For those of you who are unfamiliar with Wix let us briefly explain what it is. Wix is a cloud-based, open-source, all-in-one website builder that is particularly liked by beginners and those who have no idea how to code HTML. It has flexible designs that allow for a reasonable level of personalisation and is suited for building small to medium-sized websites. It is also popular due to the excellent customer service provided by their in-house support team who are known to be extremely responsive and very professional.
Hopefully, that all sounds positive so far, which brings us to something where Wix’s reputation is not as high, and that is regarding SEO. This most likely stemmed from Wix’s early days where it quickly became known for many issues which were hindering webmasters and SEO experts from optimising websites built with it.
Some of these issues included being unable to optimise title tags and meta descriptions for blog posts, a URL structure that would generate weird characters and add them to URLs, being unable to add alt attributes to media such as images, and the use of Flash technology which was seen as detrimental to a website’s rankings.
It is not surprising that with all these issues in play, Wix’s reputation hit rock bottom amongst SEO professionals. Even today, there are still many articles and comments online which suggest Wix should be given a wide berth if you are considering building a website with it and want to use SEO to help it rank.
To be fair to the top people and coders at Wix, rather than hide from all these problems, they addressed them one by one. Over the past few years, they have made many changes to the Wix website builder, to the point that there are many websites built with it that are ranking at the top of the search engine results.
If you want further evidence of the progress Wix has made, one of the founders of the well-renowned SEO company, Moz has been on a personal mission to reverse the reputation Wix previously had for its SEO. Even Google has stated that websites built with Wix are looked upon in no less a light than any other platform.
So, now that Wix’s reputation for SEO is on the up, and it appears that Google sees it as an equal to all other website platforms, let’s see what other positives Wix’s may be able to offer us in respect of SEO.
Well, one of the first we must point out is how easy it is to connect Wix to Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Both are vital tools for SEO so the easier it is to use them, thanks to Wix, the better.
Another is that much of the SEO functionality that you would normally need to use widgets and plugins for is already built-in to Wix’s dashboard. This allows you to focus on the content you need to create for your website, rather than having to set up and mess around with plugins.
Nevertheless, if you want to have more tools at your disposal, Wix does have some SEO apps which can be used in conjunction with the dashboard to give your website even more SEO options.
If we assess Wix’s SEO overall, to say it is bad, would be grossly unfair. Whilst it may have been sadly lacking in the past, the improvements made to Wix in recent years means it is now capable of being an effective platform for your website, and that includes SEO.
It may not have as many SEO options and advanced functions that WordPress has, and that may be a stumbling block for those are planning larger websites. However, for building small websites, and then implementing their SEO, Wix is not as bad as it used to be. Read more WIX vs WordPress
