Is Wix good enough for a contractor website?

Wix is good enough for a contractor website when you plan to stay on Wix, keep the plan paid, and check the pages the same way you would check any site: does the number dial, does the form deliver, does the main image show up fast in Google's lab test. The trade you make is that the site itself can never leave Wix. Whether that trade is fine depends on how long you expect to be in business.

This is not a post against Wix. It is a post about what Wix's own help pages say it allows and does not allow, so you can decide with the facts in front of you.

What Wix lets you do

More than people assume. From Wix's own documentation:

• Search basics on every page. The SEO panel lets you set a title tag, "Enter your title tag as it is meant to appear on search engines results," a meta description, the URL slug, a toggle to "Let search engines index this page," and a canonical tag under Advanced SEO (Source: Wix Help, SEO settings).
• Structured data. "Wix only accepts structured data using JSON-LD markups," which is the format Google recommends anyway (Source: Google Search Central). Each block "must be less than 7,000 characters," with up to five per page (Source: Wix Help, structured data). A LocalBusiness block for a plumber fits with room to spare.
• Custom code. You can place code in the head, body start or body end of pages, once "your site is published and has a connected domain" (Source: Wix Help, custom code). That covers analytics, link preview tags and most of what a trade site needs added one piece at a time.
• Moving the site to another Wix account. "You can transfer ownership of a premium site to another Wix account," and the domain can move with it (Source: Wix Help, transferring a premium site). So if a designer built it in their account, it can be handed to you. Ask for that before you pay the last invoice.

What Wix does not let you do

• Leave. Wix is direct about it: "In order for your site to work properly, it needs to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers," and "Since Wix is a SaaS solution, your site must run on Wix's servers" (Source: Wix Help, exporting). The same page says "The content you build on Wix belongs to you." Both are true at once. Your words and photos are yours. The working site is not something you can download and put somewhere else. If you ever move, you rebuild.
• Run free without the banner. "Your free site includes a Wix banner ad at the top and has a Wix favicon in the browser tab," and removing it requires "a Premium plan that includes these features" (Source: Wix Help, banner ad). A contractor site on the free tier advertises Wix above your own name.

What we cannot tell you without measuring

Whether a Wix site is fast. We do not have a number for Wix sites as a group, and we are not going to make one up. The only honest check is to run Google's PageSpeed Insights on your own home page, mobile tab, and read the Largest Contentful Paint line against Google's 2.5-second mark, remembering that the test is a lab run on a simulated slow phone, not your customer's phone. If your Wix page passes, it passes. If it does not, the fixes available inside Wix are the same ones available anywhere: smaller images, fewer scripts, a lighter hero.

When Wix is enough

• You are a one-truck operation and the site's job is to show you exist, show your work and make the phone ring.
• You or someone in the family will keep the plan paid and the hours current.
• You never intend to move the site, and you are fine rebuilding if that changes.
• You run the four checks on it that you would run on any site: the number dials, the form lands in your inbox, the texted link shows a photo, and the lab test passes.

When it is not

• You want to own the working site as a thing you can carry to any host. Wix's documentation says you cannot, and no designer can change that.
• You are paying someone to build on Wix and they are keeping it in their account. Either it transfers to you, in writing, or you are renting.
• You want the code tested against a written checklist before launch and the report in your hands. That is a process, not a platform, but it is rarely part of a builder-site job.

Next step

If you are on Wix and it passes the four checks, stay and keep it current. If you want a site you own outright, the hosting project and the code transferred to your name on final payment and a written gate report before launch, one-page sites start at $1,500 and the packages are at /build.