Wix is known for being a great free website builder that allows you to quickly and easily build your own website, but it also has a great range of premium plans for startups and established businesses.
We often get asked what are the benefits of upgrading to a premium Wix hosting plan when Wix allows you to have a free site, so we thought we would look at the benefits in more detail and why they would be important to your business. We will also look at the advantages of pay yearly subscriptions versus pay monthly and which one would be right for your business.
Free Wix sites:
Wix allows you to test out their Wix builder platform and even publish a site (on a wix website address) for FREE! This is great for when you want to play around with different design ideas, perhaps test out ideas with consumer research or to present to potential investors. It is also great for personal websites such as your own travel blog that you share only with friends and family.
The problem with the free sites is that these are not easy to find in search results due to the Wix website address you are given and so it doesn’t perform well with SEO. The other problem is that you willl have Wix ads all over your website, which doesn’t look very professional if you are trying to promote your business to customers.
Benefits of upgrading to a premium site:
You can connect your own website address (domain name), instead of using the assigned URL Wix gives you. This means people will be easily able to find your site and it will appear more easily in Google and other search engines.
Remove Wix ads. Premium plans mean you have no Wix branding on your site making your site appear more professional and sleek.
Over 500MB storage available on Wix Premium plans - perfect for those sites who have lots of image and video content
Larger bandwidth from 1GB and up on Wix premium plans so your sites will load faster than the free plans.
Google Analytics is included in Wix premium plans - meaning you can track exactly which pages are most poplar and tweak your content and promotions to achieve the best results. It also means you can see where your customers are visiting from which allows you to have a greater understanding of your customer base and shopping habits.
Different types of premium plans:
There are many different types of Wix Premium Plans to choose from depending on your needs. They are divided up into Website Plans and Business & eCommerce Plans. Website Plans contain the minimum features you need to get your site up and running and are the cheapest option of the premium plans - often perfect for startups.
Business and eCommerce plans have many more additional features than the standard Website Plans, including the ability to accept online payments, have a checkout functionality, and the use of the advanced Wix Business app features such as email marketing and more.
Pay monthly vs pay yearly subscriptions:
Pay monthly is good for those of you who may be just starting out with your business and want to test out an idea before you upgrade to a yearly package or perhaps you may have limited funds. It may also be useful for those sites that would be only used for a short period of time - such as a special promotion, or marketing campaign or for an event (such as a wedding).
For all other cases, we would strongly recommend upgrading to the yearly subscription as it will actually work out cheaper in the long run, saving you money. But also more importantly, annual subscriptions come with a range of additional free features (see pricing plans for further details: https://www.wix.com/store/plans?siteGuid=c7164866-1a6e-4d77-87f5-b7d99b02fb9e) that can help you boost your business potential.
