Another post in our review of free website builders, with all reviews written by my 11 year old son – who’s technical but 11, so has no business or life experience!

Using Wix to build a free website

I recently tried using Wix to create a website for a made-up business, Magenta Interiors, in order to see what it was like as a website builder. These are my findings and top tips for anyone who is looking for a good website builder to use to start their business.

After choosing to not spend any money, I was asked who I was making this website for: myself, or a client. I chose myself. Next I was given the option to start a conversation with their AI. I spoke with their AI, answered all of its questions, and was then taken to my “dashboard”.

I ignored all of their other prompts about paying for a domain name and chose to design my website. 

I was greeted with a choice: to generate an AI design, or use a professional template. I did this twice in the end: the first time, I chose AI. I then had a brief conversation where it gathered some more information, before being shown my website.

It was meh. AI had made me a homepage, an about page and a contact page. The images were clearly stock footage and the text was filler. The design itself wasn’t too impressive to be honest. One funny thing was that there was a section for “Room Makeover” on the services list that AI had generated and next to it was a picture of someone putting on makeup. Wrong type of makeover, AI!

Anyway, the worst bit was when I came to try and edit it. It’s possible that I was doing something wrong, but it was really hard to customize the layout at all. Most likely there was something extra that I should have pressed, but it REALLY was not clear. Eventually, I got so frustrated that I just gave up and started again.

Once again, I was taken to my “dashboard”, but this time I was given the choice of what apps I wanted on my website for some reason. I chose Portfolio (for case studies), and blog. However, I could have added a reservation booking system, an online store, a menu, an online subscription payment system and more. I chose to design my website again, but this time I selected to use a template. I was then given templates that their algorithm thought suited my business (I suspect they retained information from my earlier chat with AI, even though I had effectively restarted). I selected my desired template and got to work customising it.

My experience was much better this time. It was easy to select elements and edit them or delete them, and I quickly got stuck into it. I didn’t like my colour theme, so tried selecting colours to replace it with manually in the theme tap on the left. This did not go well. I then asked ChatGPT to give me some hex codes. That didn’t go too well either. I then found the option to ask the Wix theme assistant. It gave me a wide selection of colour themes to choose from, but eventually I ended up generating one from text.

A useful tip that I found was to click the zoom button at the top of the web page to go to 50% zoom and see your site much more clearly. This was very handy for just seeing what it looked like so far.

One of the easiest bits was just adding a section to my page. I could choose what kind of section (e.g. services block, or testimonial block), and then customize it really easily. I ended up swapping out a lot of the original template’s sections for my own.

One thing that I found really good was the AI image creator. While the AI website builder had been a let down, the image creator worked quite well for my uses. I don’t know how useful it would be for a real business, but for me it was quite good. Also, the ability to right click on an image and choose AI tools was very cool. You could do anything from adding a tiger to the back of the image, to removing a precise object and giving it a better resolution.

The only problem I had was with their portfolio app that I was using for case studies. In order to edit any text I was taken to the dashboard and told to enter my replacement text into a box, which was different to how you edited text on other main pages of the website. I think this might make sense to a developer, having discussed it with more people, but it just stood out as being a different way to edit this part of the Wix site. 

I could add projects and give them a cover and images in this portfolio interface. The problem however, was that I couldn’t change the size of my cover. For every project I added there was a Cover that you saw on the main Portfolio page. You could then click on that to go to the Project page to read about that portfolio item / case study. However, the Cover photo was then repeated at the bottom of every project page as a full-width banner that stretched across the entire screen and looked absolutely massive. No matter what I tried, I couldn’t shrink it down to a smaller size. Also, my Portfolio came with lots of made-up portfolios which I had to delete.

I was very impressed with their blog app. As a user you can go to the blog page and see a list of blogs. You can click on one to view it fully, and if I published it online properly and finished setting it up, you could write comments under it. The blog app interface was very similar to the portfolio app, but the blogs were in a different format on the page, so there was no cover problem.

The cheapest option to host my website without Wix branding and with my own domain was £9 per month. For free I could host a site, but with a Wix subdomain, a Wix advert on the site and other limitations.

The URL was trick to figure out. Your Wix URL, will, by default, have a prefix and something after a /. For example, siteprefix.wixsite.com/sitename. You can change both of these, but not thewixsite.com. Your site prefix is linked to your account and by default it will be your email address (you will probably want to change that). However, if you go to your Wix dashboard and click settings, then click on your profile picture at the top and select account settings, you can change your site url prefix.

Is a free Wix website good for SEO?

I ran Wix through a tool called Page Speed Insights and got these reports. (bearing in mind this is done with just the base website, no SEO tweaks or anything done to it).

In Wix you can give individual pages names. This will affect what appears in your website’s tab in someone’s browser. Here’s how: go to your website editor and on the left sidebar click Pages and Menu. Then click the three dots next to any of your pages and select SEO basics. From there you can scroll down a little and change the title tag for that page. Don’t forget to republish your site after making changes!

Overall thoughts on using Wix for a free website

Overall I think Wix is actually a very good and easy to use website builder, provided you build your website by yourself or from a template. Most of my problems were probably fixable in some way or another, but they were very unclear. Despite that, Wix is certainly a solid choice to build your website on!