I Used Wix for 6 Months. Here’s the Brutal Truth.

Quick Verdict

Wix is the website builder you buy when you’re desperate and your developer flaked on you. It’ll get you online in an afternoon, but you’ll spend the next year fighting its drag-and-drop interface. Decent for a brochure site. Terrible if you actually want to grow.

**Overall: ***

Ease of Use: ***** (5/5 — genuinely easy to start) Flexibility: ** (2/5 — you’re trapped in their ecosystem) SEO: *** (3/5 — not terrible, but far from good) Value: *** (3/5 — what you pay is what you get)

So, I discovered Wix about seven months ago. I was sitting at my kitchen table at midnight, two glasses of red wine deep, and my client’s old WordPress site had just vomited a fatal error — something about a corrupted database and a plugin conflict. I’d spent three hours on support forums, I was hungover from a wedding the weekend before, and I just wanted something that… worked. Immediately. Without me having to talk to a support person named "David" who copy-pastes the same script every time.

My developer friend had been pushing me toward Squarespace for months. "It’s cleaner," he’d say. "Wix is for amateurs." Well, guess what? That friend also ghosted me when I needed a quick logo revision. So I ignored him. (I now slightly distrust his taste in everything, including pizza toppings.)

Setup. Oh god the setup. The first 10 minutes were fine — pick a template, answer some questions, feel like a genius. Then the editor loaded, and I actually laughed out loud. It’s like someone designed a website builder inside a fever dream. Elements don’t snap into place. You drag a button over… and it floats off to the left because who knows why. The white space management is… aggressive. I accidentally ended up with a text box that was literally hidden behind my header image. Took me 20 minutes to find it.

And the templates. Wix has hundreds of templates. But like… 95% of them look like they were designed by a committee of people who hate each other. Too much animation. Too many "Contact Us" buttons. The business templates all feel like they’re trying to sell you a timeshare in 2005. I eventually found one that was actually clean — called "Mint" or something. But choosing it felt like winning a small, unsatisfying lottery.

What do I actually use Wix for now? My basic freelance portfolio site. That’s it. It hosts three pages: a homepage, a projects page, and a contact form. I upload the occasional new screenshot. I change the color scheme maybe once a quarter when I’m bored. It works for that.

What do I NOT use it for? An actual e-commerce store. Wix loves to push their "Wix Stores" feature. "Sell products directly from your site!" they scream. I tried it for a week. The checkout process feels clunky. The inventory management is… why do I need to click four times to mark something as out of stock? The shipping calculator broke twice. My mom tried to buy a digital download from me and got a "404 Product Not Found" error. That’s not a store. That’s a hostage situation.

Pricing. They want $29/mo for the "Business Basic" plan. For what? They’re not my landlord. You get… 50GB storage and a custom domain (for the first year, then they charge you separately). And unlimited bandwidth, sure. But the free plan has a Wix ad that looks like a neon sign on your website. I paid for the "Combo" plan at $16/mo to get rid of it. That’s $192 a year just so your site doesn’t scream "I’M USING WIX" at every visitor. That seems aggressive for a feature that should be basic decency.

But honestly? The SEO situation is where Wix really pissed me off. A friend who works in digital marketing — we’ll call her Sarah, she once told me my site had "the keyword density of a dead sea" — she looked at my Wix site and literally winced. The meta descriptions are limited to like 160 characters (standard, fine). But the URL structure is… weird. Wix adds these ugly subfolders. And you can’t change the page slug without breaking your internal links. I accidentally emailed my entire client list with the subject line "Test" because I was trying to preview a new page and Wix’s preview feature decided that was a good moment to publish the draft instead. Fantastic.

Also, you can’t export your site. If you ever decide to leave Wix, you have to manually copy-paste every piece of content. Every image. Every text block. It’s like they built a beautiful hotel and then removed the doors. You’re paying rent, but you’ll never own the building.

Who is this actually for? If you’re a Fortune 500 company, absolutely not. If you’re a small business owner who just needs a landing page with your phone number and a picture of your dog, maybe. If you’re a freelancer eating ramen and you need something up in two hours to show a potential client that you exist, Wix will save your ass. Just know you’ll probably want to rebuild on something else within a year. It’s the L.A. of website builders: great for a weekend, not for a lifetime.

The editor interface changes every three months too. I logged in last week and the entire left panel had been redesigned. My muscle memory for adding a contact form? Gone. I had to watch a YouTube tutorial. A tutorial. For a website builder that’s supposed to be "intuitive." I felt like a boomer trying to program a VCR.

Would I buy it again? No.