Why Web Designers Won’t Touch Wix: SEO

The biggest reason of all: Wix doesn’t get SEO.

That’s right folks. If you are looking for a professional approach to managing SEO for the long term, then you’ll want to stay far, far away from Wix.  I know this through personal experience. A painful, frustrating experience that left all parties deeply unhappy. May my mistakes serve to help you!

The facts:

Wix doesn’t allow you to choose your page names (URLs)

Best Practice URL: www.webdesigncompany.com/about-my-web-company
Wix URL: www.webdesigncompany.com/#!about-my-web-company/c8544

While the best practice is to allow you to choose your own keyword rich page URLs, a typical page URL in Wix introduces junk code. Wix claims that this junk code is necessary for “deep linking” for SEO but what they really mean is that they’ve built their product to require this junk code. Not only does it look ugly and disregard best practice, but this “hashbang” technique also inhibits many every day tasks needed to maintain your precious SEO rankings in the long term.

If you:

• direct one old page to a new page in the same site
• duplicate a page
• create a development site to test a redesign
• move your website

then you can kiss your page specific rankings goodbye because, in the words of Wix tech support

Google does not remove your SEO accomplishments when you switch the site connected to your domain, it will evaluate the new website (which should be as optimized as possible) and determine accordingly. Some of the score has to do with how long a site has been up so some SEO value will be lost, the site will have lower SEO status and then over time gain that back.

Needless to say, there are a lot of unhappy Wix users out there because of their approach to page URLs. So, let’s explore some of the technical concerns that this raises:

Wix doesn’t allow you to redirect one old page to a new page in the same Wix site

Yes, Wix has a redirect tool but it really should be called a page shortcut tool. This tool has one function: Redirect a nonexistent page name to an existing Wix page on the same domain.

Example: www.webdesigncompany.com/about/ to www.webdesigncompany.com/#!about-my-web-company/c8544

Wix redirect tool cannot redirect:

A Wix page to a pretty permalink/URL on the same domain.

Example: www.webdesigncompany.com/#!about-my-web-company/c8544 to www.webdesigncompany.com/about/

Or one Wix page to another Wix page on the same domain.

Example: www.webdesigncompany.com/#!about-my-web-company/c8544 to www.webdesigncompany.com/#!about-my-web-keyword-rich/c8544

This also means that you can never change your page’s name without suffering a potential SEO loss.

Wix doesn’t allow you to create duplicate pages or duplicate test sites

Duplicate pages are useful when adding new content to your web pages. Standard practice is to set up a duplicate website that you can modify without fear of potentially zapping your live website. Once you have fully modified and tested your duplicate website, you can then use it to replace the live one, maintaining all of the same page names and SEO.

Although Wix has a Site Duplication feature, all of the duplicated pages are given new names. As there is no way to change the complete page name, the duplicate site essential becomes a new website in the eyes of Google, so that the only option, as Wix tech support suggests, is that “Google needs to re-crawl your site”.

You can’t use popular tools that send information via the URL

Forget using any tools that pass information via parameters in the URL as Wix doesn’t support dynamic content. Jason M Close comments in this support thread:

You can’t move your site from Wix without losing SEO juice

That’s right folks. Once you build your beautiful Wix site, you are basically beholden to Wix for the entire life of the site. Unless you don’t mind losing SEO juice because of the weird page URLs. It takes time for Google to learn that your  old “#!about-my-web-company/c8544 ” Wix page is now “about” on your new site.

In addition to poorly managing features needed for good, long term SEO that will see you through business growth, I have another long list of significant reasons why Wix is a bad idea for business websites.

As a web design consultant, I could never recommend Wix to my clients nor could I ever launch a product like this on the market with a clean conscious. Sorry, Wix.