Is Wix A Good Place To Start A Blog

Learn how to use Wix, one of the most popular drag and drop website editors, to start up and optimize a successful blog.

Wix is one of the best and most widely used drag and drop website builders, that has a huge range of industries and professionals standing behind its ease of use and great features. And the best thing is that you don't need to know a single line of code to create your own website.

Assuming you're a blogger or small business owner that needs to start blogging for SEO reasons, we're going to lay out the basics of creating a blog on this user-friendly builder.

How to Set up a Wix Blog

Setting up a free website on Wix is very easy. So, before you jump in to watch a bunch of tutorials, here are the steps you need to take to start building your new blog.

First, you need to create your account on Wix, which is just basic signup with an email address, name and creating a safe password. You can do it directly through your Google account or Facebook profile too.

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After you've set up your account, Wix will ask you a few questions to optimize your experience best for your needs. You can answer that you need a blog for yourself or your personal business, it needs to be a blog and you've never done this before (or maybe you have but you need to refresh your memory, just answer accordingly to your experience).

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The next step is to either choose Wix ADI to create a Wix Site tailored to your needs or pick a template. Wix ADI stands for Artificial Design Intelligence and creates a customized website with free images, text and interface design in a few minutes after you answer a few questions. It suggests different widgets and extra features that you might need, and in a few seconds, you have three options to choose from. These are the designs created after I answered I need a personal blogging website, for a literary blog, in a minimal design.

three designs.jpg

I picked the one that suits me best, clicked Publish and then came to the hard decision: whether it's best to use a free Wix.com domain (like www.stefanija.wixsite.com), or a custom domain name (stefanijasblog.com for example). Having a subdomain under the Wix website is free, whereas a custom domain, web hosting and other customization options are available only after purchasing a Wix Premium plan. We'll go into more detail on Wix pricing plans later.

You can also skip the Wix ADI designs, and pick one of the high-quality templates the Wix editor can offer. After picking a template and editing your pages, you'll get to the same point: picking a free Wix domain or a custom domain name.

After publishing your website, you can start writing and easily editing and publishing your blog posts, and sharing them on different social platforms through the many widgets.

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What you get with a free plan

Although more rudimentary than what you get with a Premium plan, the free Wix blog is enough to help you set up a unique blog with good functionality and beautiful web design.

The free plan is good for non-commercial personal blogs, small business blogs that don't need too many integrations, and in situations where you don't need to customize your website design too much to infuse your own brand.

Here's what you get with the free plan.

SEO tools

If you need to work on your search engine optimization, Wix has tools that come with the free package to help you, such as mobile optimization, a sitemap of your blog, rapid loading time, instant Google indexing, redirects of 301 links, etc.

You can also read more about the best SEO practices on Wix on this FAQ page.

You can also use Wix's SEO Wiz to rank better locally, by answering simple questions.

seo wiz.png

Text and images editing

This comes as pretty basic and unimportant, but if you've ever edited images a thousand times before uploading them to your blog, you'll know how important it is. You can edit and optimize your images and text directly in your blog, to make sure everything is in its right place and looks perfect.

Embedding HTML

You can use HTML code to add external applications and plugins to make your blog posts more interactive and to have other media. To put it simply, this will allow you to add embed codes to YouTube videos, music, Google Maps, draw posts from your social media pages, or other marketing tools you might want to use on your blog.

Scheduling of blog posts

Another very useful tool is the possibility to schedule a blog post for publishing. If you're a late-night writer that wants to catch a morning wave of those reading blogs with a cup of coffee, or update your blog once in a while with 5 posts and then come back the next month, this is a very useful and convenient addition to your free plan.

Hashtags and categories

You can add hashtags and categories to help readers discover your blog posts. You can also make the blog categories appear on your blog menu, so people can filter what they want to see exactly.

Mobile app

For blog editors on the go, you can also use the [Wix app](uhttps://www.wix.com/mobile/wix-app. On it, you can write, edit and share your posts, as well as use most of the features Wix has on desktop too.

Multiple writers and editors

You can also use more than one account as a writer or editor for your blog. Your team can also have contributing writers, and edit a blog post together since the editor supports more than one account working at the same time.

What if I need more than the free features?

If you need more than what a free plan on Wix entails, there are a total of seven premium plans that you can buy, four Basic Website and three eCommerce plans.

More suitable for blogging, is one of the four choices for website plans, so we won't get into detail for the Business & eCommerce Plans.

You can choose one out of these four plans:

Connect Domain ($4.50/month): This plan allows you to connect to a custom domain name, as well as add a free SSL certificate that keeps sensitive data on your site secure. You get up to 1 GB bandwidth, 500 MB of storage space and 24/7 customer support. The downside is that this plan displays Wix ads, that your readers might find annoying and change the way your blog's interface looks.
Combo ($8.50/month): With the Combo package, you can link your custom domain and get a free domain voucher that's valid for one year, and can be used for these extensions: .com, .net, .org, .info, .biz, .rocks, .pictures, .co.uk, .club, .space, .xyz. You also get a free SSL Certificate, 2 GB bandwidth and 3 GB of storage space, as well as 30 minutes of video hours that enable you to showcase & stream your videos online, sell, rent or offer subscriptions to your content. Same as the previous plan, you get 24/7 customer support. Wix Combo also removes Wix Ads. It is perfect for personal use, so if you need it for a personal blog, this package is the one you're looking for.
Unlimited ($12.50/month): Basically, you get all that the Combo package entails, plus unlimited bandwidth, 10 GB of storage space, 1 hour of video hours, and a Site Booster and Video Analytics App, both free for 1 year. The Site Booster app helps you be found on search engines like Google & listed in top-tier directories, whereas Video Analytics enable you to get insights and stats about your site, see where your visitors come from, pages that get the most traffic & more. This package is more suitable for entrepreneurs and freelancers.
VIP ($24.50/month): The biggest difference between VIP and any other package is that with it you can get first priority support and customer care. Otherwise, you get all of the abovementioned services and features, with unlimited bandwidth, 35 GB storage space and 5 hours of video hours. This package comes with a much heftier price, and is perfect for companies that need an A-class blog and require priority customer care.

Other blogging platforms you should know about

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Wix is a great platform for many things, but there's plenty of other blogging platforms that can suit your needs better.

Medium is a great place for business, entrepreneurship, IT and many other topics. It has its upsides and downsides, but it's free to use and very easy to edit blogs in.

WordPress is the proto-website builder for people with no or little experience in coding. However, it is a bit more complicated than a simple drag and drop editor, but has endless plugins, tools and customization options that can make a WordPress blog as good as an actual news site. For example, TechCrunch is a WordPress website!

Elementor is a WordPress-based website builder that also has a lot of integrations and is easy to use, similar to Wix in the drag and drop editing style. However, it's more popular in eCommerce and landing page design.

Squarespace is yet another easy website builder but limits its users to features only used by it.

And there's many more, like Joomla, Ghost, Weebly, etc, that we won't include after picking out our favorites based on the look, beginner- friendliness and cost.

We hope you found this guide useful and you'll get to building your own Wix blog soon. For more information on this site builder, check out our comparison guide on Wix vs Shopify.