Published 6 November 2026 · By Coelho Branco
What Wix does well
Wix is good at what it promises: drag blocks around, pick a nice template and have a page live in an afternoon. If you're testing an idea, that's worth a lot. The question isn't whether Wix works, it's whether it works for your business. If you need professional website design, with pages written for people searching on Google and a profile linked to the map, the sums change.
Building a Wix website is free as long as you accept two things: an address like name.wixsite.com and the platform's own advertising on your site. To use your own domain, such as silvabarber.pt, and remove the ads, you need a paid plan, renewed monthly or yearly. So "is Wix free?" has a short answer: the editor is, a professional site isn't.
Where Wix gets expensive
The cost that never shows up on an invoice is your time. Picking a template is quick. Writing a page for each service, sorting out photos, adding opening hours, wiring up WhatsApp, setting up the contact form and working out why the site doesn't show on Google is not.
There's also what the editor won't do for you. It doesn't know what your customers search for, it won't write the "haircut in Lagos" page that shows up when a tourist looks for one, and it won't remind you to add the site to your Google profile.
Then there's leaving. A site built on Wix stays on Wix. If you ever want to move, you take the text and images, but the design and structure stay behind.
Wix or WordPress?
That's the next question for anyone doing it themselves. Wix is simpler and everything comes bundled: hosting, security, updates. WordPress is more flexible, but hosting, plugins and updates become your job, or the job of whoever maintains it. For a business that only needs a presentation site and has nobody to handle the technical side, Wix usually causes fewer headaches than an abandoned WordPress install.
When an agency is worth it
It's worth it when your time is worth more than the price difference, and when the site needs to bring in customers now. A serious agency hands over the site with the copy written, the domain registered in your name and connected to Google, and tells you in writing what you'll pay from year two.
Before comparing, work out the three-year cost: the Wix plan plus your hours, against the agency's price plus hosting. We show how to do that sum in what a website really costs. With us, a one-page site starts at €390.
A quick way to decide
- You have time, you enjoy building sites and the business doesn't depend on it this month: try Wix.
- You need customers from Google, two languages or online booking: get quotes from people who do this every day.
- You already have a Wix site and aren't sure it's working: the free audit tells you what to fix first.
An example: the same business down both routes
Picture a small barber shop in Portimão, with two barbers and loyal regulars. The owner decides to build the site on Wix one Sunday afternoon. He picks a sleek dark template, uploads half a dozen photos from Instagram and writes "Traditional barber shop with quality service" on the home page. By the evening, the site is live.
Three months later, the site is still live, but nobody has found it. The page doesn't say "barber in Portimão" in any heading, there are no prices, the opening hours are in an image Google can't read and the booking button leads to a form nobody checks. There's nothing wrong with Wix: what's missing is the work that turns a website into a place customers actually reach.
The same business, with an agency, gets a different kind of site: a page with the service and town in the title, visible prices, opening hours as text, a WhatsApp button, an English version for people on holiday and the Google profile pointing to it. The difference isn't the tool, it's who is thinking about the customer who doesn't know the shop yet.
If you decide to do it yourself, copy this list: the service and town in every page title, prices as text, opening hours as text, a contact button on every screen and the site linked to your Google profile. That alone puts you ahead of many rushed websites.