Have you created a Wix website but noticed that you are getting no website visitors? Or maybe you have tried to create a nice website using Wix, but it turned out really ugly…
Being the CEO of a web design company, a lot of clients ask me why you shouldn’t use Wix to create an affordable website. When you first check out these DIY website builders, they seem like a pretty good deal. You pay an affordable price every month and get to have your very own website online.
When you start digging deep into these DIY websites, you see that they are not all they are cracked up to be. You end up with a ugly looking website that doesn’t bring in any customers or traffic. So what happened?
Why You Shouldn’t Use Wix
I always tell my clients that building a website is like building a house. It takes a team of people (all with specialty skills) to come together and build it. You need an engineer, designer and structural builders. When you build your website with platforms like Wix, you are trying to build a house all by yourself and it may end up looking decent but it’s going to have a lot of structural issues. Its going to end up costing you more in the end than hiring a professional to get the job done.
Bad User Experience
The biggest reason you should not use Wix to create your website is that you are not a professional web designer. There is a detailed process creating a website including building out user flows, CTAs, prototyping, etc.
When you create a website using a DIY site builder, you are likely not designing it with a good user experience which will diminish your user experience resulting in lost customers and revenue. You will also lose brand recognition and uniqueness because there are a lot of other customers all using the same website templates.
Professional web designers will layout a user flows using objective based designs that are likely to increase engagement and customers. Websites designed by user experience professionals are more likely to engage the visitors and funnel them through a user flow, increasing your conversions and customers.
Speed & Security
One of the most important parts of your website is the speed and security. Having a fast website will increase user engagement and search engine optimization. Wix.com and other DIY site building websites host your website on a shared server with thousands of other users. This diminishes the speed of your own website will results in lost customers and bad user experience.
Having this mean people on a single server is also dangerous security-wise. If someone were to hack one of these servers, it may compromise every customer hosted on that server.
Lack of SEO
Probably the single biggest problem with DIY builder websites like Wix is that they are not SEO-friendly. SEO stands for search engine optimization and its the act or methodology of getting more visitors to your website from search engines (like Google). This includes on-page optimization as well as off-page optimization. Both of these are very necessary and equally important for getting more traffic to your website.
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Wix websites are known to have bad SEO since you are not in full control of your website. To build a website with good on-page SEO, you must have access to the code and be able to constantly monitor your website for potential SEO issues.
DIY Website builders are widely known for having bad SEO because they are generated on fly in a visual type of editor. This creates un-needed code and extra HTML that will hurt your rankings in the search engines. If you are looking to gain traffic, conversions and more customers to your website, think about hiring a pro.
Limited Pages
Often times, DIY site builders only offer limited pages unless you pay more. Wix offers a single page for their lowest website plan. This is just bad in so many different ways. A website should never be only one page. To engage and sell the customer, you must have an authoritative website with more than one single page.
Another con about having limited pages is that your likely to get no visitors to your website. Google and other search others love content… Whether its images or words, the more you have, the more traffic you are likely to get.
Flash Based
Most Wix websites are flash based which is almost a dead technology for creating websites. Flash is terrible for SEO since it does not produce any crawl-able content.. just code. Its also very slow loading and should only be used for animations and games.
Flash based websites created by Wix will be far superior to their non-flash competitors in both usability and search engine rankings.
Website Ads
Upon creating a website with Wix, you will notice that there is a large ad that explains the website was created with WIX. This can dramatically lower your management rate and brand awareness. Customer trust is very important and when you build a cheap site, customers knows. This will create a sense of cheapness in the customers mind because they know you didn’t invest much in your website.
Customers come across these ads and see that you created your website for free. Would you trust a company that has a free website?
Not Unique
Wix currently has over 90 million users and 500 designer-made templates. Now, 500 may sound like a lot of pre-made templates but with over 90 million users these templates are going to get used a lot. That means that even though you may think your website looks pretty good, there are a lot of other people with that exact same template.
If you want to stand out among your competitors, you must have a custom website design that builds confidence in the customer by uniqueness and brand recognition.
Having a non-unique website can hurt you in the search engines as well. Google bots crawl your Wix site and notice its very similar to other websites out there and you will get dinged for this. The key to gaining visitors to your website via Google is having a unique website with unique and engaging content.
Optimization-less
A successful website is always being optimized. You must constantly be looking for ways to increase engagement using A/B testing and user flow testing. When you create a simple Wix website you don’t have the ability or freedom to do any of this. The result is that you will have a static website that is not growing or evolving which can kill your business.
No Migrations
Say you are not happy with your Wix.com service and you would like to cancel. Unfortunately, its almost impossible to move your website anywhere else. So before you sign up and spend countless hours trying to put together a Wix website, remember that you won’t be able to move it anywhere and you are stuck with them.
Wrapping Up
In conclusion there are a plethora of cons when it comes to using Wix to build your own website. You may not see any traffic or visitors and if you do, its likely they will leave because the website has not built enough trust in the company. Customers are smarter these days and they know the different between a pre-made template and a custom designed website. Which business would you rather use? The professional website? Or the do-it-yourself website?
If you are a small- to medium-sized business owner looking for a more robust, performative, and custom solution for your web presence, head on over to DOT Studio to request a free quote for your next design project.
