Recently I’ve had two acquaintances contact me to give them some feedback on their websites. After looking into the first website, I quickly came to the conclusion that the online website builder and host they were using was detrimental to securing decent search engine rankings.
The service ignored the most basic fundamentals of search engine optimisation. When the second person came to me, I noticed they were using the same service and realised that it must be somewhat popular. The service I’m referring to is call Wix and they claim to currently host over 6 million websites!
What? They are actually advertising that they are search engine friendly? Is this not paramount to false advertisement? Not only would I describe wix.com’s website creator and hosting service as not search engine friendly, I would suggest it is actually quite search engine unfriendly.
I can see the appeal of the service, it actually makes creating a website from scratch easy enough for most people to be able to produce something presentable, in little time. But the trouble comes when they expect search engine traffic.
Fist let me clarify, I’m describing Wix’s premium paid service in this post. I can’t imagine anyone half serious about their business or website using the free service, as you cannot use your own domain name and the free version plasters your site in wix ads.
So, what exactly makes Wix websites so search engine unfriendly?
One Page Only
Wix limits the amount of keywords and pages you can rank for, because in the eyes of the search engines it is just one page that utilises flash to imitate several pages. The code for every page of a wix site, is contained within one page.
Typically when optimising a website, I consider which pages to optimise for certain keywords. You have no such option with Wix. You get one page to optimise for all of your keywords – which is severely limits your search engine traffic / ranking potential.
This means that you also cannot have:
Unique Title Tags / Meta Descriptions
For the reason above, having only one page to work with means that your virtual pages cannot be optimised for unique title tags and meta descriptions.
Deep Pages Indexed
The search engines only see one page, therefore they only index one page. It is almost ironic that wix automatically creates an xml sitemap, because it only contains the one page.
Also, in the nice to have category, but unavailable to Wix customers:
Google Webmaster Tools
You cannot currently verify your site in Google Webmaster Tools with Wix. GWTs verification requires either a file to be uploaded (cannot do with Wix), for you to be using the Asynchronus Google Analytics snippet (see below) or to edit DNS settings – an option which may not be possible or may be far too advanced for most people that would consider using Wix.
Asynchronus Google Analytics
Wix does not use the new asynchronus Google Analytics code. The older snippet is slower, less accurate and will not support newer features as they are made available.
My final beef with Wix, is their pricing, it’s not that it’s crazy expensive. The site lists the ad-free package starting at $8.25 per month, to the ecommerce package at $16.178 – both when paid yearly. It’s just that the alternatives are similarly priced and are actually SEO friendly.
I would suggest a shared hosting plan and a WordPress install would be a better option for most of those 6 million customers.
So, apart from helping people realise what they will and won’t get with this service, I hope my post and others like it get the attention of Wix, so that they might improve their service to make it not only easy to create a website, but also give that website a decent chance of being found online.
This article has 23 comments
May 13, 2011
Hi David –
Thanks for posting this article regarding Wix.com. I recently created my company website using Wix and really love the ease of use and professional look of Wix, but I have come to find that my pages are not searchable and are not showing up – as you discuss in your article.
Any suggestions of how I can make my Wix web pages searchable; or do you think I need to start from scratch with another sitebuilder? I would hate to start over and really like the look of my site – are there any sitemaps or webmaster tools that I can use, or are there any services you can offer?
Thanks,
Jason
May 17, 2011
Hi Jason,
I’ve been hearing a lot of similar comments, people using wix to create a somewhat decent looking site, only to discover that it does not attract visitors due to the search engine issues.
My advice is to move away from wix and host your own site. That way you have complete control over it. You can get shared hosting quite cheap, as cheap as wix’s monthly fee for it’s ad-free package anyway.
You might consider a free CMS like WordPress, which is quite user friendly, search engine friendly and free. You could either choose one of the many free themes available or have someone build you a custom theme – checkout an outsourcing site such as odesk for that service.
Good luck!
July 23, 2011
ugh no way I have been building this web site with wix for about a week now was going to switch to premium today and i had to stumble upon this ? this is tragic
July 23, 2011
Look on the bright side, you didn’t pay for premium!
July 26, 2011
Hi David,
I have this wix site and all pages are not getting indexed properly by google would it help if i had say the pages hosted on another site with a redirect to our pages?
Putting the website on another platform is not an option , cause of money just need a cheap way to improve seo.
Thanks
Paul
July 26, 2011
Hi Paul,
Are you talking about the Africa Tour Planner you linked to?
That site appears to have quite a number of pages (114) indexed by Google. You can see by going to Google and entering this command:
site:http://www.africatourplanner.com
Unfortunately they all almost identical titles and descriptions which may work against you trying to get decent rankings.
Re: The suggestion of hosting pages on another site and redirecting – I don’t believe it will help, it may just create more duplicate content issues for you.
July 27, 2011
Hi Dave,
I was forced to make the website like that but it worked out better in the end. Wix is apparently fixing this issue of indexing all pages in the site. If anyone is looking for a more seo friendly web builder try weebly it has all the seo stuff wix doesn’t and amazingly quick to use the only thing is it doesn’t look that great but i would have chosen weebly if i knew i wasn’t going to have these seo problems.
Thanks David for telling me about those titles and descriptions i’m a moron for not seeing that earlier another problem wix hasn’t sorted out
Cheers
July 27, 2011
Hey Paul,
It does look like wix have made a little progress since I originally posted this in Jan, as they can now get more pages indexed. However, there is still a long way to go before they can live up to the ‘Search Engine Friendly’ claim. I guess it’s up to each wix website owner to decide whether they can wait (or if their business can even survive) who knows how long, for the improvements.
Good luck!
September 21, 2011
I have to disagree with you. We have MANY companies that we have built wix websites for and have them ranking very well on Google. Sorry, but your analysis is incorrect.
September 30, 2011
Great post David, I have had various clients come to us with flash sites and I tell them the same the best thing they can do is start over. For seo WordPress is king!
September 30, 2011
Cheers Rob. Have to agree, I pretty much use WordPress to build new sites exclusively these days, it is so easy to optimise every facet for SEO and there is about nothing it can’t handle with a plugin or two!
September 30, 2011
Brenan, you claim to be an SEO expert – you should know better. If you are happy building sites for paying clients on wix, then I think you have no right to call your self a web designer or an SEO, you are doing your clients a huge disservice. Imagine the potential of those websites if they were built on an SEO friendly platform. Good luck, sounds like you’re gonna need it!
March 18, 2012
Intresting about Wix Thanks for posting. I got a basic service with them as I’m trying to promote myself and for 3 months I have been unable to edit or update my site, I have tried everything they have suggusted though their “help page” so I complained through their “post a question” to a wix support member and reacived an email telling me my question had been deleted and it seems I cannot post any more questions so I’m stuck with an out of date website that I’m being billed for hosting still and have no control over it. Sucked in? It seems i am as I choose wix as I’m not tech savy and on tight budget I next time I shall do my homework.
May 6, 2012
We are a small company depending on website results. When Microsoft closed down the free small business websites I switched to Wix a month ago, and we’re still not in the search engines. All Wix say are they are working on it.
I have asked for my money back.
June 21, 2012
I have to agree as well.
I have pressed Wix for more detail on this and their responses are always dancing around the issue. It’s like that with a few things (like why can’t users have the option to auto-save – hours of work can be lost if you forget to click the save button ..which often happens and then the flash component crashes and you lose everything).
They claim that they are doing all they can but that doesn’t sound the same as “search engine friendly” which has now been changed to “Google Friendly”
They do now offer the option of converting your flash site to HTML5 (then making adjustments to get it all as it should be).
When I asked them if I would have more keyword options on converting to HTML5 this was their response…
“We have a whole department dedicated to the research of SEO, not just for promoting Wix.com itself on search engines but also for helping our users. From this research we learned that after a certain amount of keywords or characters for title/description it simply stops being effective for search engines.
We are limiting the meta data sections because we are trying to encourage users to have good SEO, not to hinder our users in any way.
We also spent a lot of effort in creating the SEO Monitoring Tool to help our users understand what needs improvement on their sites(for free of course)
As for which is better (flash or HTML5), that’s a difficult question. We are working on improving the SEO functionality of both editors constantly. I would have to say that the HTML5 editor is probably easier to promote on search engines for our users but those who have a deep understanding of SEO can promote their site on Flash just as well (our home page is still in flash and we depend on users finding us online)”
…I dunno. What you think?
I do know that our website rank fell off the first page and we’ve been dropping ever since but I do have to make some changes as per the Wix SEO Monitoring Tool
Available here for wix users: http://promote.wix.com/seo/
Hope that helps.
A little while ago I came across a very similar website builder but it was HTML based and it looked great. I have bookmarked a website called http://pro-wizard.com/ but nothing shows up on that URL (not even an error message so I’m not sure what up there). In any case I can’t find this site again and if it’s not pro-wizard.com then do you happen to know what I may be referring to? I know it’s not Yola or Weebly (just checking out weebly and looking good but not sure about seo options)
August 24, 2012
I’d be super interested to hear what David has to say about Danny’s discussion with Wix…I’ve had a wix for a long time, but I’m working on a new site in WordPress exactly for the SEO of it…I’ve tried everything Wix suggests for SEO my page with them, but it’s been a total failure in rankings. Now I’m hearing that the HTML5 option they offer fixes this (from uneducated friends who also have wix accounts, assuming that HTML5 just *has* to index better), and I just don’t believe it. Googling for reviews on Wix’s new HTML5 format produces 2 very distinct sets of results: Wix & it’s writters shamelessly plugging it’s amazing “SEO Friendly” features, and freelance developers looking for any reasons to bash them. I assume the real answers are somewhere in the middle, but it feels impossible for the DIY tech-illiterates like me to try to educate themselves in this debate!
September 27, 2012
Hi David,
Thanks for the post. This is is quite helpful to understand how they run. No wonder there was a screen full of codes when I viewed the source… Thanks!
October 16, 2012
Thanks, Dave. I’ve also been burned by Wix. There is NOTHING that replaces proper site planning, content writing, and design using professional tools. In the end, you’ve built it. You know it’s yours. WIX is nothing but a cheap, buggy excuse for good design.
December 25, 2012
Hi Dave, we facing some of the problems that you mentioned above regarding Wix. Particularly -
1)Limited keyword
2)Page address limitation by character length..its way to short.
3)Sitemap updation issues.
4) Sometimes its hard to use wix editor.
Hope WIx guys work this out.
April 5, 2013
I actually like wix and I think they have come a long way apparently after reading these comments. Their seo wizard really is nice and made making necessary changes for improved seo easy and within 2 days of my site being up I’m on the first page of Google for an important keyword relative to my site. It is an HTML5 website which may be a bit easier than a flash site would be for seo possibly. I also had no problem getting Google Webmaster Tools to work..just added the txt record webmaster tools provided to the wix domain manager and bingo ..verified. The website I made using wix can be viewed at here http://www.bestgrapplingdummy.com
The one thing i did notice is that the sitemap seems extremely void of content and I know my site is a splash page but I expected to see more content in the sitemap. with HTML5 and ajax maybe there are things to do with this I’m not fully understanding yet though and possible this is the way it is supposed to be.
April 7, 2013
Well, I use wix HTML5 and I am the top ranking. Free version, in fact! http://bit.ly/1412fYC
April 8, 2013
Thanks Jacob, but;
1. My original post is well over 2 years old now, I have no idea what kind of improvements they’ve made in that time.
2. Looks like your site ranks #2 after Facebook, and that is for a very low competition phrase I haven’t even heard of before, not a stellar example by any means.
April 8, 2013
Thanks for the update, Carl. I haven’t had any reason to review Wix again since my original post in Jan 2011. HTML5 is a million times better that flash, so that’s something!