Is Wix Good for Small Businesses? Here’s Why We Recommend It

As professional web designers, our team has worked with all of the major website platforms, including WordPress, Squarespace, Shopify, GoDaddy, and Wix. Each platform has its own strengths, and there are situations where one may make more sense than another. But when it comes to building websites for small businesses, there's one platform all of our designers consistently prefer: Wix.

At Glow Up Web Design, that preference comes from experience. We've seen what it's like to design, build, update, troubleshoot, and maintain websites across different platforms. When we look at the entire picture, including creative freedom, ease of use, maintenance, business tools, security, support, and long term cost, we believe Wix offers one of the best overall solutions for small business owners.

After five years as a Wix Partner, that belief has only gotten stronger.

Wix Does the Heavy Lifting Behind the Scenes

One of the biggest reasons we recommend Wix to small business owners is something they may never actually see.

Wix handles a tremendous amount of the technical work behind the scenes.

With a platform like WordPress, a website may depend on a collection of themes, plugins, hosting services, security tools, and third party developers. All of those pieces need to continue working together as they are updated.

A plugin update can create a compatibility issue. A theme can become outdated. A third party tool can stop being maintained. Security, backups, and other technical maintenance may require additional solutions.

That doesn't make WordPress a bad platform. It simply means there can be more moving parts to manage.

For small business owners who want to focus on running their business instead of becoming their own IT department, we see a lot of value in Wix's managed approach.

Hosting, security monitoring, backups, infrastructure, and much of the platform maintenance are handled by Wix. This means fewer things for our clients to worry about after their website launches.

Does that mean a Wix website requires absolutely no maintenance? Of course not. Websites still need to be monitored, content needs to stay current, integrations need attention, and occasional issues can come up. But because Wix takes care of so much of the technical maintenance behind the scenes, there is generally less for the business owner or their web team to manage. In our experience, that can make the ongoing cost of maintaining a Wix website significantly lower than a WordPress website with multiple plugins, themes, and third party tools to maintain.

Wix Gives Us Incredible Creative Freedom

This is one of the biggest reasons our designers love working with Wix.

People who haven't used Wix in years sometimes still think of it as a basic drag and drop website builder.

That really doesn't represent what the platform has become.

Wix give us an incredible amount of creative freedom. We can create custom responsive layouts, animations, interactions, dynamic content, scroll effects, CMS driven solutins, and unique experiences that don't look like they came straight from a template.

And when the built in tools aren't enough, Wix provides development tools and APIs that allow us to create custom functionality.

That creative freedom is important to us because we don't believe every small business website should look the same. Your website should tell your story, reflect your personality, and communicate what makes your business different.

Wix gives us the freedom to think outside the box while still giving our clients a website that is manageable after launch.

You're Buying More Than Website Hosting

This is something we think small business owners often overlook when comparing website costs.

When you pay for Wix, you're not simply paying to host your website.

You're buying access to an entire ecosystem.

Wix has its own business solutions for online stores, bookings, restaurants, events, memberships, payments, marketing, customer management, and more.

One of the biggest advantages is that these tools are designed to work together.

If someone books a service, makes a purchase, fills out a form, becomes a member, or interacts with your business, that information can stay within the same ecosystem instead of requiring several completely separate pieces of software to communicate with oner another.

There are certainly situations where we still use third party tools. But every integration we can eliminate means one less account, one less connection to maintain, and one less potential point of failure.

That's why we don't look at the cost of a Wix Premium plan as simply "website hosting."

You're paying for the hosting and infrastructure, but you're also getting the website builder and access to a growing ecosystem of business software.

When you look at everything that's included, we think Wix provides tremendous value for a small business.

Wix Is Built With Small Business Owners in Mind

Another major reason we chose Wix is simple:

Our clients can actually use it.

A website shouldn't become something a business owner is afraid to touch.

After we build a website, our clients may eventually want to change a photo, update their hours, publish a blog post, create a coupon, add a product, or check an order.

Wix has always placed a huge emphasis on usability.

That doesn't mean every advanced feature is simple. We build some very complex Wix websites. But many of the everyday tasks a business owner needs to perform are approachable without needing to call a developer every time something changes.

Better yet, Wix has an awesome mobile app that allows business owners to manage their business on the go. They can update products, send invoices, respond to customers, write blog posts, manage bookings, and more, right from their phone. That makes managing a website and the business behind it even easier.

And Wix hasn't stopped improving.

We've watched the platform evolve dramatically over the years, and that continuous improvement is another reason we've continued choosing it.

Our Partnership With Wix Makes a Difference

There's another side of Wix that most business owners never see.

Wix has an entire Partner Program for professional designers, developers, freelancers, and agencies like Glow Up Web Design.

Through this program, partners have access to benefits such as priority support, educational resources, product updates, Partner Success resources, and revenue share opportunities.

We can also participate in product beta programs, allowing us to test certain features before they're publicly released, report bugs, provide feedback, and help Wix understand how professionals are actually using its tools.

We really value this relationship because we're not simply building websites on someone else's software.

There is a feedback loop between Wix and the professionals who use the platform every day.

And that relationship benefits our clients too.

As Wix Partners, we have access to priority support for more complex platform issues. If we run into something that can't be solved on our end, we have an additional level of support available to help us investigate the problem.

Our clients aren't just getting Glow Up's support. Behind us is a direct relationship with the platform we're building their website on.

Why Glow Up Web Design Has an Incentive to Build You an Awesome Website

Here's something most of our clients probably don't know: Wix actually rewards us when the websites we build succeed.

As a Wix Partner, Glow Up can earn ongoing revenue share from qualifying Wix Premium plans for websites we build. That means we don't just have an incentive to build you a great website at launch. We have an incentive to build you a website with longevity, one that you'll want to keep using for many years to come.

We want your website to grow with your business instead of needing to be completely rebuilt a few years down the road. The longer you're happy with your website and with Wix, the more value you get out of your original investment, and Glow Up continues to benefit from the relationship too.

And if we build you an eCommerce website? We want you to sell as much as possible. Wix gives eligible Partners a very small share of qualifying sales processed through Wix Payments, currently just 0.05% to 0.10%.

We're certainly not getting rich from that tiny percentage, but we love what it represents: when our clients make more money, we can make a little more too.

It means our interests are aligned.

We have an incentive to think beyond launch day. We want to build you a website that lasts, that can grow with your business, and most importantly, that actually helps your business make money.

Because part of Glow Up's success is tied to yours. And we think that's exactly how a partnership should work.

Wix Has Become Much Stronger at SEO

This is another area where Wix's old reputation tends to follow it around.

Years ago, Wix had legitimate SEO limitations. The platform today is very different.

Wix now provides tools for managing technical SEO settings, structured data, redirects, metadata, sitemaps, URL structures, and connections with search engine tools.

Wix also supports IndexNow, which allows participating search engines such as Microsoft Bing to be notified when pages are added, updated, or deleted.

That doesn't guarantee rankings or guarantee that a search engine will index a page. No website platform can promise that.

But it can help search engines discover website changes more efficiently.

At the end of the day, SEO depends much more on your website's content, structure, authority, user experience, and overall strategy than the name of the website builder you use.

A well designed, content rich, properly optimized Wix website can absolutely compete in search.

What About WordPress and Shopify?

We don't believe in pretending that one website platform is the best solution for every business.

WordPress is still the most widely used content management system on the web, and there's a reason it became so dominant. You can do A LOT with WordPress.

Shopify is also an extremely powerful eCommerce platform. For certain businesses with complex or large scale eCommerce needs, we may absolutely recommend Shopify instead.

But the most powerful platform isn't automatically the best platform for every business.

A local service business with ten employees doesn't necessarily need the same technology as a company processing millions of dollars in online orders.

For many small businesses, Wix provides the capabilities they actually need without introducing unnecessary complexity or an endless collection of paid third party tools.

For eCommerce in particular, Shopify may have an advantage when advanced commerce functionality is the primary focus of the business. But many small businesses simply don't need that level of complexity.

Wix's eCommerce tools are more than enough for many of the businesses we work with, especially when eCommerce is only one part of what their website needs to accomplish.

That's the sweet spot we're looking for.

The Best Platform Is the One That Produces the Best Return

Every website platform has pros and cons.

Wix has limitations. WordPress has limitations. Shopify has limitations. Webflow has limitations.

So instead of asking:

"Which website platform has the most features?"

We think small business owners should ask:

"Which platform gives my business the best combination of flexibility, reliability, usability, cost, and return on investment?"

After five years of working with Wix, our answer for most of the small businesses we serve is still Wix.

And because we've spent years learning the ins and outs of the platform, we're able to push it much further than many people expect from a website builder.

When the standard tools aren't enough, we can use CMS collections, dynamic content, APIs, advanced functionality, and custom coding solutions to extend what Wix can do and work around many of its limitations.

That's ultimately why all of our designers at Glow Up Web Design choose Wix.

It gives us the creative freedom to build websites that feel completely unique while giving our clients a platform that's powerful, reliable, and manageable for the long term.

We get to push the creative and technical boundaries.

Our clients get to focus on running their businesses.

And that's exactly how we think a small business website should work.