Wix SEO is the part of the optimisation work the platform leaves to whoever runs the site: the sitemap, canonical tags, robots.txt, server-side rendering and some of the structured data are automatic, while meta descriptions, the main heading on the page (H1), image alt text and the business information have to be filled in by hand. In our test of 294 pages on 105 Italian sites built with Wix, run on 9 October 2026, the canonical was there in 100% of cases, but 36.4% of pages had no meta description and 43.9% had no H1 at all.
In short, on Wix the technical side is fine. It's the text fields that get left empty.
And in the UK Wix is far from a niche. In the Chrome data collected by HTTP Archive for August 2026, there are 13,521 Wix sites with traffic measured from the UK on mobile, against 125,625 on WordPress: roughly one for every nine. Worldwide, according to W3Techs (October 2026), Wix runs 4.2% of all websites and 6.1% of those with an identifiable CMS.
So where do Wix users go for instructions?
Mostly to Wix itself. When we searched "wix seo" on Google UK from a mobile on 10 October 2026, the page opened with an AI Overview built almost entirely on wix.com pages, then a carousel of videos, then Ahrefs, two pages from an agency selling Wix SEO, the Wix Studio Academy, a migration software vendor, a 2022 guide from an SEO software company and a Wix marketplace listing. Apart from Ahrefs, everything on the page comes from Wix or from someone selling Wix services or software.
So the same mistakes keep turning up:
- the homepage showing up on Google as "Home | Site name", on one site in five;
- an empty meta description, because Wix leaves it blank by default;
- no H1, because the big title in the template is often text with the right style but the wrong tag;
- business information never filled in, which means missing out on the LocalBusiness markup Wix generates automatically.
The yardstick we use to judge a site, whatever platform it runs on, comes from the projects we work on. On Macropix, a Milan-based maker of LED screens, every product line has a page with a title and description written for its search, and for "monitor pubblicitario" (advertising display) the site went from position 88 to 2 on Google Italy (the full case is in our guide to SEO for manufacturing).
On Sunscape, an Italian solar farm developer, we built an architecture of pages by region: in six months organic impressions rose from 329 to 5,809 a month.
What does that have to do with Wix?
Neither result depends on the CMS. Both depend on one page for each search, with a title, H1 and description written for that search: exactly the fields we found empty in the test, and the ones Wix can't fill in for you.
In this article:
- what Wix does for you and what it doesn't, with links to the official documentation;
- the speed of Wix sites in the UK compared with WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and Squarespace;
- the results of our test on 294 pages, check by check;
- how to fix titles, descriptions, H1s and business details from the dashboard;
- when Wix isn't enough and it's worth switching platform.
Let's start.
Is Wix good for SEO? (yes, and on speed it beats WordPress)
Yes: according to the official Wix SEO page, every Wix site is rendered on the server, has a sitemap created and submitted to Google automatically, a canonical pointing to the page itself and images compressed and converted to WebP. The bad reputation dates from earlier: until 2016 there was no alt text and no editable URLs, as Ahrefs recalls, and importing 301 redirects from a CSV file only arrived in December 2020, according to the update log kept by Tooltester.
Ahrefs itself had published a study in 2019 of 6.4 million sites, according to which WordPress sites got far more organic traffic than Wix ones. It later withdrew it, writing that the method didn't hold up and that the difference came down to the skills of the people running the sites, not the platform.
Today the clearest figure is speed. We pulled the values for sites visited from the UK, on mobile, from HTTP Archive:
| Platform | Sites with UK data | Good Core Web Vitals | Lighthouse SEO (median) | Lighthouse Performance (median) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wix | 13,241 | 91.0% | 0.96 | 0.615 |
| Squarespace | 8,486 | 85.1% | 0.92 | 0.29 |
| Shopify | 39,341 | 84.3% | 0.92 | 0.45 |
| Webflow | 4,078 | 78.9% | 0.96 | 0.615 |
| WordPress | 121,260 | 65.8% | 0.92 | 0.46 |
Wix passes the Core Web Vitals, the speed and stability metrics Google measures on real Chrome users, on 9 out of 10 sites visited from the UK, against roughly 2 in 3 on WordPress. Worldwide it reaches 81.2%.
So speed on Wix is no longer a problem?
Almost. The weakest metric is still server response time (TTFB): it's good on 90.5% of Wix sites visited from the UK, while loading of the main element (LCP) is good on 94.3%. And the Lighthouse Performance score, at 0.615, says that pages pass the test with real users but are still heavy in the lab test. The figure to watch is the first one, the one you'll find in the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console.
The test: 105 Wix sites, 294 pages (and the most neglected field is the description)
You can rerun the test in an afternoon. On 9 October 2026 we took from DataForSEO's backlink index the 300 .it domains with the most authority that contain a link to wix.com, removed portals, public bodies and news sites (28 domains) and downloaded the homepages of the remaining 272. Those served by Wix, recognisable from the "Wix.com Website Builder" signature in the code, numbered 108; 105 responded correctly. For each one we analysed the homepage and two pages taken from the sitemap. The sample is Italian, because that's the market we work in, but the settings we checked are the same on a UK site.
Total: 105 sites and 294 pages. They include B&Bs and farm stays, psychology and physiotherapy practices, architects, restaurants, workshops, associations and an online shop selling agricultural spare parts. 42 sites have a blog, 23 an online shop, 19 the Wix bookings system.
| Check | Result | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Canonical tag present | 294 pages out of 294 | 100% |
| Canonical pointing to another address | 1 page out of 294 | 0.3% |
| XML sitemap reachable | 101 sites out of 105 | 96.2% |
| Robots.txt present | 105 sites out of 105 | 100% |
| Meta description missing | 107 pages out of 294 | 36.4% |
| Meta description missing on the homepage | 14 homepages out of 105 | 13.3% |
| Meta description missing on internal pages | 93 pages out of 189 | 49.2% |
| Homepage title starting with "Home |" | 20 sites out of 105 | 19% |
| Site name left as the template default ("My Site", "Ilmiosito") | 4 sites out of 105 | 3.8% |
| Title over 60 characters | 56 pages out of 294 | 19% |
| No H1 | 129 pages out of 294 | 43.9% |
| Exactly one H1 | 113 pages out of 294 | 38.4% |
| Two or more H1s | 52 pages out of 294 | 17.7% |
| Code language set to English on Italian text | 5 sites out of 105 | 4.8% |
| Homepage with JSON-LD structured data | 102 homepages out of 105 | 97.1% |
| Homepage with LocalBusiness markup | 56 homepages out of 105 | 53.3% |
| Images with empty alt | 1,718 out of 4,080 | 42.1% |
| Pages with a social sharing image (og:image) | 163 pages out of 294 | 55.4% |
| Pages set to noindex | 3 pages out of 294 | 1% |
| AI crawlers named in robots.txt | 0 sites out of 105 | 0% |
The limit of the sample needs saying up front: these are sites that link to wix.com, often with "created with Wix" in the footer or the banner of the basic plans. It's a sample of small sites, run by the owners themselves, which is the typical Wix audience anyway. It isn't a national statistic.
The comparison with the tests we ran the same day on other platforms is still telling. In Webflow SEO 4 sites out of 15 had no canonical, and the meta description was missing on 17.3% of pages. On Wix the canonical is always there, but the description is missing twice as often. In Squarespace SEO it was missing on 81%.
Wix has automated the technical side: the mistakes are left in the fields only someone who knows the business can write.
Titles and meta descriptions on Wix: half the internal pages have no description
The meta description is the two-line text Google may show under the title in search results. On Wix the starting value is blank: that's stated in the guide to default SEO settings, which also explains where the title comes from. On the homepage it's the site name; on other pages it's the page name followed by the homepage title.
That one rule explains three numbers in the test.
The first: 14 homepages out of 105 without a description, against 93 internal pages out of 189. People who write a description do it for the homepage and stop there.
The second: 20 homepages out of 105 show a title that starts with "Home |". The page is called Home in the menu, nobody wrote a title by hand, and on Google the site's first result becomes "Home | Smith Physio" instead of "Physiotherapist in Harrogate | Smith Physio".
The third: on 4 sites the site name was still the template default, with titles like "HOME | My Site". It's the name Google shows above every page on the site, until someone changes it.
But doesn't Google write the description itself anyway?
Often, yes. Google Search Central explains that the snippet is mainly drawn from the page content, and that the meta description is used when it describes the page better than the text does. But without a description, the sentence that has to persuade people to click is chosen by Google, not by you.
On Wix the fix happens in a few places:
- for the main pages, open Pages & Menu in the editor, click the three dots next to the page, choose SEO basics and write the title and meta description;
- for blog posts, products and services, set title and description templates by page type from the SEO & GEO dashboard, so every new product is filled in from the start;
- check that the site name in your business info is the real one, because it ends up in the title of every page;
- keep the title under roughly 60 characters: in the test 56 pages out of 294 went over, often with the full address tacked on at the end.
How to write a description that earns clicks is in our guide to the meta description, and which other tags Google reads is in the guide to meta tags.
Does your Wix site show up on Google as "Home"?
In the test one homepage in five had that title and half the internal pages had no description: those are the lines that decide whether a searcher clicks on you or on a competitor. We check your site page by page and tell you which titles and descriptions to rewrite first, starting from the searches that bring you customers.
Book a strategy consultationH1s on Wix: 4 pages in 10 have no main heading (and one homepage had 15)
The H1 is the page's main heading, the one that tells Google and screen readers what the page is about. In the test 129 pages out of 294 (43.9%) had none, 113 had exactly one and 52 had two or more. Homepages fared worse: 44 out of 105 without an H1. The extreme case was a page with 15 H1s.
How is that possible, if there's a big title on the page?
Because on Wix appearance and tag are two separate things. The official guide to heading tags explains that you change the level from Edit Text, under SEO & accessibility, in the HTML tag drop-down, "without affecting its content or design". So a line can look like a heading and be a paragraph, or the other way round: whoever builds the page by eye chooses the look, and the tag stays whatever the template had.
The same guide flags a mistake that explains some of the pages with lots of H1s: empty line breaks set to the Heading 1 style generate blank H1 tags.
The fix:
- select the heading at the top of the page, open Edit Text and set the tag to H1;
- set section headings to H2 and decorative lines to paragraph;
- look for empty lines with a heading style and delete them;
- put the page's search in the H1: "Physiotherapy in Harrogate", not "Welcome".
The right heading hierarchy is in our guide to heading tags.
Structured data on Wix: LocalBusiness only appears if you fill in your business info
Structured data is the code, usually in JSON-LD format, that describes to Google what's on the page: a business, a product, an event, an article. On Wix it's partly automatic, and it shows: 102 homepages out of 105 had some. But in most cases it was only the WebSite type, which tells Google the site name and little else.
The type that matters for a business with premises is LocalBusiness, with name, address and logo. According to the guide to LocalBusiness markup, Wix creates it on the homepage by itself as soon as you enter the name and address in Business Info, and only for the main location. In the test 56 homepages out of 105 had it, 53.3%.
Among those without it were farm stays, a physiotherapy practice and a restaurant: businesses that live on local searches and were missing a form that takes five minutes to fill in.
Is the markup enough to get into Google's map results?
No. Google uses LocalBusiness markup for business details in the results, but appearing on the map goes through your Google Business Profile. The two need to stay aligned, with the same name and the same address, as we explain in our guide to local SEO.
For products, events and blog posts Wix adds markup to dynamic pages automatically, and from the SEO dashboard you can edit the templates or write your own. Which types you actually need is in our guide to schema markup.
Images, language and social previews: the details Wix leaves to you
Alt text is the description of an image that screen readers read out and that Google Images uses to understand what it shows. Of the 4,080 images in the test, 1,718 had an empty alt, 42.1%. None was missing the attribute altogether: Wix always adds it, sometimes empty.
Not all of them need fixing, because icons and decorative backgrounds should keep an empty alt. Photos of a B&B's rooms or a shop's products, on the other hand, should have one. Ahrefs points out a limit that can't be solved on Wix: image file names are rewritten as unreadable codes. How to write alt text is in our guide to alt text.
Two quick checks next:
- the language in the code: 5 sites out of 105 declared lang="en" on pages written in Italian, including a farm stay and a maker of wooden handles. For a UK site the equivalent slip is a template left on another language or on "en-US". Google says it works out the language from the text, but screen readers and browser translators trust the code;
- the social sharing image: only 163 pages out of 294 had an og:image, so in almost half the cases anyone sharing the page on WhatsApp or Facebook sees a preview with no photo.
AI crawlers, redirects and robots.txt: none of the 105 sites had touched the settings
Robots.txt is the file that tells bots which parts of the site they may visit. On Wix it's always there, generated automatically, and in the test it was present on 105 sites out of 105. It was also still in its default version: no site named a single AI crawler, either to block it or to let it through.
Wix lets you do it from the robots.txt editor, in the SEO dashboard. The guide to blocking AI crawlers offers an example that blocks CCBot, GPTBot, ChatGPT-User and BingAI, and admits that some bots ignore the rules.
Should you copy the example as it is?
It depends on what you sell. GPTBot and CCBot collect text to train models, while ChatGPT-User is the bot that visits a page when a user asks ChatGPT to open it. Blocking it means disappearing from exactly the answers where someone is looking for you. The differences between the bots are in our guide to AI crawlers.
Redirects, on the other hand, are easy on Wix: you manage them from the dashboard and import them from CSV, but the import guide warns that each file can hold at most 500 redirects and that rows beyond the limit are ignored. Migrating a shop with thousands of products takes several files. When to use them is explained in our guide to 301 redirects.
When Wix isn't enough (and when it's the right choice)
Wix is the right choice for people who run their site themselves: professional practices, B&Bs and holiday lets, tradespeople, small shops. In the test the canonical, sitemap and robots.txt were in order even on the smallest site, and in the UK its Core Web Vitals beat those of every other platform we measured: what's missing is the text, and only someone who knows the business can write it.
It gets tight in three cases:
- multilingual sites with precise requirements for their addresses, because according to Ahrefs you don't get full control over the URLs of translated versions on Wix;
- large catalogues, where the automatic sitemap is hard to edit and redirects have to be uploaded in batches of 500;
- projects with lots of data-driven pages, such as pages per town or per product, which on WordPress you handle with plugins and custom fields.
The comparison between platforms, with data, is in our guide to the best CMS for SEO. For the closest alternatives, see WordPress SEO, Shopify SEO if you sell online, and HubSpot SEO.
If you decide to switch, the real risk is the migration: every old address needs mapping with a 301, otherwise the rankings you've earned are lost. The right sequence is in our guide to SEO for a website redesign.
FAQs about Wix SEO
Yes. Wix renders pages on the server, creates and submits the sitemap, sets a canonical on every page and compresses images. In our test of 105 Italian Wix sites on 9 October 2026 the canonical was present on 100% of pages, but 36.4% had no meta description and 43.9% had no H1: the text fields have to be filled in by hand.
It depends: Wix starts with fewer technical errors and on mobile passes Core Web Vitals on 91.0% of sites visited from the UK, against 65.8% for WordPress (HTTP Archive, August 2026). WordPress gives more control over multilingual sites, large catalogues and data-driven pages, thanks to plugins and custom fields.
No. According to Wix's guide to default SEO settings, the meta description starts out blank. In our test it was missing on 93 internal pages out of 189: you write it in each page's SEO settings or with the page-type templates in the SEO dashboard.
Yes. Every Wix site has a sitemap generated and updated by the platform, split by content type (pages, posts, products, bookable services). In the test it was reachable on 101 sites out of 105.
Up to 500 per CSV file: rows beyond the limit aren't imported. For bigger migrations you upload several files, one after another, from the redirect manager.
From the Robots.txt Editor in the SEO dashboard, by adding rules for the bots you want to exclude, such as GPTBot or CCBot. If you want to appear in ChatGPT's answers, it's worth letting through the bots that serve searches with sources, such as ChatGPT-User and OAI-SearchBot.
Wix SEO in brief
Wix generates the sitemap, canonical and robots.txt by itself, and in the UK it's the fastest of the platforms we measured.
The meta description starts out blank: in the test it was missing on half the internal pages.
The homepage title comes from the page name: one homepage in five was called "Home".
The H1 is set separately from the style: 4 pages in 10 had none.
LocalBusiness markup only appears if you fill in your business info.
What we took away from the test is something else. On Wix the name you give a page in the menu also becomes its title on Google, until you write one: anyone who calls their pages "Home", "About us" and "Services" is writing, without knowing it, the titles of their search results. On this platform Wix handles the technical side, and that's exactly why nobody checks the rest. It's why, when we open a Wix site in our SEO consultancy, the first check isn't in the code: we open Pages & Menu and read the page names.
Until next time!
