Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is Wix still terrible for SEO?
-
In Australia, I hear it over and over again that Wix is literally the worst site builder you can use due to it's poor site build for SEO. Has anyone here got some tangible reasons for why this is? As I am constantly getting asked this by clients who are using Wix and want me to help with their SEO.
-
There are many famous and top-quality platforms available for e-commerce like Shopify, Big Commerce, Magento, etc. Learn more about it.
-
Even though our agency is representing the Wix SEO Haters, we must admit that they have made a ton of improvements.
Yes, historically, they were awful and often wouldn't even appear in SERPs.
Now, the issues they still face are the following:
- Poor page speed
- Non-customizable sitemap or robots.txt file
- Lack of structured data capabilities
- Not a ton of advanced SEO capabilities in the Wix SEO Wiz tool.
But, despite all of that, John Mueller from Google has said websites are websites for Google.
So, while it's not the ideal platform, it's a viable option for small businesses or freelancers with limited budget. However, I'd always recommend using a more advanced platform, such as WordPress.
-
It is possible to customize product urls, meta titles and meta descriptions. Seo settings for product page
-
The same content will get the exact same ranking regardless of the CMS that produced it.
John Mueller said websites are websites for Google
on the post that @Casey mentioned.
For most sites out there, the available SEO settings on Wix are enough and switching a CMS will not boost their rankings. There are, for sure, sites that require a different CMS than Wix but SEO is rarely the reason for it.
-
I've got a Wix site that I'm pretty happy with. There have definitely been some frustrations, and it does seem like I've been missing out on some customization options that would help with SEO, but for certain key words my site is now showing up on Google in the top 3 of local results and page 1 of organic results. I'm admittedly pretty clueless regarding SEO, programming, and most of the stuff talked about on Moz, but I feel like Wix has been an easy and inexpensive way to get a good looking site that gets results.
-
Yes. Go for WordPress which is good for SEO. Wix is not good for SEO though they are trying to make it Search Engine Friendly to make their platform indexable.
-
The short answer is: Yes...but not "as" bad as previously. Should you choose it over Wordpress as an example? No, you should not.
Here's the long answer and an update of sorts:
The fixes...
- Wix uses "hashbangs" in their URL structure, which previously kept Google from indexing all the content but they fixed this in 2016.
- Wix previously suffered from an inability to customize page titles and add alt tags but it is my understanding that they've fixed these issues as well. And, Google's John Mueller says that Wix Websites do-in-fact "work fine" in search.
Regardless, in spite of the fixes, Wix still has what I feel are issues that render it inferior to WordPress. For instance;
- you can't customize canonical tags (or even add self-facing ones)
- you can't customize product URLs (relatively weak on all ecommerce stuff)
- you can't add customized Meta Description to product pages
- you also can't customize Page Titles for product pages
- Wix has a mobile editor, but that's just for smartphones, not tablets.
I find Wix especially unsuitable for use in ecommerce. Wix pulls SEO information for page titles, descriptions, etc. from the Product Information you initially enter and which cannot be edited at a later time. For me, that's probably the biggest reason that I prefer WordPress over Wix. You make a mistake, you are SCREWED down the road.
Bottom Line: If you can get the client to move to Wordpress, do it. It's just "better."
Hope that's helpful.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Harms of hidden categories on SEO
On our website we have some invisible/hidden categories on our site. Can anyone advise whether these are harmful in terms of SEO?
On-Page Optimization | | CostumeD0 -
Address on Every page of the website for Local SEO? Good or Bad?
Is this good idea to add business address on every page of the website?, How Google see this? and This is Good or bad for ranking?
On-Page Optimization | | Dan_Brown10 -
ECommerce Filtering Affect on SEO
I'm building an eCommerce website which has an advanced filter on the left hand side of the category pages. It allows users to tick boxes for colours, sizes, materials, and so on. When they've made their choices they submit (this will likely be an AJAX thing in a future release, but isn't at time of writing). The new filtered page has a new URL, which is made up of the IDs of the filter's they've ticked - it's a bit like /department/2/17-7-4/10/ My concern is that the filtered pages are, on the most part, going to be the same as the parent. Which may lead to duplicate content. My other concern is that these two URLs would lead to the exact same page (although the system would never generate the 'wrong' URL) /department/2/17-7-4/10/ /department/2/**10/**17-7-4/ But I can't think of a way of canonicalising that automatically. Tricky. So the meat of the question is this: should I worry about this causing issues with the SEO - or can I have trust in Google to work it out?
On-Page Optimization | | AndieF0 -
SEO for Online Auto Parts Store
I'm currently doing an audit for an online auto parts store and am having a hard time wrapping my head around their duplicate content issue. The current set up is this: The catalogue starts with the user selecting their year of vehicle They then choose their brand (so each of the year pages have listed every single brand of car, creating duplicate content) They then choose their model of car and then the engine And then this takes them to a page listing every type/category of product they sell (so each and every model type/engine size has the exact same content!) This is amounting to literally thousands of pages being seen as duplicates It's a giant mess. Is using rel=canonical the best thing to do? I'm having a hard time seeing a logical way of structuring the site to avoid this issue. Anyone have any ideas?
On-Page Optimization | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
Ecommerce On-Site SEO: Keywords in Category Descriptions
Hello, I'm doing on-site SEO for a client's ecommerce site. Are 160 words enough for a category description? I'm using the keywords once at the top of the description, and once at the bottom of the description, with the ones at the bottom reworded so that they are the keywords with a different word order. I used to put the keywords in 3 times but it just feels like stuffing. Is twice, worded differently the second time, enough for a category description? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | BobGW0 -
Two Word Company Name (Combined to One) & SEO
Hi All, I'm dealing with a company that has a two word name like "GreatCompany". They rank #1 for that but not for "Great Company". The phrase is not super competitive, but obviously they are not writing the company name with two words anywhere on their site. Has anyone had to deal with something like this? Thinking about creative solutions but I'm fairly sure we're going to need to use the name both ways to have an effect here (or use PPC to augment) but I don't really love the idea of doing that... will feel very odd and inconsistent for visitors. Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | ketanmv0 -
German SEO
Just a quickie, Does anybody know of any strong German SEO agencies? Many Thanks Sean
On-Page Optimization | | Yozzer0 -
How do Maximize WordPress with 2 SEO Plugins
I have 2 WordPress SEO Plugins, Yoast and All-in-One SEO. I have tried like heck to make them work together, but every time I crawl my site here, I get multiple error messages. My question is, how can I tweak the title settings to avoid having multiple meta desctiptions, titles etc.
On-Page Optimization | | TheSportsDaddy0