Wix is the most-used DIY website builder among small businesses - and for good reason. The drag-and-drop is genuinely easy. But ease comes with trade-offs in speed, SEO control, and what AI search engines can do with your site. Here's the honest picture.
Where Wix genuinely shines, where it quietly costs you, and what a hand-coded subscription site does differently. Real tradeoffs, no strawmen.
Wix is fine for a hobby site, a personal page, or a temporary placeholder while you build something serious. For a business that depends on Google, Bing, and AI search engines for leads, Wix's slow load times, limited schema control, and inability to ship llms.txt or fine-grained structured data cost you traffic. Custom-coded sites give up Wix's drag-and-drop simplicity in exchange for outranking Wix sites in nearly every measurable way.
| Dimension | Wix | Custom-coded by Brattleboro Local |
|---|---|---|
| Typical Lighthouse score | 30-60 (mobile) | 95-100 (mobile) |
| Average page weight | 3,000-8,000 KB | 50-300 KB |
| Schema markup control | Limited, template-based | Full custom JSON-LD |
| Custom HTML/CSS/JS | Restricted (Velo only) | Full control |
| AI search readiness (GEO) | No llms.txt, limited schema | Full GEO stack out of the box |
| URL structure control | Auto-generated, hard to fix | Designed for SEO from day one |
| Site ownership | Hosted on Wix only | Published buyout schedule - own it any time |
| Export/migration ability | Essentially impossible | Plain PHP, fully portable |
| Monthly cost (basic biz) | $22-$159/month (you do all the work) | $179/month (we do all the work) |
| Long-term commitment | Locked in to Wix forever | Buy the site out and host it anywhere |
| Real customization ceiling | Hits limits fast | No ceiling |
We're not in the business of trashing other platforms. Here's where Wix is genuinely the better fit.
If your business doesn't depend on the website for leads - you have plenty of word-of-mouth, your customers find you another way, and the site is mostly a brochure - Wix is fine. The 30-minute drag-and-drop genuinely solves your problem cheaply.
Before you commit to a custom site, a Wix MVP can validate whether your business even needs a website. Pay $14/month for a few months while you figure out what's actually needed. When the business is real, migrate to custom.
Some audiences (older demographics, niche B2B, captive industries) genuinely don't notice slow sites. If your customers find you through referrals and never compare you to competitors via Google, Wix's speed disadvantage matters less.
Where the trade-offs go the other direction - these are the situations where custom code outperforms Wix.
Wix sites consistently underperform custom sites in local-pack rankings - speed is one factor, but limited schema control and URL structure are bigger. A Brattleboro dentist on Wix loses to a custom-coded competitor in the local pack, every time, all else equal.
AI search engines weight schema markup, llms.txt, and entity-rich content heavily for citation. Wix's limited schema implementation and inability to publish a proper llms.txt makes AI citation unreliable. Custom-coded sites are built for the AI search era from day one.
Custom forms, integrations with your CRM, scheduling systems, member areas, conditional content - all of these are doable on Wix but they push you into Wix's Velo platform, which is essentially a programming environment with worse tooling than just hiring a real developer.
A custom site can move from one host to another - DigitalOcean, AWS, anywhere with PHP support - in an afternoon. A Wix site is on Wix forever; exporting is functionally not a thing. Vendor lock-in is real cost.
Specific business types we work with, and which platform actually fits each.
Could be either, leaning custom. Wix has decent photo gallery templates. But custom lets us optimize the images to AVIF/WebP automatically (Wix does some of this; custom does more), and lets us implement structured data for Photograph entities that helps the gallery rank in Google Images. For a photographer whose business is the visual portfolio, the speed and image-SEO win matters.
Custom strongly recommended. Reservation systems integrated cleanly with the rest of the site convert better than third-party widgets dropped into Wix. Menu schema (Restaurant + Menu in JSON-LD) is critical for AI Overview citation ("what's on the menu at X restaurant in Wilmington?") and harder to fine-tune on Wix.
Wix is fine here. The site is essentially a landing page with a Calendly embed. The lead volume from Google is unlikely to justify a custom build - the audience finds the coach through referrals and social. Wix at $22/month makes sense; revisit when the business is doing $200k/year.
Custom wins. Accounting is YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) content - Google holds it to a higher quality bar. Schema for FinancialService, accountant credentials, and review attestation all need to be implemented carefully. Wix's templated approach can't get there.
Wix makes leaving deliberately awkward. There is no meaningful export: you cannot take your site with you, and the pages have to be rebuilt rather than transferred. In practice that matters less than it sounds, because the rebuild is included and a Wix site is rarely large.
What we do take is the content itself. Text, images, your logo, product or service descriptions and any blog posts get inventoried and moved across by hand. Anything you have written is yours and comes with you. What stays behind is the Wix editor, the Wix apps, and the Wix subscription.
Your domain is the one piece to handle carefully. If you bought it through Wix it is still yours, and we either move it to a registrar in your name or point it at the new site while it stays where it is. Either way you end up holding the domain, which is not always true today.
URLs are mapped so existing rankings survive, including the /post/ and /service-page/ prefixes Wix adds. Four to six weeks start to finish, with your current site live throughout, and the Wix subscription is only canceled once the new site is up and you have approved it.
Last reviewed: by Mike Ferreira.
Yes, consistently. Wix sites typically score 30-60 on Google's mobile Lighthouse test; well-built custom sites score 95+. The difference is real-world: a Wix homepage that loads in 4 seconds vs. a custom homepage that loads in 0.6 seconds. Wix has improved their performance significantly in recent years, but they're still ~5× heavier per page than a comparably-featured custom build.
Yes. Domains are independent of Wix - you point your domain (brattleborodentist.com or whatever) at the new hosting. The migration is content + URL structure, not domain ownership. You don't lose your brand.
They're fine for basics - title tags, meta descriptions, sitemap generation. The ceiling is the issue. You can't fine-tune URL structure, can't ship llms.txt, can't emit custom JSON-LD beyond the templates Wix supports, can't optimize images beyond Wix's automatic processing, can't control which AI crawlers see what. For a serious SEO/AEO/GEO strategy, you outgrow Wix's tools.
Usually less than one week. We extract content from your Wix site, rebuild it for performance, set up 301 redirects from old Wix URLs to new ones, and launch. Rankings often improve within 8-12 weeks of launch due to the speed and structural gains.
Velo is Wix's attempt to let developers build complex sites on the Wix platform. It works, but you're now paying Wix monthly fees AND writing custom code - getting the worst of both worlds. If you need real development, hire a real developer and skip Wix entirely.
On the sticker, slightly - Wix at $22-$45/month versus our $179/month. But the Wix number buys you an empty editor: you design it, write it, SEO it, and blog on it yourself, forever. Our $179 includes a custom build (a $12,000+ value), weekly content written for you, town landing pages, and an AI chatbot - and the lost traffic from Wix's slower speed and limited schema typically costs southern Vermont businesses more in foregone leads than the price difference.