You may have heard (or read) someone saying: “Don’t go with Wix, their SEO sucks”. You’re not the only one:
So we decided to thoroughly check the ins and outs of Wix’s SEO and let you in on our findings. We’ll also show you where we identified weaknesses (for certain types of projects even we would advise against using Wix).
Note: If you are looking for a complete guide on all the Wix SEO features, please check them here.
But first… where does Wix’s bad reputation come from?
It is true that, at first, recommending Wix for SEO was difficult. They just had too many issues that made competing in Google, and other search engines, difficult. Some of these past issues were:
A terrible URL structure. It would add strange characters to the URL (e.g. yoursite.com/#!about/xis9 ). This is not SEO friendly at all. But this was fixed during 2016.
Adding alt attributes (alternative text for images) wasn’t possible. But now this is also a thing of the past.
The blog… well, the blog used to be an absolute disaster as you could not optimize the title tag, the URL or the meta-description of your posts. Awful! But Wix fixed this during 2016 too.
Also, back in the day, Wix was based on Flash technology, and this was bad for SEO, and I mean really bad.
All these SEO issues that Wix had, sank its reputation. However, we must say they’ve been working hard and, in 2016, they finally caught up with the best site builder alternatives for SEO.
In 2019, they even added a couple of advanced SEO options like Canonical URLs and Rich Results, making Wix a pioneer for website builder SEO.
It’s worth mentioning that Google (through their senior employee, John Mueller), has stated that “WIX websites work fine in search”. Moreover, Rand Fishkin (a well-known SEO advocate and co-founder of MOZ) has become the Wix SEO hero in a Wix marketing campaign to improve their SEO reputation. More recently, they started yet another SEO competition called Wix Lovers vs Wix Haters.
