If you want to build a website with minimal effort and maximum creative freedom, look no further than Wix. It offers standout features like online storage for your site assets, e-commerce tools, stunning video backgrounds, animated titles, mobile apps, and even a useful free service tier. Moreover, Wix X’s editor interface is one of the most user-friendly, smooth, and powerful within the ever-growing website building services space. In short, Wix is an easy-to-use, versatile tool that deserves our Editors’ Choice award for website builders alongside Duda.
Getting Started with Wix
Wix is a website builder, a user-friendly tool that allows you to quickly establish an online presence through a drag-and-drop interface – no coding or FTP knowledge required. All you need is an email address to get started with Wix hosting. In fact, if you don’t mind ads, you can create a free site.
On the other hand, if you want an ad-free site with a custom URL or e-commerce options, you need to upgrade to a paid account. These plans range from the Light account for $16 per month (2GB of storage, a free domain for one year, and two collaborators) to the Core plan for $27 per month (50GB of storage, five collaborators, basic analytics, and e-commerce). If you want a shopping cart and other features to make money, the cost of business and business elite plans ranges from $32 to $159 per month. Finally, there are enterprise-level plans that require a special quote from a Wix representative (starting at $500 per month). For more information on account types, see the Wix premium account pricing table. This pricing is reasonable. Paid plans for Duda start at $19 per month, while Squarespace options start at $16 per month.
After creating an account, you can search for a general type of site – business, designer, event, blog, etc. – then decide whether you want to use a site template or let Wix automatically create a site for you using its artificial design intelligence (ADI). More about ADI later. There are nearly 20 main site types, each with several subcategories. For example, there is a restaurant option with subcategories including bar, café, and catering. For our Wix test site, we chose the blog category, which offers over 70 beautiful template options.
Overall, Wix provides hundreds of template options, more than Squarespace or Weebly. Many of them are free, although some commercial options do require an e-commerce level subscription. Templates come with a full demo, so you can get a sense of the theme before you start editing. In a nice touch, the template preview shows how your site will look on a smartphone screen too.
There is one drawback. Unlike Squarespace or Weebly, Wix does not allow you to change templates once you’ve selected one. This is a major disadvantage against the service, as you need to create a separate site and transfer your files to the new pages if you want to give your online presence a new look.
Wix Web Design Options
After selecting a template and starting to edit your site, you will enjoy a one-minute introductory video. The templates are modern and appealing, with your navigation icons fixed at the top as viewers scroll down. Eight circular buttons allow you to add elements, change the background image, access the app market (where you can get third-party site widgets), view your uploads, and start blogging. You can minimize or hide these control elements if you need to edit the area below them.
It contains…
Wix has all the usual options for texts, media, social media widgets, buttons, and shapes that you would expect from a website builder. If there’s something you want that isn’t included by default, check out the app marketplace. You can also easily embed HTML and add SoundCloud or Spotify playlists to delight your site visitors.
Editing the template design is easy. Just click on any element to see resizing handles and drag buttons. You have more freedom to place elements where you want them compared to Weebly or Squarespace. Double-click on text to edit and format it. As you move elements around, guides appear to help with alignment with other elements. A toolbar provides tools for resizing and arranging elements, including match size, alignment, and overlapping options. If you select more than one element, you can move them together around the page. We love that Wix lets you move any element freely, with effects like Bounce-In, Glide-In, and Spin-In. Overall, Wix offers an excellent basic editor.
Wix also has great right-click context menus. Most other builders do nothing when you right-click, except bring up browser options that don’t help with the site building process. Wix allows you to use right-click to change images or edit text. You can customize the page layout as you wish, including the number of columns and their sizes and alignments. Additionally, you can easily add new pages and drag them to change the site’s navigation sequence. Wix allows you to password-protect certain pages or require login or signup to access content.
Using the Wix X Editor Option
The X Editor is a site building option that features cleaner, more designer templates than the basic editor. More importantly, these are responsive templates, unlike those you deal with when using Wix’s classic editor interface. The X Editor has a built-in demo to show you the ropes, along with a link to the X Academy site. The latter showcases the power at your disposal through lessons and video tutorials. (Credit: Wix)
The X Editor works more like Adobe Photoshop or InDesign than a traditional website editor. Layers allow you to stack elements, while quick templates let you copy a design element quickly to other pages. Click on a text element, and a series of dropdown menu options will appear for changing sizes, locations, anchors, and other elements. The right-click function from the basic editor is repeated here, launching context-relevant context menus when activated. If you’re working on a responsive website, the X Editor starts with three different page sizes that you can switch between to see how your site looks. You can also add more breakpoints, which are different resolutions that become part of your switching options. Overall, it’s faster to move elements around your site using the X Editor, even compared to Wix’s already effective website builder.
Fonts and color palettes are available, and you can save your choices in design libraries. This gives you the ability to quickly change the color of the entire page, or perhaps just the header text, without losing your previous design choices. The X Editor is also built for collaboration among multiple users, as design libraries allow the group to test different ideas without discarding anything.
Website Building Add-ons
The interface
The main administrative account of Wix is clearer than Weebly, as a full list of your sites is displayed. Click on one, and the site’s dashboard will appear with a sidebar for site options buttons. You will also see a feed of site activity, along with buttons for common tasks.
Wix Analytics provides basic reports on site traffic, but it’s best to use the free Web-Stat app or set up a separate Google Analytics account (which requires a paid account level) for this functionality. Web-Stats provides very useful information, as it tells you where visits came from, what display and computer, and the browsers the visitors used – even for free users. Main account holders can add Facebook Pixel reports. The app market provides more tools for tracking search engine optimization, video display, subscription data, and music playback. This is done over other more specific additional features like creating custom seating charts for recurring live event venues or creating a premium app for your restaurant.
Wix has many features that will enhance the hosting experience, including Wix Fitness, Wix Turbo, and Ascend by Wix. Wix Fitness is a website building framework aimed at fitness entrepreneurs. It streamlines promotion, scheduling, client management, and even selling workout videos online. Wix Turbo is performance technology that Wix claims will improve site loading speed. According to the company, “Wix sites will be optimized to implement JavaScript at enhanced execution speed and utilize the latest CSS functionalities.” If you are updating a site that you haven’t touched since Wix Turbo arrived, which improves page loading speed, you should go through the site update process. For our test site of 17 pages, the process took less than a minute and the site looked just fine after the process.
Ascend by Wix is “a suite of 20 products that allows entrepreneurs to start, manage, and promote their business directly from the Wix web development platform.” The tools include chat, site membership, billing, workflows, tasks, automations, and quotes.
Wix now allows you to create English text for your site using artificial intelligence. All you have to do is hover your mouse over a text block, select “get text ideas,” and tell Wix the purpose of your site and the topics you want to cover in the text. Wix gave us some compelling paragraph options for our journalists’ portfolio. It’s a great feature, and Wix continues to expand it. You can now talk to the AI chat assistant to create an entire site using AI just by answering some questions. You still need to edit what the AI does to truly tailor the site to your needs, but this tool can save a lot of time at the start. Hostinger (formerly known as Zyro) also offers a wide variety of AI tools to build your site and predict user behavior.
For tips on getting started building your site, be sure to read our introduction on how to build a website. Also, check out 10 tips to improve your site’s ranking in search engines.
Wix Artificial Design Intelligence
We tried using Wix ADI to build a local business site for testing. It greatly simplifies the site building, is very fun to use, and offers a lot of help. You start by answering some basic questions about the purpose of the site, features, and location and address. It then searches for content related to your business or web activity. Optionally, you can add social accounts like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. After that
Source: https://me.pcmag.com/en/old-website-builders/9859/wix-website-builder
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