Among the various website creation platforms wix is an actor which is gaining more and more market share thanks to a very aggressive marketing strategy. The platform offers its visitors to create a free and personalized website in just a few clicks, Wix also offers paid packages that allow the user to have more possibilities for customization as well as other services to improve their website. .
Is creating a site with Wix a good idea? What are the things to know? We will, through this article, go through the important points to know.
Wix, what is it?
It is a web platform dedicated to the creation and hosting of websites, one of the most popular which advocates easy and free! The Wix concept quickly won over the most novice around the world. The latest figures announce 76 million users across five continents.
Free and paid features
A few drag-and-drop and two-three clicks are enough for Wix to offer you a site in HMTL 5, a professional showcase or a small e-commerce site quite impressive, and this for free without any technical knowledge. Like its main competitor WordPress, Wix has its App Market which will help you find very practical features to boost your website (integration of a chat, contact form, newsletter, etc.)
Benefits of Wix
The Wix platform has more than one asset that has conquered millions of Internet and amateur users, let’s discover them together.
- Very easy to handle. Customize colors, fonts, add text and images, create the layout using drag and drop. Wix is the only platform that has based its use on this technology. If HTML and CSS don’t speak to you, it doesn’t matter, since you won’t have to write in any computer language.
- Completely free. Free “templates” or Wix site templates are available with very interesting designs. You can go to the end of your site creation, until it goes online, without having to pay a single penny: a professional and design site at stake.
- No need to find a host. On Wix, you create and host your website directly on their Cloud.
- All Wix templates are responsive and this is an asset, at a time when the percentage of Internet users who surf only on smartphone or tablet is increasing at high speed.
- Possibility to expand the functionality of the site thanks to the App Market and its 150 applications including the Blog function.
- The websites created on Wix are in HTML5, their natural referencing and their loading time could be qualified as good.
- Wix paid plans offer a very good price / performance ratio
- Ideal platform for quickly having a showcase site or a small e-commerce
- A very extensive French assistance center
Disadvantages of Wix
Considerable improvements have been made to the Wix platform in recent years. However, some weaknesses remain troublesome:
- You will have no access to the code or to the database. The day you decide to stop hosting your site on Wix, you say goodbye to everything.
- Almost zero flexibility. Your business is growing, you need an even better site. Be aware that migrating your site to another CMS platform like WordPress, for example, will be a real obstacle course that may discourage you.
- With the free offer, you will always have banner ads at the top and bottom of your site and a domain name that does not look very professional in the form monsite.wix.com. This will add credibility to your business.
Interest of CRM for small businesses
As a reminder, CRM or customer relationship management in French is a service for companies to create, maintain and consolidate a relationship with their customers . Concretely, the CRM will be your tool to more easily manage communication with your clients or potential clients and develop optimized loyalty strategies. Most of the time, this takes the form of full-fledged, expensive software which was not accessible to VSEs and SMEs.
Several CRM functionalities and a single dashboard
Those days are over, because Wix now offers in its App Market many CRM solutions from the simplest to the most advanced, such as collecting comments on social networks, creating and sending newsletters, collecting the actions of visitors to the website. or even follow up on sales and send invoices.
The strong point of the concept is the unique dashboard that collects all the information in one place. With these very easy to set up CRM functionalities and the dashboard, Wix scores a point with small businesses and professionals who have no technical knowledge and a limited budget.
Features offered
Wix, which is a pioneer in the world of website creation platforms, offers a range of clever features in free mode. So you can:
Customize and play on appearance
- By adding parallax effects
- Allows you to broadcast a different background image for each page of the site
- By activating and editing from a dedicated interface the mobile version of the site
Communicate easily with visitors
- Using the contact form or the chat
- With survey and newsletter features (Wix Shoutout)
- The blog, subscription to the RSS feed
- Suggest social media sharing buttons (Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, Google+) and comments
Bet on the “wow” effect of the media
- With full screen video on the home page
- Thanks to the possibility of creating various image galleries with yours or the site’s free collection
- By importing social networks, your photos already published or your YouTube and Vimeo videos
Add the handy features
- Google Maps
- A search engine with the “Site Search” application
- The visit counter
- The countdown to the announcement of a future event
Integrate webmarketing oriented functions
- The creation of landing pages as part of a Facebook or Google Adwords campaign, for example
- Of popups to capture attention
- By adding your Adsense ad units to generate more income.
A glance at the technical aspects of Wix
Design & template
On the Wix platform, you will have the choice among more than 500 templates . And the least we can say is that Wix strikes hard with great designs , much of which for 0 €. The models are classified by category and then under category according to the type of activity: catering, fashion and beauty, health and well-being, service companies, etc.
To make it easier to choose, you can display only new, popular, or blank templates. And, when you have chosen your template, all you have to do is bring your personal touch with your colors, photos, texts, etc.
Page editor
Wix offers a complete page editor whose only limit is your imagination.
You can add a page according to predefined or blank templates, then you are free to organize the tree structure of your pages as you see fit.
After the creation stage, comes the edition of the page itself. You can edit everything: the name, the title, any subtitles, add content (texts, images, galleries, buttons, etc.) with the famous drag and drop. Then, each content can be personalized from a specific interface. For example, to format your texts, it’s like in a Word editor.
Third-party applications
The Wix App Market is simply fabulous with over 160 fairly relevant external applications. We find for example: MailChimp, one of the best known emailing solutions, Callback, so visitors can ask you to call them back or appointment managers. Some are free, but most third-party applications are chargeable.
Wix and SEO
In order to optimize your site for the search engines, you will find in the “Referencing” tab of each page, the basic tools for editing the title, the meta description as well as the keywords.
From your Wix table, you also have access to an SEO control tool that helps you improve the SEO of your website.
In addition, note that the sitemap.xml files and the robot.txt file are generated automatically , they remain searchable, but cannot be modified. However, you can choose whether or not to index a specific page.
Of crucial importance for your referencing, the Wix platform gives you the possibility to configure 301 redirects .
And finally, as you know, the search engines prefer websites that have a fast loading time, Wix sites are pretty good.
Integration of third-party tools
Adding third-party tools, especially those from social networks like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Google+ or even linking your website to a Spotify or Soundcloud account is almost a breeze. Other tools like Google Analytics are offered, but only to those who have opted for Premium plans.
Wix for an e-commerce site?
Yes, it is possible, whatever the Wix template you have chosen. To add an online store to your site, you should start by taking the eCommerce package . You will then have access to the WixStores tool which allows you to create an online store, manage your articles and categories, configure payments, and of course, manage your orders.
The strong points
- The presentation of the product
- Configuration of delivery costs per item
- Intuitive basket management, adding discount codes
- Choose from several payment methods, including offline payment and major online payments like PayPal
The weak spots
- Payment by credit card is not offered
- The tool only offers 2 variations per article, which is rather restrictive
- There is no default comment area per product
- Manual sending of order validation emails
Different plans for different web goals
As explained in the introduction, creating Wix websites is free. The company nevertheless offers different types of paid plans that could interest you depending on your goals on the web. These plans, summarized below, differ mainly by the choice of “templates” they offer and the possible personalized hosting offers.
Note that these prices are displayed without promotion and that it is important to go to the Wix site to see the discounts ranging from -35% to -50%.
Our opinion
Basic functionality for your business
The Wix platform is undeniably a sufficient tool to have a professional website from a responsive template adapted to your sector of activity. The additional functionalities and natural referencing which are nevertheless basic, will be of great help to you and will even allow you to launch your e-commerce site.
Without us being able to really exploit the creation of website with Wix, the result is appreciable to obtain a beautiful brand image online.
