Somewhere in New Zealand this afternoon, a plumber with a ute and eleven years of good word of mouth is going to build himself a website between jobs. It will have his logo, his service area, a contact form that works and photographs of a bathroom he is proud of. It will cost him about $17 a month and take an evening. By Friday people will be finding him on Google who would otherwise have rung somebody else.
That is Wix, and it is worth saying plainly before anything else: for that plumber, it is the correct answer. The money he saves goes into a better van sign and a proper camera, which is where it should go.
Wix is a hosted website builder aimed at people who are not going to hire anybody. You pick a template, drag things around a canvas until they look right, publish, and you are done. Hosting, security, the domain, the forms and a substantial stack of business tools all arrive inside the one subscription. Nobody writes a brief and nobody sends an invoice with a project management line on it, which for a business of one is the entire point.
What Wix does that nothing else quite does
The drag-and-drop canvas is more permissive than any comparable tool. You can put an element anywhere, pixel by pixel, without understanding a grid or a box model or why a div refuses to sit where you told it. Designers find this maddening. People who have never built anything find it liberating, and that difference in reaction is the entire product strategy.
Around the editor sits a remarkably broad set of business tools. Bookings with calendar sync for a physiotherapy clinic. Restaurant ordering and table reservations. Invoicing, quotes, email marketing, automations, a basic CRM and a loyalty programme. For a small operator, replacing four separate subscriptions with one is a real saving in money and in attention.
Wix Studio, the platform's professional tier, is a real attempt at the agency market. It brings responsive breakpoints, CSS grid, reusable components and a client handover flow, which is a considerable distance from the drag-anything canvas that made the company's name. Velo lets developers write JavaScript against Wix's APIs, connect external databases and build custom logic. The company has spent years closing the gap between what Wix can do and what a serious build requires, and the distance is shorter than most people in the industry assume.
None of that changes the underlying architecture, though, and the architecture is where the decisions that matter get made. A site built in Wix Studio is still a Wix site, hosted by Wix, editable only inside Wix and exportable from Wix in the same limited way as everything else on the platform.
The SEO position deserves correcting too. Wix was poor at this a decade ago and the reputation outlived the reality. You now control page titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags, structured data and redirects, and sites built well on Wix rank perfectly well. Anyone still telling you Wix cannot do SEO is quoting 2015.
What Wix costs in 2026
Prices below are USD, billed annually, and exclude GST. Paying monthly costs roughly 5% to 8% more.
- Free. A Wix subdomain and Wix advertising on your pages. Useful for testing an idea.
- Light, $17 a month. Custom domain, no Wix ads, basic support. No ecommerce.
- Core, $29 a month. Where selling online begins, along with the business tools and more storage.
- Business, $36 a month. More advanced commerce, additional currencies and better analytics.
- Business Elite, $159 a month. Full commerce capability, developer tooling and priority support.
A domain and a business email address sit on top. So does anything from the app market that goes beyond the basics. A working small business site lands somewhere between $30 and $60 a month all in, which is a defensible number for a sole trader and a rounding error for a company doing $3M.
Cost is rarely what makes this decision. What makes it is what happens next.
The two things to understand before you commit
Your template is permanent. Wix does not let you change template on a published site. If you outgrow the design in two years, or rebrand, or simply decide the layout is holding you back, the path forward is to build a new site on a new template and move your content across by hand. Page by page. Product by product. This surprises people at exactly the moment they can least afford the distraction, which tends to be the moment the business is growing fastest.
Leaving is hard by design. Wix does not provide a clean export of your site. Content can be extracted with effort, and the design cannot come with you at all, because it only exists inside Wix. Migrations off the platform run longer than equivalent moves off Shopify or WordPress for exactly this reason. The lock-in is not hidden and it is not accidental, and it becomes a real number on a quote three years from now.
Neither of these matters to the plumber. Both matter enormously to a business that intends to grow into something the category measures itself against.
Where the ceiling actually sits
For an established business, three constraints tend to decide it.
Operational depth is the first. Wix handles a straightforward catalogue and a straightforward sale. Inventory across several locations, wholesale pricing behind a login, retail POS sharing stock with the website, ERP connections and multi-currency markets with landed costs at checkout are either absent or shallow next to Shopify. When Skyrocket migrated Advintage off Magento, the job carried more than 5,000 SKUs, layered discount and stock rules, wholesale pricing and an ERP integration, and went live with zero customer downtime. That work needs commerce primitives already sitting in the platform.
Design distinctiveness is the second, and it is the one that costs the most while showing up on no invoice. Wix templates are used by millions of businesses, and template-derived sites tend to look like each other. A company trying to establish itself as the reference point in its category is buying differentiation, and a canvas built for speed of assembly is not built to deliver it. Where the design has to carry the brand, the tool has to give a designer real control over spacing, type, motion and structure.
Content architecture is the third. Wix has a CMS and it is functional. Businesses running a serious content strategy, with related collections, filtered listings and templates that scale across hundreds of items, will feel the difference against Webflow within the first quarter.
There is a fourth constraint that shows up later and hurts more, which is what happens when the site needs to change. An established business rebrands, opens a second location, launches a product line, acquires a competitor. On a platform with a proper content model, most of that is a content exercise. On Wix, structural change tends to mean rebuilding pages by hand, and the effort scales with how many pages you have rather than with how big the change is. A business that expects to look materially different in three years is buying a rebuild it has not budgeted for.
Wix against the alternatives
Against Squarespace, the split is flexibility versus taste. Wix will let you put any element anywhere, which is why Wix sites range from excellent to alarming depending entirely on who built them. Squarespace narrows what you can do and lifts the floor as a result, so a beginner's Squarespace site tends to look better than a beginner's Wix site. Wix carries far more business tooling in the subscription. Pick Wix if you need bookings, invoicing and a dozen small tools in one place. Pick Squarespace if the brand is visual and you want it to look considered without knowing why it does.
Against Webflow, the question is who is doing the building. Wix is made for the owner doing it themselves on a Sunday. Webflow is a professional tool with real control over structure, spacing, motion and a content model designed to scale, at $25 a month for the Premium plan. If you are engaging a studio, the case for Wix largely disappears, because you are paying for expertise and then handing it a tool built to work without any.
Against Shopify, it is a question of how much commerce has to happen. A short catalogue with simple shipping runs on Wix without complaint. Multi-location inventory, wholesale pricing behind a login, POS sharing stock with the website, ERP connections and Australian pricing with duties calculated at checkout are Shopify territory, and the gap widens every year rather than closing.
Against WordPress, Wix wins on everything except portability and extensibility, which happen to be the two things that matter most when you eventually want to leave.
How to decide
Ask what the website is being asked to earn.
If the answer is that it needs to exist, look credible, take enquiries and cost almost nothing to run, Wix does that job well and you should stop reading and go build it. A sole trader, a small clinic, a cafe, a new venture testing whether anyone wants the thing at all: this is the right tool and the money saved is better spent elsewhere.
If the answer is that the site carries a meaningful share of revenue, needs to look unmistakably like your brand, has to hold up as the business doubles and cannot become a rebuild in year two, the ceiling arrives sooner than the price suggests. Webflow gives design control and a content model built to scale. Shopify gives commerce depth no builder matches. Clean Collective moved to Shopify and saw conversion rate rise 103% with sales up 28%, which is the shape of what platform choice is worth once there is real volume behind it.
The mistake is not choosing Wix. The mistake is choosing it for a business that has already outgrown it, then spending three years working around a decision that cost $17 a month to make.
Common questions
Is Wix good for SEO?
Yes, for a well-built site. Page titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags, structured data, redirects and sitemaps are all under your control, and Wix sites rank. The old reputation for poor SEO reflects the platform as it was a decade ago rather than as it is now.
Can I change my Wix template later?
Not on a published site. Wix's official path is to build a new site on the new template and move your content across manually. Worth knowing before you choose a template you are lukewarm about.
Can I move my Wix site to another platform?
Content can be moved with effort. The design cannot, because it exists only inside Wix, and there is no clean site export. Budget more time for a migration off Wix than for an equivalent move off Shopify or WordPress.
Is Wix or Shopify better for an online store?
For a handful of products and simple fulfilment, Wix is adequate and cheaper. For real volume, multiple locations, wholesale alongside retail or selling into Australia with local pricing, Shopify is a different class of tool and the gap widens as you grow.
Should an established business use Wix?
It depends what the site has to do. A business turning over a few million dollars where the website is a credibility check rather than a revenue engine can run on Wix without harm. When the site is expected to generate qualified enquiries or carry commerce at volume, the constraints on design, content and lock-in start costing more than the subscription saves.
Skyrocket builds Webflow and Shopify websites for established New Zealand and Australian businesses. If you are weighing a platform decision and want a straight read on which one fits your commercial model, get in touch.
