If £9–£16 a month is the whole budget and you enjoy building it yourself, use Wix — genuinely. It's the best version of the rent-a-website model: fast enough now, pleasant to edit, everything included. The comparison flips the moment the website is meant to be a business asset.
On Wix you cannot export your site — Wix provides no code export, so leaving means rebuilding from scratch. You can't version-control it, can't take the design with you, can't define your own structured-data entity graph, and can't put a file at your own domain root. A Folium Studio build costs more up front (from £6,500) and £0/year after — and at year five you own HTML in a Git repo instead of a subscription.
Most "Wix alternative" pages are written by other website builders, arguing about which subscription you should rent. This one is written by a studio, so the comparison is different in kind: a platform you rent versus a site you own. That difference touches everything below.
Credit first, because the comparison has to be honest to be useful: Wix in 2026 is not the Wix of the slow-site jokes. In HTTP Archive's Core Web Vitals technology report, roughly 75% of Wix sites passed CWV on mobile in late 2025 — second among the major builders, comfortably ahead of the average WordPress site. The editor is genuinely good. The app market covers bookings, stores, chat, email. For a DIY site, it's the strongest option of its generation.
What follows is twelve rows of comparison. Each one is a single concrete claim. The argument is in the table, not in the prose around it.
12 dimensions, side-by-side
@ids.llms.txt at the root, crawler allow-list.The cost, over five years
Here's the part most studio comparisons fudge, so let's not: Wix is cheaper over five years. Substantially. The question this page actually asks is not "which costs less" — it's "what do you have at the end". One path ends with five years of receipts; the other ends with an asset you own, on free hosting, that any developer on earth can work on.
- Core plan (£16/mo, annual) £192/yr
- App market subscriptions £60–£360/yr
- Domain after year one ~£15/yr
- What you own at year five —
- Cloudflare Pages £0/yr
- Licences & apps £0/yr
- Domain ~£15/yr
- What you own at year five the site
If the £6,500 number ends the conversation, that's a legitimate ending — see the honest box below. The businesses this page is for are the ones who hit Wix's walls: the template that almost fits, the app stack that creeps to £40/month, the redesign that means starting over, and the discovery — usually at the worst moment — that none of it can leave the platform.
The speed picture, honestly
The lazy version of this page would dunk on Wix performance. The data says otherwise, so here it is.
The remaining gap is structural rather than scandalous: Wix ships a platform runtime on every page and every installed app adds its own JavaScript; a hand-built static page ships only itself. That's the difference between passing Core Web Vitals and pinning the needle. Whether that margin matters depends on how competitive your search and AI surfaces are — for most local-service queries, it does.
When Wix still wins
We build bespoke sites for a living, so read this section as against interest — which is exactly why it's here. There are cases where recommending a studio build would be malpractice.
Pick (or keep) Wix if…
- The budget is the budget. £9–£16/month versus a four-figure build isn't a fair fight, and it isn't meant to be. If the site is a calling card rather than a revenue channel, rent the calling card.
- You need to be live this week. Nothing a studio does beats "pick template, type, publish" for speed-to-existing. A good Wix site today beats a perfect site in eight weeks.
- You genuinely like building it yourself. Some owners enjoy the editor, iterate constantly, and keep their site fresher than any retainer would. The platform rewards that temperament.
- You want bookings or a small store on day one, in one box. Wix's built-in commerce and scheduling are integrated and supported. Static commerce works, but Wix's bundle is real convenience.
The pattern: Wix wins while the website is an errand. It stops winning when the website becomes infrastructure — when search positions, AI citations, brand fidelity, and ownership start carrying revenue weight. That's usually the moment the export button gets looked for, and isn't there.
Questions we get
Can you export a Wix site to HTML?
No. Wix provides no code-export feature — its own help centre states that sites must be hosted on Wix's servers to function. Third-party scrapers can capture rendered pages, but stores, bookings and gated content don't survive, and the result is a snapshot, not an editable site. Leaving Wix means rebuilding.
Is Wix slow?
Not any more, in the main. Around 75% of Wix sites passed Core Web Vitals on mobile in HTTP Archive's late-2025 technology report — second among the major builders. The honest case against Wix in 2026 isn't speed. It's ownership, export, recurring cost, and limited control over structured data and root files.
What does Wix actually cost over five years?
Wix Core is £16/month billed annually in the UK — £960 over five years before app-market subscriptions, which commonly add £5–£30/month each. A realistic business setup lands between £1,000 and £2,500 over five years. A bespoke static build costs more up front (from £6,500) with £0/year after — the difference is that at year five you own an asset rather than a subscription.
Can AI assistants cite a Wix site?
Yes — Wix pages are crawlable and do get cited. The limitation is control: schema beyond the built-in
defaults is constrained, entity graphs with stable @ids aren't part of the platform's
vocabulary, and root-level AI context files like llms.txt aren't yours to define. A
hand-built static site can be instrumented for AI citation down to the byte.
When is Wix the right choice over a studio build?
When £9–£16/month is the whole budget; when you need a site live this week; when you enjoy DIY and a template fits; or when you want built-in bookings or a small store on day one. A studio build costs many multiples of a year of Wix — if the site isn't a serious business asset yet, Wix is the rational answer, and this page will still be here when that changes.
Can Folium Studio migrate a site off Wix?
Yes, with honesty about what that means: because Wix has no export, migration is a re-authoring, not a transfer. We extract the content from the rendered pages into JSON, rebuild the design — to match, or refreshed — preserve the URL structure where it's worth preserving, and ship it as static HTML with a custom edit panel. Hosting goes to £0/month.
If the answer is owning it, the service is the greenfield build.
Designed and built for you, content as JSON in your own Git repo, custom edit panel, deployed on Cloudflare Pages with hosting at £0/month — and instrumented for AI citation from day one. From £6,500.
See the Greenfield service →