Wix review (2026): pricing, features and who it's for

What $29 buys that $17 does not

Light at $17 is a brochure plan. You get a site, your own domain and no way for a customer to pay you on it. For a trade shop that is the whole job. You want a visitor to book, and you want a deposit attached so they turn up. Core at $29 is the first plan that takes money.

Do the yearly math before you sign. Core paid up front is $348 for twelve months. Month to month is about $36, so $432 a year. Paying by the month costs about $84 more and loses you the free first-year domain. One good piece of news on fees: Wix does not add a cut of its own on top of what your card processor charges. What Stripe or Square takes is what the payment costs you.

Owners who like Wix tend to like it for one reason, and price is not it. One owner who has used it for years calls it "a lot more expensive" than a site you would launch on WordPress or Webflow, with less room to change things, and still worth it if you are not good with design.

Booking a job from the website

Wix Bookings is the part a service business cares about. It gives you a service list, a calendar, staff availability, a booking form you can change, email and text reminders, memberships and packages, and a history for each customer. You can add Bookings to a site for free. Customers cannot book until the site is on a paid plan, and taking payment for an appointment needs a paid plan too.

That matters more than the feature list. A one-truck plumber who wants drain jobs booked online is looking at Core at $29 a month, not the $17 headline. A shop that only wants a phone number, a service area and a few photos can sit on Light, or even the free plan while you decide.

Check what you already pay for first. If your crew dispatches out of Jobber, Housecall Pro or ServiceM8, you may already have online booking in that tool. In that case Wix is your storefront and your shop window, and the calendar stays where the job data lives.

Getting paid through the site

This is where owner reports get uncomfortable. Wix will send invoices and take card payments, and it hooks up to Square. It also breaks for some people in ways that are hard to see from the inside. One service owner watched test payments go through fine, then had a first paying customer hit a vague error.

Another owner in the same discussion says the pattern is common and support is slow with it. Read those as a warning about your setup, not a reason to walk away. Before you send a first real invoice, pay yourself. Run one live card payment for a small amount from a phone that is not logged into your account, then refund it. Ten minutes there beats a customer who cannot pay you at nine on a Friday night.

The yearly bill renews itself

Every advertised price above needs a year paid up front. That money is committed, so treat the renewal date as a real date in your calendar. Every paid plan carries a 14-day money-back guarantee, and domains are left out of it, so the window to change your mind is short.

Cancelling is the part owners get wrong. One owner describes switching auto-renew off, getting confirmation emails, and finding out later that the switch only covered the domain. The site plan kept billing. Whether that is a settings maze or a policy, the lesson is the same. If you decide to leave Wix, cancel the site plan and the domain separately, then check your card statement the following month.

Set a reminder two weeks before your renewal date every year. That gives you time to move, downgrade, or stay on purpose rather than by accident.

Support, and the one choice you cannot undo

Support runs around the clock in English through callback and chat, plus tickets and a big help center. There is no hold queue. You ask for a call and Wix calls you. Priority customer care is held back for Business Elite at $159 a month, which is a lot of money for a faster answer.

Owners say the quality has slipped. One small business owner who has been on Wix for years is now looking at Squarespace, after going in circles with support over a fix.

The other thing to know before you start is the template. Wix says you cannot swap a site onto a different template once you have created it, published or not. The way around it is building a second site and moving your pages, media, plan and domain across. So the design you pick in week one is the design you keep until you rebuild. Look at more templates than you think you need, and pick one that still works when you add three more service pages.

The shop this suits

Wix fits an owner who will do the site themselves and wants everything under one login. Drag things around, drop in your photos, switch on Bookings, done. You do not need to know what a plugin is. The SEO controls are there too. You can edit each page title and description, the sitemap gets built and filed for you, and Wix creates redirects when a page address changes. One warning on that: hooking up Google Search Console needs a paid plan with a domain attached, so the free plan cannot see how it is doing in search.

One owner who picked it for his marketing site says Squarespace felt too locked in by comparison, and that he has had no problems since. That freedom with layout is why we would point a shop that wants a specific look at Wix rather than at a tidier builder.

Some shops should buy something else. If you expect to move your site to another host one day, moving off Wix means rebuilding, and self-hosted WordPress is the better home. If your crew already books jobs inside your field software, a $17 Light plan or the free plan may be all the website you need to buy. And if you sell parts and filters online in any volume, the shop tools are thin, and owners who push on them end up moving to a store platform. Buy Wix for a site that turns visitors into booked jobs. That it does well for $29 a month.

What owners actually say