Wix is good at one job: getting something up this week, yourself, with no one to wait on.
If that’s still the job, stay.
The trouble starts when the job changes. You need the site to bring work in, not just exist. People find you on a phone and bounce. The page looks like three other businesses in your suburb. The bill is still there in year four. And if you ever want to leave, you mostly start again.
Stay if this is you
- You’d rather drag things around yourself than pay someone once.
- People already know your name. You’re not trying to win a Google fight.
- A first brochure is enough for now.
- Paying a bit every month feels safer than paying once.
That’s a legitimate business. Wix was built for it.
Leave when the week starts leaking
The shopfront is quiet. Enquiries still come through Facebook. The site doesn’t make the next step obvious.
It looks rented. A customer couldn’t pick you out of a lineup of other Wix sites.
You’re paying rent on something that isn’t growing with you. Forty-odd dollars a month doesn’t sting on day one. Over five years, Business Basic is about $2,640. Elite is north of $15,000. A website that wins work starts at $500, once.
Leaving would mean starting again. Your words and photos live in their editor. That’s not a site you have. That’s a subscription you can’t cancel.
What you get instead
A shopfront built around how people actually hire you. It opens on a phone before they get bored. You change the words and photos yourself. If we ever part ways, it keeps running — nobody holds the keys.
The portal and the connections can wait. A lot of owners only need the website this year. When the inbox is the problem, we add the customer area and make Stripe, Xero, and the calendar talk. You don’t have to decide all of that on day one.
The money, simply
Wix is free to start and expensive to keep. A site you keep is the other way around.
For most local businesses, the monthly fees catch up somewhere between two months (if you’re on Elite) and a year (Business Basic). After that you’re paying for something you could already have owned.
Josh’s Carpentry is the simplest picture of this: a tradie site that looks like the work, loads on a phone, and makes it easy to get in touch. That’s the job Wix is supposed to do. It just doesn’t, once you care who wins the enquiry.
Already on Wix?
Tell us how a job comes in now. We’ll tell you whether moving is worth it — and if it isn’t, we’ll say stay.