Choosing the right platform to develop SEO strategies

Website-building platform Wix has a historically bad rep in terms of SEO friendliness, but all in all, it’s a good baseline for you to create your website with. There are templates and tutorials for you to learn the basics of website design, but many question whether the pros outweigh the cons. 

In this blog, we’ll be going over the reasons why Wix struggled with its SEO in the past, what changes they’ve made to improve this, and give you enough information to decide whether to stick with Wix or use another platform to make your website.

Why wasn’t Wix compatible with SEO?

Before we start, we have to go through the facts – it’s much easier to make a website on Wix, thanks to its templates, but for WordPress you’d probably get a higher quality result with extra time and effort. Here are some of the reasons why Wix wasn’t exactly at the top of its SEO game:

1 – Wix had no support

In the past, Wix has claimed a lot of inaccuracies are true, which muddies the waters on what the truth actually is. They claimed that meta descriptions directly affect a site’s rank, which directly contradicts what Google has said. However, the truth appears to be somewhere in between – that meta descriptions can affect click-through rate, which can in turn affect ranking. Now, they have a help centre, which aims to answer a whole host of site-related questions.

In addition to this, Wix has claimed in the past that short-form content (250-400 words) performs better than long-form content. However, we found their blog post on the ideal content length, which has since been remedied. People make mistakes, and times have changed – so this isn’t Wix’s fault.

2 – Bots couldn’t crawl Wix servers

Bot crawling?! For a website to earn its rightful place within search results, a bot must first map the site by visiting all of its pages and indexing them. Previously, Google’s bot struggled to do this with Wix, but Wix implemented changes to make it easier. Shortened URLs and restructured site code seem to have done the trick.

With the bad publicity received, Wix soon wised up and released guidelines on how users could improve their SEO. Site speed (loading and navigating) is also an issue due to bloated code, but luckily they’re making improvements like adding structured data to their SEO settings.

3 – You can’t export sites on Wix

Perhaps one of the most pressing issues with Wix is that once a site is created, it can’t be exported. This means if it outgrows its surroundings, for example requiring an eCommerce page, there is no official way to do this without downloading the site, reuploading the data to a new platform, making the necessary changes and then deleting the old one.

To add in SEO, you’d have to do the same – which is extremely time-consuming and could even be costly. In our opinion, you’d be better off starting off using a different platform in the first place. WordPress, used by the Identity Agency, can be expensive and tricky to master without plugins, but there is a lot more freedom and functionality.

Why should I use Wix?

Wix is free to use, and very easy to learn, with its building blocks and user-friendly interface. As we mentioned, there are also many templates to choose from; and they even have Wix Payments, which allows you to manage orders.

Like we explored in our article about not needing a professional website right away, we’d recommend Wix as a place for experimenting with layouts and designs. Many beautiful and professional-looking designs can come from Wix, but we prefer WordPress’ malleability – to be honest, we’re stubborn!

Wix-ing you well!

We hope you enjoyed this article about Wix and SEO – it was good to learn that they have listened to complaints and remedied their process to make it easier for their audience. All in all, you should be doing what’s best for your business; if you don’t know how to do this, chat with us!