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Why do SEO professionals dislike Wix? | Uncovering reasons and starting a discussion | My experience with SEMRush + Wix guide | Testing Rabbit SEO, SE Ranking, and DeepCrawl Apps: Here’s my take
In a nutshell: Our expectations haven’t been met, and that’s led to frustration. That’s the key takeaway, and I totally get why things have turned out this way. Throughout my journey in marketing, I’ve dealt with major projects on WordPress. The argument for WordPress being reliable and SEO-friendly holds water, backed by the giants in the SEO realm. WordPress offers everything you need right out of the gate, including custom code changes. It’s a fantastic feature that gives users a sense of control over their websites – a cornerstone of great user experience.
Now, what’s the deal with Wix? Wix pitches itself as a user-friendly website builder for those who lack coding skills but want to construct their own sites. That’s not an official Wix stance, but that’s how users perceive it. As Wix gained users globally, developers recognized the need for SEO-friendly features. But, many users already had sour experiences, and they’re hesitant to give it another shot – after all, we have WordPress.
I pondered what if I made Wix my go-to platform for websites and harnessed Wix’s SEO features? Purely speculative, mind you – I haven’t migrated from WP to Wix. But, it’s an intriguing experiment. I dived into SEMRush’s “Wix SEO: How to Rank Better with Your Wix Website” guide and noticed it covered the fundamentals of SEO. Just take a look:
1. Follow the SEO Setup Checklist
2. Connect to Google Search Console and Google Analytics
3. Conduct Keyword Research
4. Create High-Quality Content
5. Optimize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
6. Craft User-friendly URL Slugs
7. Introduce Internal Links
8. Optimize Your Site’s Images
9. Establish Backlinks to Your SiteYou sense it, right? It’s essentially an SEO beginner’s checklist with straightforward guidelines on core SEO principles. That’s not too shabby, we all need to master the basics and apply them routinely. But what does it say about Wix as an SEO-friendly website builder? Well, it suggests that Wix can indeed be SEO friendly. Generally speaking, every Google-indexed page has a chance to be on the top. It’s a matter of competition, nothing more. So, if we have the main SEO functionalities and features in a website builder, is it viable? This is the crux of the matter for SEO professionals. If you’re ready to embrace new features, experience potential hiccups, and still want to take the plunge, then why not give it a shot? If you prefer tried-and-true tools, then stick with WordPress. That’s perfectly valid. But don’t claim that Wix lacks SEO-friendliness. It’s simply not accurate.
I’d like to reference johnmu words: “Wix is fine for SEO. A few years back it was pretty bad in terms of SEO, but they’ve made fantastic progress, and are now a fine platform for businesses.”
Perhaps Mr. Mueller was a tad enthusiastic, but if he said it, he had a reason.
My Take on Wix: They’re moving. It still looks raw from the SEO point of view. But they’ve now integrated with SEMRush, Rabbit SEO, SE Ranking, DeepCrawl, and other tools and platforms. It’s essential to note that SEO apps on Wix aren’t a guaranteed ticket to SEO success. They aid in optimizing the tech and content aspects of a website. Nothing more. While a couple of years ago, we might not have considered SEO on Wix, we now have options.
In Summation: SEO extends beyond content and tech optimization. It’s a multifaceted, intricate endeavor. Each SEO professional who comprehends the entire process, from inception to results, can pick the tools that suit their needs best. That’s a resolute stance. Personally, I’m fascinated by the evolution of SEO and marketing. It’s incredibly gratifying to witness our industry’s growth. Whether WordPress or Wix evolves their platforms, marketers will undoubtedly reap the benefits.
Do you need to use Wix? – I don’t care
Do you need to hate Wix? – I’m not sure
Do you aspire to achieve stellar SEO outcomes? – Absolutely. Choose the right tools, lean on your experience and insights, and you’re on the right path. -
1 Reply
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It’s crucial to grasp that Wix is currently quite limited. The future of Wix is beside the point. The present state is what holds significance.
SEO specialists shouldn’t strive to enhance the tool. Instead, the tool should enhance the work of SEO specialists, making tasks easier and more streamlined.
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WordPress works fine – fact
Wix is SEO friendly – questionWordPress proven by community
Wix is proven by a couple of influence SEOsAround 810 million websites use WordPress as of 2023
According to BuiltWith, there are over 110 million live websites using WixThat’s the main reasons
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Wix is way too limited and alot of things that you need to improve site speed cannot be done because you can’t access the hosting.
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This is a much more complicated question than it might seem at first glance. Wix has a number of problems related to internal functionality. I have many practical examples of how difficult it is to work with text formatting and alignment of content on the page.
I don’t call it hate. Rather, I have a negative experience of use. If even the most basic features work shakily, I can’t put everything on this card.
Speaking of WordPress alternatives, Wix is not the first thing to consider. This is one of the possible options, but certainly not the first -
If we consider the ability to place the title and description as SEO features, then we can consider Wix as SEO friendly. But in this case, we should assume that Medium or any blog platform is also SEO friendly.
We need advanced features. I agree with this opinion. We need full access to hosting, code and the smallest possible details, because everything matters in SEO.
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>Throughout my journey in marketing, I’ve dealt with major projects on WordPress.
You can stop at this thought. Big players always choose proven options. If you have something to lose, then you will only rely on what you trust. I guess Wix can be used to build a blog grid or something like that. It will be fast, convenient and possibly even cheap. But here we cannot talk about complex marketing cases where you need to compete with the top segment of websites.
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I think the problem is that many SEO pros dislike the old Wix, and not the new Wix. What I suspect is that 10+ years ago it was a basic site builder without a lot of features and websites tended to be slow. And that ‘rumor’ of it being slow and not having a lot of features has just continued over the years.
What I would do is just continue to show the “new Wix” and its features and how good it is now. Show that it’s SEO friendly. Show that sites can rank. Continue to do what you’re doing with Wix, and eventually that ‘rumor’ and ‘reputation’ will go away. It may take more time, but keep in mind that most SEOs are only really in the industry for about 5 years are so, so it might take a few “generations” of SEOs to finally get rid of it.
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My partner uses Wix for her business’s website. Just yesterday I went through some of her changes and was surprised by the speed and performance of the website. She’s an interior designer among other design niches and much of her website are pictures of her work. Google Lighthouse had nearly 90s across the board for mobile. She is not a technical person. She is using one of Wix’s themes and her own design intuition.
Looking at this one website, technically, there is no reason why a Wix website cannot perform to meet expectations from an SEO point of view. I do see some potential savings on a few small details (css not in a file, html bloat). But the site is already so fast, almost instantaneous.
I have not reviewed the dashboard of the Wix platform and cannot speak to that.
Based on my experience thus far, I would say Wix is a fine platform.
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I can’t resist. Functionality is one thing (and IMO you should always aim to use less functionality, because more = more risk of breakage and incorrect implementation, and definitely don’t over-provision before you need it).
The other (really for me: bigger) thing is that IMO most people should just not be running their own website or server, period. That includes, statistically speaking, you, and most of your clients (if you work for clients). Let (force! pay!) someone (a group! a company!) do it for you, someone who has a qualified, dedicated team to handle outages, maintenance, attacks, everything. Lots of the mainstream hosted platforms have a great track-record. De-risk your work and delegate it to someone who can do this, and who you trust to do it for the long run. Do not encourage your clients to just click “upgrade” when they happen to visit their control panel, have someone else do this for you.
The additional upside to delegating the hosting platform is that you profit – for free – from all of the work done for everyone else. Speed, structured data, metaverse-ML, whatever the world throws at you – a platform will be able to do this for everyone, immediately, and they will fix it if it doesn’t work properly. Don’t worry if your caching plugin is compatible with schema-2047.org – it doesn’t need to be your problem to fix, to plug the security issues, to handle the DDOS attacks that come from adding VR-SQL support. Let a professional do it, just like *you* are probably the professional when it comes to SEO. Do you want some PHP-Apache-hacker implementing tl;idr-keywords on the site? or do you prefer to leave that to a qualified SEO? Just because you can (“click the install button”), doesn’t mean you should.
Well, I deleted 2 longer monologues on this topic now, it’s after 7, and I just want to drink something and sit outside for a bit now, so I’ll hit publish. #yolo
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I’ve seen wix employees circling this subreddit and trying their best to put out the good word, and a few people in here have that same smell.
Show me actual pagespeed and google core web vitals on a typical Wix site and then I’ll care. Until then keep your fluff.
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Having helped a client for over a year with his Wix website, it was actually pretty decent as regards to sitespeed and SEO.
That being said, where it falls apart is the ability to make real customized changes as compared to WP (the same customization can be said of squarespace)
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