So, you’ve decided to build your website with Wix. After all, everyone says it’s the easiest way to make a website without code. That’s exactly why I tried it too. 

Well, here’s what I found: Wix isn’t for everyone. 

It has some downsides nobody warns you about, and depending on your goals, these could be major deal breakers.

I’ll walk you through what these issues are, then show you how to create a Wix site if you still want to give it a shot. 

And if you’d rather skip the risks, I’ll share why beehiiv’s website builder is better—it gives you Wix-level simplicity without the headaches (plus some cool perks).

Why Trust Me?

Kawusara has 5+ years of experience running her own WordPress websites, so she understands what to look out for in a website builder. She’s also passionate about deeply researching and testing software and breaking down her insights in plain, simple language.

My goal with Wix was to build a travel blog. I wanted to create a professional online space where readers would come to learn about me and read about my travel experiences without getting lost in technical stuff.

That’s what drew me to Wix. It looked beginner-friendly and came with a free plan to get started. For a blogger like me, that was an easy yes.

But I also had other plans in mind. I wanted a blog where readers could subscribe and receive newsletters from me. I was also willing to upgrade from the free plan, as long as it didn’t cost an arm and a leg. 

While Wix met these criteria to a certain extent, it wasn’t the perfect fit for me, and I’ll share why.

From my experience, Wix’s huge template library and drag-and-drop interface make it easy to spin up websites in minutes.

This is why its limitations aren’t immediately obvious. 

Before you go all in with Wix, let me point these out, so you can decide if they’re dealbreakers or quirks you can live with.

Over the years, Wix has gone from being a website builder to more of an all-in-one business platform. From running an online store, sending marketing emails, taking appointments…the list goes on. 

This is great if you’re a small business owner looking to run all your marketing operations from one dashboard. But if your main goal is to build a website and publish blog posts, Wix’s interface feels bloated and overwhelming.

It slows you down, makes the learning curve steeper, and leaves you stuck paying for tools you’ll never use.

When starting a website, most of us aren’t thinking about redesigns down the road. 

But sooner or later, it happens—your brand evolves, design trends shift, or you simply just want a fresh new look. Ideally, your website builder should make the switch smooth, right?

Not with Wix.

Wix locks you into the template you picked when you first built your site. If you decide to change it later, you’ll have to create a new site from scratch and manually move over all your content.

With Wix’s free plan, you get 500MB of storage and 1GB of bandwidth.

The 500MB storage includes the images, videos, and files you upload to your Wix website. When you hit the 500MB cap, your site will still run, but you won’t be able to upload new files unless you upgrade to a paid plan.

This means that the heavier your pages are, or the more traffic you get, the faster you’ll run out of bandwidth. And if there’s a sudden spike in visitors, your site will slow down (or its content might not display) until you upgrade.

However, it’s worth noting that Wix will alert you as you reach your bandwidth limit to prevent this from happening.

As I mentioned earlier, Wix supports email marketing, a key feature used by most content creators and businesses.

On Wix’s free plan, you can only send 200 emails per month. And keep in mind, any automated emails you’ve set up (like welcome emails) also count toward the 200-email limit.

When you outgrow this limit—and most people do—you’ll need to pay to keep things running. Wix’s email plans are separate from its main website plans, starting at $10/month for 500 marketing and automation emails. 

To be fair, it’s not unreasonable. If you weren’t paying Wix for email, you’d be paying for it elsewhere. But here’s the thing: once you start growing, Wix feels pricey compared to platforms like beehiiv, which bundles websites, blogs, and email into affordable plans.

After you sign up for a Wix account, here’s how to go from a blank canvas to a published website in no time.

As a newcomer to the platform, Wix walks you through an onboarding flow to learn about the kind of website you want to build.

Based on your responses to questions about your audience, the type of site you want to create, your goals and more, Wix will match you with the right website templates and install the apps you need right away.

Once you’ve finished this step, you’ll get access to your Wix dashboard, where you can start customizing your site.

In your Wix dashboard, you’ll have the option to connect your website to a custom domain. Plus, you can purchase this domain directly from Wix and have it seamlessly connect to your site.

However, this feature is only available on paid plans. If you’re on the free plan, you’ll automatically inherit a Wix subdomain, which is something like www.mywebsitename.wixsite.com.

With that out of the way, click the Design Site button to launch the website builder and start building your website.

When you launch Wix’s website builder, you can either generate your website with AI or start with a website template that suits your taste.

Wix’s AI still has a lot of learning to do, so you’re better off hitting the Pick a Template button.

This opens up Wix’s template library which has over 900 designs across multiple business categories. 

No matter what type of business you’re running, chances are you’ll find something that fits. To save time, you can use the search bar or filters to narrow things down.

Wix also highlights Best Match templates based on the answers you gave during the onboarding process, so you don’t waste much time in this stage.

Once you’ve picked a template, it’s time to make it your own using Wix’s drag-and-drop editor.

The editor is pretty easy to get the hang of, and everything on your site is organized into Sections and Elements.

Let’s start with Sections.

Each page is built from stacked sections (like Team, Services, Testimonials, etc.) When you click a section, you can: 

Each Section is made up of Elements, which include text, images, audio and videos, forms, and much more. You can:

Also, when you right-click on an element, you’re able to duplicate it or delete it. Alternatively, you can do so with shortcut commands like Ctrl+D and Del.

The Site Pages and Menu area controls how your pages appear in your site’s header (aka the main navigation panel) of your website. From here, you can:

Now, while you can create new web pages here, this isn’t the place to open and customize them.

To customize these pages, use the Page dropdown at the top of the editor. This shows all the pages you’ve created and lets you jump into each one to tweak it to your liking.

Finally, head to the Site Design area to define the look and feel of your site. You can pick a premade theme or create your own with custom fonts, colors, page backgrounds, and transitions.

After getting your website to look the way you want on desktop, take a minute to preview it in mobile mode. This is super important because some elements that look fine in desktop mode can appear weird on mobile. 

The good news is that Wix lets you make mobile-specific edits. Any tweaks you apply here will only affect the mobile version of your site.

When your website looks polished—both on desktop and mobile—click the Publish button in the top-right corner, and your website will be live.

Like Wix, beehiiv lets you create custom, mobile-friendly websites for free. But after trying both, I found beehiiv to be a much simpler and more affordable option.

Let’s take a closer look at all the ways beehiiv stands out from Wix as an all-in-one website building, blogging, and newsletter publishing platform.

When you log into beehiiv, you’ll notice right away that the interface feels much cleaner and lighter compared to Wix.

Everything is laid out simply, so you can get familiar with the entire platform in a single sitting.

That’s because beehiiv isn’t trying to be a jack of all trades. It’s focused on helping you build websites, publish blog posts and newsletters, and grow the community around your content.

When you launch beehiiv’s website builder, you go through a short 4-step setup flow. You simply:

That’s it. The whole setup takes less than a minute, which means you have more time to focus on tasks like customizing and publishing your website, creating content, and growing your audience.

beehiiv’s Website Builder features a drag-and-drop interface for customizing your website.

The left panel gives you access to everything you need—options to customize your header and footer, add new pages, and drop in new elements. 

Want to add text, image, or button elements to your page? Just drag them from the left panel and place them where you want on the page. Plus, click an element to access its customization settings on the right panel.

The real time-saver, though, is beehiiv’s collection of ready-made sections and blocks. Instead of building every part of your site piece by piece, you can start with polished layouts and simply make them your own.

Unlike Wix, beehiiv gives you the freedom to change your website’s template whenever you want—even after your site is live.

When you make the switch, all your content moves over automatically, so you don’t have to rebuild everything from scratch.

Here’s how my travel blog looks with the new template and all the content migrated. The only things left are customizing the navbar and footer, along with a few design tweaks.

If publishing content is a key reason you want a website, beehiiv makes the process a breeze.

You can start with a template or start writing from scratch. Just start typing, and when you need to add media, pull up the slash (/) menu to insert images, videos, audio, file attachments, and social embeds. You can also style your posts and save them as templates for future use.

Team collaboration is built in, too, which is helpful if you work with a team of editors and graphic designers. You can @mention teammates in comments, leave feedback, and they’ll get an email notification to jump in and edit.

When your content is finalized, publishing is seamless—you can push it to your subscribers’ inboxes, your website, or both at the same time. 

This way, your content gets maximum reach and engagement without any extra effort on your part.

Besides sending regular newsletters to your email subscribers, beehiiv also supports automated emails that trigger based on your subscribers’ actions.

For example, you can set up a welcome email sequence that automatically goes out to new subscribers as soon as they join your list through your website. Yep, it’s all inside beehiiv, so you don’t need to pay for a third-party tool.

Like Wix, beehiiv comes with built-in SEO features to help your website and blog posts show up in search results. But beehiiv also goes a step further by giving you extra tools to grow your audience beyond Google.

For example, you can turn on the referral program and reward subscribers who bring in new readers. You can also join beehiiv’s recommendation network, which lets you cross-promote your newsletter with other creators on the platform.

Since beehiiv is a newsletter-first blogging platform, its pricing plans are tiered based on the size of your mailing list (not the number of monthly emails you send).

So whether you’re on a free or paid plan, you can create a website on beehiiv, connect it to a custom domain, and publish unlimited blog posts and newsletters. You only pay as your subscriber count grows.

This setup makes beehiiv a much more affordable option than Wix, especially if you have a huge email list and send regular emails.

Wix is a good website builder if you’re looking to build websites with zero coding and design skills. The drag-and-drop editor is flexible, the template library is huge, and the app marketplace gives you plenty of ways to add extra features.

However, I wish I knew that regardless of these benefits, it’s still not the best fit for content creators like me, authors, and news publications.

These users want a simple interface to focus on managing their website, blog, and email content at a fraction of Wix’s price.

I’ve found that beehiiv fills in these gaps perfectly. Sign up for beehiiv’s free plan and check it out for yourself.

To create a website on Wix, sign up for a Wix account, create a website, and connect it to a custom domain (or stick with Wix's subdomain). Then, choose a website template from Wix’s library (or let Wix’s AI tool design a base template for you) and customize it using its drag-and-drop editor.

Yes, you can create a website for free on Wix, but it comes with 500 MB storage and 1GB bandwidth limit. Also, you can’t connect to a custom domain on this plan. You’ll need to upgrade to Wix’s paid plans (starting at $17/month) to remove these limitations.

Yes, Wix is perfect for beginners, thanks to its huge template library and drag-and-drop website builder. 

Yes, there are better Wix alternatives based on your needs. For instance, if you’re looking for an easy-to-use and affordable platform to design websites, publish blog content and newsletters, and send automated emails, beehiiv is a much better choice for you.