Wix used to be the punchline of SEO conversations. Slow load times, bloated code, and no meaningful control over technical fundamentals. If you were serious about ranking, you were told to stay away. That reputation was earned. But it's also increasingly out of date, and if you're dismissing Wix on those grounds right now, you may be making a decision based on a platform that no longer exists.
We tested a Wix Studio site against our standard SEO benchmark to see where the platform actually stands. What we found was a Lighthouse SEO score of 95 to 100 out of the box, without a single line of custom code. For a small business owner without a developer, that matters.
Wix has a free plan for building and exploring, and you can upgrade to go live whenever you're ready, so you can test the platform's SEO features before committing to a paid subscription.
This covers what changed technically, what the built-in SEO tools actually do, and which types of small business Wix now suits well and which it doesn't.
Wix's core technical problem for years was how it rendered pages. JavaScript-heavy client-side rendering made it slow to load and unreliable for search engines to crawl. That changed from 2023 onwards, when Wix began rolling out server-side rendering (SSR) across the platform. By the end of 2025, SSR was deployed everywhere. Server-side rendering means the page content is built before it reaches the browser, so Google can read it immediately rather than waiting for JavaScript to run.
The practical results were faster DOM availability, native lazy loading for below-the-fold content, and metadata that renders correctly before the page even reaches the browser. These address the root causes of the old Wix performance complaints rather than papering over them.
The impact on Core Web Vitals has been measurable across all three key signals:
For a small business owner who is also the marketing team, finance department, and customer service desk, these improvements matter precisely because they happen automatically. You don't need to configure them.
If you manage your own WordPress install, SEO tooling means installing and configuring Yoast or Rank Math, connecting Google Search Console separately, and remembering to check everything yourself. Wix takes a different approach: the SEO assistant is built into the core platform rather than added as a third-party plugin, and it connects to Search Console from the same dashboard.
The AI tooling analyses your site and surfaces personalised recommendations covering internal linking opportunities, meta description improvements, and keyword usage. It won’t replace a dedicated SEO consultant for competitive markets. It’s designed for the café owner, the freelance photographer, the local plumber. People who need their site to rank without becoming SEO specialists themselves.
Wix SEO Wiz, the platform’s guided setup tool, has been substantially updated and now includes voice search-friendly keyword suggestions. It connects directly to Google Search Console so you can see how your pages are performing without leaving the Wix dashboard.
Automatic sitemap management is also handled for you. Wix generates and submits your sitemap to Google automatically, updates it whenever you make changes to your site, and handles 301 redirects and canonical tags without manual intervention. These are tasks that routinely get missed on self-managed WordPress installs, and each one can quietly cost you rankings.
Squarespace and WordPress.com both offer capable SEO tools for small businesses, with different trade-offs on flexibility and ease of use. If you haven’t committed to a platform yet, it’s worth seeing what each currently offers before you build.
If you're a local business, appearing in Google's local results and Maps is often worth more than broad organic rankings. A plumber ranking for "plumber in Bristol" matters far more than ranking for "plumber" nationally. This is where Wix's recent improvements translate most directly into business results.
Wix integrates directly with Google Business Profile, so you can manage your listing, respond to reviews, and see how customers are finding you all from within your Wix dashboard. For a business owner already juggling a dozen tools, having this consolidated into one place saves real time each week.
Structured data is handled through a built-in schema generator. Schema markup is the code that tells search engines your business type, location, opening hours, and services in a structured way it can reliably read. In 2026, correct schema is increasingly a factor in appearing within Google's AI Overviews, where sites with clear schema signals show up at a notably higher rate.
Mobile-first indexing is now fully standard across Google's ranking systems, and Wix handles it well. The platform's responsive design tools ensure sites perform correctly across device sizes by default, reducing the risk of the mobile/desktop discrepancy that has caught out many small business sites in recent algorithm updates.
For many small businesses, Wix is now a legitimate choice on SEO grounds. That wasn't true two years ago.
Wix is not the right platform for a high-volume content operation, a complex e-commerce build with thousands of product variants, or a business that needs granular technical control over every SEO variable. For those use cases, self-hosted WordPress or a developer-built site still has a clear edge.
But for a local service business, a portfolio site, a restaurant, or a small online shop, the combination of automatic technical SEO, built-in local SEO tools, AI-guided optimisation, and a usable interface makes Wix a real option. The old trade-off was: easy to use, but you pay for it in rankings. In 2026, that gap has narrowed considerably.
The platform has done the technical heavy lifting so that small business owners can focus on what actually moves the needle: good content, accurate business information, and a site that serves their customers well.
Wix's SEO reputation is running about two years behind its reality. The platform has made substantial, infrastructure-level improvements: server-side rendering, measurable Core Web Vitals gains, AI-powered recommendations, and deep local SEO integration. These aren't cosmetic updates.
For small business owners who need a site that works, ranks, and doesn't require ongoing technical maintenance, Wix is a genuine option. If you need advanced technical control, a large content operation, or complex e-commerce, look at self-hosted WordPress or a developer build instead. For most local and service businesses, the remaining differences between Wix and those platforms don't matter enough to justify the extra complexity.
Wix can rank. If you dismissed it on SEO grounds a few years ago, the platform you dismissed no longer exists.
