Wix test data

Each of the three fixed briefs (a ceramics shop, a café and a wedding photographer) was pasted in full into Wix's AI site chat. The clock ran from sending the brief to the finished first draft being live at a public address.

Wix asks a few follow-up questions, then sends you to a dashboard, and the design is generated in a separate step in the editor (Aria).

The shop was live in about 10.5 minutes, the café in about 6.5 minutes and the photographer in about 20 minutes.

The photographer site failed the first time: after about 13 minutes Wix showed "Site couldn't be completed. There was a technical issue" and the page stayed blank. A second try worked in about 3 minutes.

The design step itself took 3 to 4 minutes each time. The rest is chat questions and moving between the chat, the dashboard and the editor.

Every page of the three first drafts was checked at 360, 768 and 1440 pixels wide and on a phone-sized screen. Faults were counted once per type on each page: horizontal scrolling, low-contrast text (WCAG AA), placeholder text or images, broken images, overlapping elements and tap targets that are too small.

No page scrolled sideways, no text failed contrast and no image was broken. The designs look polished and match each business.

Small tap targets were found on all 19 pages, mostly the row of social icons and the product size buttons.

The café header kept a placeholder "LOGO" box, and the photographer's logo text overlaps itself.

• A first automatic pass flagged overlapping text on nine product pages. Checked again on a phone layout, it was not there, so those were not counted.

Each brief has 20 checkable facts (prices, address, hours, phone, policies, pages). Each live first draft was read page by page and every fact marked right, missing or wrong. Anything the AI added that was not in the brief was listed as invented.

About 13 of the 60 facts were right: 8 on the shop, about 2 on the café and 3 on the photographer site.

The AI invented a lot: six extra products with prices, a 15% discount, "worldwide shipping" (the brief says US only), two different made-up café addresses in New York and California (the café is in Portland), wrong opening hours, fake phone numbers, and three customer testimonials on the photographer site although the brief said not to add any.

The photographer site promised "Booking for Fall 2024", a season that is already over. Most requested pages (About, Contact, Catering, Pricing) were missing.

• Later, Wix's AI "Generate a Contact page" added another made-up studio address, opening hours and "we ship worldwide" to the shop.

The same twelve edits for every builder, done on the café site: move a section, change the font site-wide, change the colours site-wide, add a page with its menu link, edit the footer, add a form field, replace an image and choose what part shows, change a button's link, duplicate a section, change the phone layout on its own, embed custom code, and rewrite one section from a written instruction.

All twelve worked without a workaround. Most took under a minute. The slowest were embedding code (it needs a double-click that isn't obvious) and the form field (the form builder opens as a pop-up with its own Save).

Changes made in the phone view stayed on the phone: centring a heading there left the desktop heading as it was.

Three things went wrong along the way: the new Catering menu item overlapped the Facebook icon, the AI rewrite cut off the opening-hours line, and the "Read More" button the AI made linked to the section it already sat in.

Lighthouse mobile tests on the home page and one inner page of each live site, three runs each (the photographer site has only one page).

Every page scored between 55 and 76. The median of the 15 runs was 72.

The main content took a long time to appear: a median of about 8 seconds on a simulated phone connection, and over 20 seconds on two runs of the shop's home page. The shop's pages weigh about 5.7 MB.

• Speed is retested every day for 30 days on the live tool pages; this grade uses the 21 October runs.

The twelve points were checked in the published HTML and files of all three sites, and each setting was tried in the Wix dashboard.

Present and working: editable page titles, editable meta descriptions, editable alt text, clean URLs, an editable robots.txt, canonical tags, structured data (LocalBusiness, Product, ItemList and more), Open Graph tags, 301 redirects (a test redirect worked within 30 seconds) and a noindex option, per site or per page.

Two points fell short: the café's two menu pages have no H1 heading, and sitemap.xml could not be confirmed because the test sites are hidden from search engines while they are tested.

Wix's AI wrote no meta descriptions on any page and left most photos without alt text (2 of 12 on the café home page, 2 of 17 on the photographer's). You can add both, but you have to do it yourself.

• The sitemap will be rechecked when a test site is briefly made visible to search engines.

Each point was tried on the shop site on the paid Core plan.

All twelve worked. The test subdomain was live with HTTPS about 40 minutes after the DNS records were added, although Wix said it could take 48 hours.

A form message reached the inbox in about a minute. The blog app wrote a full post with AI in under 45 seconds. A test order went through checkout (paid offline, so no money moved): order 10001 for $38.

Tax, shipping, product variants, digital products, email marketing, bookings and visitor analytics are all built in or free Wix apps. Adding the blog failed once with a Wix error and worked on the second try.

• Shipping and tax came out at $0 on the test order because the AI build set up no shipping rates or tax. Card payments were not tested.

I tried each export in the dashboard and read Wix's help centre and Terms of Use.

Products export to a CSV file (9 products, 19 variants, prices, stock and image links), and form entries export too.

The site itself can't be moved: Wix says "the SaaS architecture does not support external hosting", and blog posts can't be exported ("Currently, it is not possible to export blog posts to other platforms").

Wix's terms say you own your content, but you give Wix a broad licence to use it, including to improve its AI tools. A domain you bought elsewhere stays yours.

• Site History (restoring an older version) was not tested.

The same three questions went to each support channel: connecting a domain bought elsewhere, contact-form messages not arriving, and changing the card and switching from monthly to yearly billing.

Wix's AI helper (Helpmate) started answering all three in about a second, with correct, step-by-step answers and links.

A human expert joined the live chat about 60 seconds after I asked for one. His answers were correct, mostly as marked-up screenshots of my own dashboard.

Every plan was read on Wix's US pricing page on 21 October 2026, and the billing options at checkout. The figure graded is the yearly cost of the cheapest plan that connects your own domain and removes Wix's branding.

The cheapest plan for that is Light at $17 a month, billed yearly: about $204 a year. Light can't sell; a shop needs Core or higher.

Core shows $14.50 a month billed yearly, but that is a 50% first-term discount on $29. After the first year, Core costs about twice as much.

Monthly billing costs more than yearly and drops the free domain. The free plan shows a "Built on Wix" banner on every page. There is a 14-day money-back guarantee.

• Prices change often; the price tracker rechecks them every day.