I frequently recommend Wix to freelance clients who just need a basic site. Once they set it up, it basically keeps going for years and years, which is not true of most other stacks, including Wordpress. It's an easy service from a single vendor, so no need to deal with different hosting/CDN/SSL/etc providers. I think it's a wonderful thing for clients with simpler needs.
The benefit for clients is that they can pay you once, for a few hours, to help them set it up (if they even need that)... and then they basically don't need you anymore. I've "lost" several happy clients this way, but I'd rather they just use that service than waste their money on a developer they don't really need. It's very easy to use, reliable, and cheap. And they have a single vendor to go for any sort of support they might need for their website.
In contrast to many of the over-engineered Next.js or Gatsby sites I've seen, Wix is far, FAR easier to maintain and I get pretty much zero complaints about it after initial setup. All the other stacks I've ever made for clients, whether they were in Next, React, Angular, vanilla HTML, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, other CMSes... all became a maintenance headache after 2-3 years, and usually obsolete, unusable, and completely rewritten within 4-5. Not so with the Wix sites; they just keep going year after year and the client never worries about it again, logging in to post an occasional update every week or so but otherwise letting it do its thing.
I wouldn't choose to use it for a personal project anything more advanced than a personal blog or a very simple marketing site. But it's fine for what it is, and the web is better off for having services like this for regular people to choose from. Not everything needs a super-heavy JS frontend.
If you want something that just works for years and years, static sites are fantastic for that. Hugo is what I use for my astrophotography blog and it's blazing fast and...well...static
As an agency owner, we don't use these tools regularly but we have clients who do, and we support them. As far as the domains, they are a registrar like any other. You can transfer the domains away or to them like any other registrar. This means that the customer "owns" it for the period of time it is registered for with an accredited registrar. The web builder companies do not own it on your behalf.
There are no real SEO penalties, but as with any web property, you have to do the work to get all the SEO working as you want.
As far as benefits for developers, give me an open source tool any day that I can improve on, extend, or mess up with sketchy coding. These tools are meant for consumers to build their own sites for the most part. They represent the initial commodification of "get a website". They are more difficult and/or expensive to extend than a tool like WordPress, Laravel, Hugo, etc. And they are walled gardens, which means they are difficult to migrate away from.
Thanks. Yeah, that’s good to know that there’s nothing shady going on with the domains. It does seem very inexpensive when you factor in the domain and hosting, so I was curious if there’s any drawbacks.
It's extremely expensive. At $17 or $21 a month which works out to $250 a year you could go to a million other places. For $5 dollars a month wordpress will include a domain and 6 gigs. Hostinger is $2.99 with domain.
Good point about the files. Wix is a walled garden.
But cost wise, $20 a month is nothing. The first time they run into a WordPress security, theme, or extension issue, they'll spend more than a year's worth of Wix hosting to hire a dev to fix it.
One data point I have discovered: many organizations block wix.com by default, because it's popular with phishing actors who mock up Google/Apple/Microsoft logins on free accounts and Wix has been relatively slow to take those down.
What did you find overly complicated about Wix compared to Squarespace? (I don't have a dog in either race... started with Squarespace, but clients found Wix easier to use over time. Maybe that balance has shifted again recently?)
Compared to Wordpress, though, either is much simpler because they're fundamentally site builders as opposed to CMSes. With Wordpress you really have to think about concepts like "schema" and try to understand posts vs pages vs comments, and it gets way more complicated once you start adding in page-builder plugins or ACF or SEO optimizers or performance enhancements... Wordpress is way more powerful (and thus complex, buggy, and expensive in dollars and time) than any of the "build your own website" services, Wix or Squarespace.
I use Typedream. Pretty happy with the results. Squarespace was just too inflexible (in my opinion). Didn't try Wix. Any of the point-click tools, you give up a bit of creative freedom for the time-to-value & ease of maintenance.
I frequently recommend Wix to freelance clients who just need a basic site. Once they set it up, it basically keeps going for years and years, which is not true of most other stacks, including Wordpress. It's an easy service from a single vendor, so no need to deal with different hosting/CDN/SSL/etc providers. I think it's a wonderful thing for clients with simpler needs.
The benefit for clients is that they can pay you once, for a few hours, to help them set it up (if they even need that)... and then they basically don't need you anymore. I've "lost" several happy clients this way, but I'd rather they just use that service than waste their money on a developer they don't really need. It's very easy to use, reliable, and cheap. And they have a single vendor to go for any sort of support they might need for their website.
In contrast to many of the over-engineered Next.js or Gatsby sites I've seen, Wix is far, FAR easier to maintain and I get pretty much zero complaints about it after initial setup. All the other stacks I've ever made for clients, whether they were in Next, React, Angular, vanilla HTML, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, other CMSes... all became a maintenance headache after 2-3 years, and usually obsolete, unusable, and completely rewritten within 4-5. Not so with the Wix sites; they just keep going year after year and the client never worries about it again, logging in to post an occasional update every week or so but otherwise letting it do its thing.
I wouldn't choose to use it for a personal project anything more advanced than a personal blog or a very simple marketing site. But it's fine for what it is, and the web is better off for having services like this for regular people to choose from. Not everything needs a super-heavy JS frontend.
If you want something that just works for years and years, static sites are fantastic for that. Hugo is what I use for my astrophotography blog and it's blazing fast and...well...static
As an agency owner, we don't use these tools regularly but we have clients who do, and we support them. As far as the domains, they are a registrar like any other. You can transfer the domains away or to them like any other registrar. This means that the customer "owns" it for the period of time it is registered for with an accredited registrar. The web builder companies do not own it on your behalf.
There are no real SEO penalties, but as with any web property, you have to do the work to get all the SEO working as you want.
As far as benefits for developers, give me an open source tool any day that I can improve on, extend, or mess up with sketchy coding. These tools are meant for consumers to build their own sites for the most part. They represent the initial commodification of "get a website". They are more difficult and/or expensive to extend than a tool like WordPress, Laravel, Hugo, etc. And they are walled gardens, which means they are difficult to migrate away from.
Thanks. Yeah, that’s good to know that there’s nothing shady going on with the domains. It does seem very inexpensive when you factor in the domain and hosting, so I was curious if there’s any drawbacks.
It's extremely expensive. At $17 or $21 a month which works out to $250 a year you could go to a million other places. For $5 dollars a month wordpress will include a domain and 6 gigs. Hostinger is $2.99 with domain.
Wix doesn't let you move your files.
Good point about the files. Wix is a walled garden.
But cost wise, $20 a month is nothing. The first time they run into a WordPress security, theme, or extension issue, they'll spend more than a year's worth of Wix hosting to hire a dev to fix it.
One data point I have discovered: many organizations block wix.com by default, because it's popular with phishing actors who mock up Google/Apple/Microsoft logins on free accounts and Wix has been relatively slow to take those down.
Paid Wix sites usually have their own domain and aren't on xxxx.wix.com.
But they still use Wix CDNs like wixstatic.com and parastorage.com. I wonder if those are blocked too...
Squarespace is a great balance between having no website at all and WordPress.
Wix is overly complicated bloat, and you are better off just using WordPress if you need the bells and whistles or Squarespace if you don't.
What did you find overly complicated about Wix compared to Squarespace? (I don't have a dog in either race... started with Squarespace, but clients found Wix easier to use over time. Maybe that balance has shifted again recently?)
Compared to Wordpress, though, either is much simpler because they're fundamentally site builders as opposed to CMSes. With Wordpress you really have to think about concepts like "schema" and try to understand posts vs pages vs comments, and it gets way more complicated once you start adding in page-builder plugins or ACF or SEO optimizers or performance enhancements... Wordpress is way more powerful (and thus complex, buggy, and expensive in dollars and time) than any of the "build your own website" services, Wix or Squarespace.
I use Typedream. Pretty happy with the results. Squarespace was just too inflexible (in my opinion). Didn't try Wix. Any of the point-click tools, you give up a bit of creative freedom for the time-to-value & ease of maintenance.