Here are my personal thoughts from my personal experience, developing number of sites for both start-ups and personal clients, I’ve tried Wix in different context from doing everything by myself to leading a team of web designers.
Pros:
- You can build something relatively sufficient very fast.
- The tool is intuitive when you want to do something simple.
- The templates to start from are nicely structured, so that specifying few keywords you’ll most surely come up with something that suits your taste.
- Rich set of elements you can build the web pages from.
- Wix code for under-the-hood technical things that can’t be done with standard set of components.
- Wix technical support answers are fast and elaborative when you ask about something simple.
- Version control mechanism allows to rollback quickly.
- Their advertising is cool and projects tons of optimism :)
Cons:
- The site loads and renders slow. Not terribly slow to give it up totally, but fairly too slow. A fair amount of infrastructure code topped up with elements, caged in iframes. Slowness is bad for SEO and for user engagement.
- The editor loads slow too.
- If you’ll choose to keep the documents using Wix hosting they’ll load really slow too, they will be renamed to some unreadable name, some PDF documents rendered unscrollable, you can’t host a ZIP file as media pack etc (we’ve switched to hosting on external vendor and solved all the probs, for instance PDF downloading time dropped from 20 seconds to 3 seconds).
- The set of components as rich as it is quickly becomes inflexible: you’ll eventually run into something essential that you can’t control. In Product language, it looks like feature completeness tests weren’t accomplished. Few examples:
- Simply as it is, you can’t define the background color of some menus.
- You can’t specify “nofollow” for some URLs (which might affect your SEO badly).
- You can’t have nice tables (means you can mimic them on desktop version with rectangle text boxes, but your mobile view will burst in hysterical tears), plugins from the app marketplace are not providing nice tables either.
- This is a big one: the mobile view is kind of derived from the desktop view (ie not a first class citizen as a desktop view), so without Wix Code you can’t have elements which are displayed only on mobile. Loading elements and hiding them isn’t a good approach either.
- Media page plugin is inflexible (no filter by category, for example).
- There are many more: our design team “ran into walls” with too many features. Simple is always easy, push it a little harder and the system stops delivering.
- Whatever voting on new features and bugfixes is advertised on the Wix site, there is no transparency about what exactly will be fixed and how while customers are screaming for essential features to be implemented.
- Collaboration is impossible (you’ll just get a warning that someone else is working in the editor, which is also not always true).
- Multi-language support is mostly about duplicating all the pages and maintaining each one of them separately.
- Mobile view is not stable (at some stage elements kept being misplaced even on untouched pages).
- Considerable pain when it comes to edge cases:
- When a bug in the subscription form was encountered, it took weeks to support just to acknowledge the bug and they’ve told me they’ll update about the progress on a weekly basis. They’ve cloned the site for inspection, but disappeared very fast and the bug wasn’t fixed till the moment of writing.
- We’ve moved a site to a different domain (which can’t be done without letting Wix know) and inspecting the Google Analytics board discovered that the SEO wizard should’ve been re-runned. It took days of support to figure out the correct flow in Wix backoffice interface to specify the new domain name for Google tag manager. Data for 10 days was lost. When support was notified that the feature can be improved, they didn’t even tried to understand there is a problem in their flow.
- When setting Google Analytics we needed to figure out by ourselves that `editor.wix.com` should be excluded from referral traffic.
- Wix support is just like the functionality: simple requests are always handle very effectively, harder requests in our case resulted with in-acknowledged bugs and on-paper canned promises in the best case. In the worst case it will be just a repetitive saga of misunderstanding since new agents reply without reading the request history. Support agents always write very politely, but they won’t help you to solve the problem. “We’ll keep you posted” is a common response to leave a customer empty-handed. We needed push them to open bugs in their internal systems. In my cases these communications ended up with frustrated lines from my side and sugarcoated answers from theirs.
In short, if you aren’t too picky, you’ll end up with a nice and simple Wix site. Whenever you’ll try to dig deeper, you’ll find too many unattended nuances which you won’t be able to workaround alone or contacting support (Suggested test case: try to ask them how to make a FAQ page so that every question/answer pair can be referenced with an individual SEO-friendly URL).
We’ve decided to shift from Wix after a considerable time and effort invested in making the site ~70% towards of what we wanted it to be.