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With its user-friendly interface and simple drag-and-drop functionality, Wix has become one of the most popular website builders available today. However, despite its many advantages, Wix’s limitations could negatively impact your Local Search Rankings.
What is Wix and why people like using it
Founded in 2006, Wix is a highly regarded website builder that enables users to create visually appealing websites and online stores using an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. Its extensive range of features and user-friendly design have made it one of the most widely used website builders on the market today.
User-Interface
Wix’s intuitive drag-and-drop design is a major advantage, as it allows users to build beautiful websites quickly and easily without any coding or technical expertise. With Wix, even those without a technical background can create a professional-looking website they can be proud of in no time. Its user-interface makes it accessible to anyone, regardless of their experience or skill level.
Free
Wix’s free plan is a significant draw for beginners and small businesses venturing into web design, as it allows them to get started without any upfront costs. However, the free version of Wix has some limitations, such as restricted storage space and lack of access to certain plugins. While businesses can upgrade to access more advanced tools like marketing automation, this requires purchasing additional plans. Additionally, Wix’s custom template system means users have limited control over the design and functionality of their website.
Style & Templates
Wix offers an extensive selection of templates and customization options to meet the needs of every user. With hundreds of professionally designed templates to choose from, you can easily find one that aligns with your brand. Furthermore, Wix provides a variety of customization tools such as fonts, backgrounds, images, and more, allowing you to personalize your site to your exact specifications.
The Necessity of Local SEO for Small Businesses
Local SEO is crucial for small businesses to gain online visibility in local search results. With good local SEO, businesses can reach potential customers who have a specific intent to purchase within their immediate area.
Here are some tips for optimizing your website for Local SEO:
By adhering to these best practices, you can increase your chances of being discovered by potential customers in your target areas, enhancing your visibility, credibility, and sales.
Reasons why Wix and Local SEO don’t mix
Although building and managing your website on Wix may appear to be a convenient choice, it has several significant drawbacks when it comes to Local SEO. Given that search engines algorithms are continually evolving, businesses must keep up with the latest best practices to remain competitive in their respective industries.
Customization restrictions
Because Wix is a simpler website builder, the amount of customization options available to users is limited, especially when compared to open source code-intensive builders. Since most of Wix’s websites are pre-designed with templates, more advanced users can only add custom code through an HTML code element, which can restrict their ability to add unique features.
If the customization options provided by Wix do not meet your needs, it may have a negative impact on the user experience that you aim to offer on your website, which could harm your business.
The Need for Speed
According to Search Engine Journal, reports dating back to 2020 suggest that Wix websites contain code bloat, meaning that the site contains unused or unnecessary code that can cause web pages to load slowly. This can negatively affect user experience, causing visitors to leave the site before it finishes loading. Search engine algorithms take this into account when ranking pages.
Responsive Design Missing
Although Wix has improved the responsiveness of its websites over time, this isn’t always the case. When creating a responsive website using Wix, you must carefully choose the website theme or template. It’s best to select templates with simple, minimalist, and static designs that don’t require too much loading or rendering when switching from desktop to mobile view.
Crazy URL Structure
Wix uses URLs that have a unique link structure with a hashtag (#) in each link, which is not a preferred format among most SEO professionals. This structure indicates that the link is served through JavaScript, which has historically caused issues for websites using it with regard to search engine crawling and indexing.
Limitations of Content
While Wix offers various options for creating content, its blogging capabilities leave room for improvement. Basic features like tags and categories, crucial for creating SEO-friend content, are available, but there is no option to create private or backdated posts. Moreover, the writing interface only offers plain text editor, which can be limiting for formatting the content creatively.
Another limitation is the absence of advanced customization tools, such as schema implementation, which can hinder the creation of unique and distinguished content that stands out in search engine result pages.
Migrating is not fun
Although it is possible to transfer your entire Wix website to WordPress, it requires a significant amount of manual effort. In addition to establishing your hosting and WordPress site, and importing your blog post using the RSS feed method, you will also have to manually duplicate your Wix pages on WordPress.
This manual process of transferring pages can be extremely time-consuming, and you’ll also need to redesign those pages from scratch, which is less than ideal.
Less than ideal SEO controls
Despite offering some rudimentary SEO controls like page titles and descriptions, the platform falls short in providing more sophisticated options for optimizing content for search engines. One major drawback is the absence of an easy-to-use feature for modifying the auto-generated sitemap, which can be a time-consuming process when compared to utilizing a tool like Yoast.
Furthermore, customization of file names generated by Wix is limited, making it challenging to optimize for SEO.
Conclusion
It is crucial to comprehend the advantages and disadvantages of utilizing Wix. Although exchanging money for ease of use may appear appealing at present, taking a long-term approach may be more advantageous.
As businesses aim to expand over time, they frequently outgrow the capabilities of Wix in a brief period. Local SEO is a fundamental aspect for small and local enterprises, and choosing a platform that hinders proper execution may not be the best decision.
