feature modern design elements. So, if you want a sophisticated-looking website that looks great on mobile devices and desktops alike – we're sure Wix will stand up to the task.
Customizability
With so many templates at your fingertips, achieving a unique site is only a few steps away. You can easily replace texts and images to ensure your website reflects your brand's aesthetic. On top of this, the drag-and-drop editor allows you to place elements anywhere on your site. With a few easy clicks, you can customize colors, fonts, background images, scroll effects, etc.
You can add extra pizzazz to each website element by adding parallax scrolling, slow reveals, zoom-in, and/or fade-in scrolling. We also love that Wix provides over 100 fonts for you to work with, and allows you to add your own.
To spruce up your images, Wix enables you to add a variety of filters from inside the Wix editor. However, at this stage, it's worth mentioning that Wix’s image editor isn't as advanced as some of its competitors. For example, you can't adjust brightness, contrast, or saturation with Wix's image editor.
Ecommerce
Like other website builders, Wix has been ramping up their ecommerce features aggressively. They’ve built a solid core of features: flexible coupons codes (for % discounts, free shipping, limited time etc.), shipping and tax rules, products options, digital products and no transaction fees.
Last year I criticized them for missing some features— for example, you weren’t able to edit email receipts that are sent to customers. But Wix has since added that.
There are some things that I’ve found to be a bit confusing. For example, their variations editor asks you to subtract costs rather than just putting them in a new price.
In the end, if your main focus is ecommerce you may want to check out Shopify (a highly rated ecommerce website builder) but Wix is a solid alternative for stores just starting out. (Technically it’s cheaper than Shopify— though not by much. Wix’s first ecommerce plan is $25 / month to month while Shopify is $29 / month to month.)
Wix's Pricing Options
Wix is available for free for as long as you want. If you need professional features like your own domain name or ecommerce, you must choose from one of their premium plans ranging from “Combo” to “Business VIP”. The cheapest ad-free plan with a custom domain name costs $14 per month.
