Cloud-based web development services are provided by Wix.com Ltd., an Israeli software business that is publicly traded in the United States. Web and mobile site development in HTML5 using online drag and drop tools is made possible. Wix has offices all around the world, including in its home country of Israel, as well as in Canada, the United States, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Lithuania, Poland, the Netherlands, Ukraine, and Singapore. Websites may be enhanced with features like social media integration, online storefronts, marketing tools, discussion boards, and email newsletter subscriptions. Wix is a freemium website builder, meaning the company makes money off of paid add-ons rather than the base service itself. Wix is utilised by 2.3% of the top 10 million websites, per W3Techs.
Founder
Wix is the brainchild of 3 founders: Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami and Giora Kaplan. The idea was born (on the beach) while they were building a website to be the basis of another start-up idea.
The tech savvy trio quickly discovered that creating their own website was difficult, frustrating and very costly. It was this agonizing experience that led them to a light bulb moment—to build a platform that empowered anyone to create their own website with no coding or design skills needed.
In 2006, Wix was born. Since then, Wix had evolved into the leader in website creation, committed to providing the latest features and capabilities that enable anyone to create a professional online presence.
WIX Growth
June 2011, Wix launched the Facebook store module, making its first step into the social commerce trend. In March 2012, Wix launched a new HTML5 site builder, replacing the Adobe Flash technology. In October 2012, Wix launched an app market for users to sell applications built with the company's automated web development technology. Wix's software development kit lets app developers create and offer web apps to Wix users. By August 2013, the Wix platform had more than 34 million registered users.
On 15 May 2014, Wix launched the WixHive API which allows Wix apps within a user web site to capture and share their visitor data (such as contact information, messages, purchases and bookings) with other installed apps within the same web site. In August 2014, Wix launched Wix Hotels, a booking system for hotels, bed and breakfasts, and vacation rentals which use Wix websites. Wix Music was launched in 2015 as a platform for independent musicians to market and sell their music. Wix Restaurants was launched in 2016. In December 2017, Wix Code, an API for adding database collections and custom JavaScript scripting, was released. In March 2020, Wix Code was re-branded to Corvid API, and then in January 2021 re-branded from Corvid to Velo, to avoid resemblance to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. In December 2018, Wix launched Ascend by Wix, a suite of 20 products that lets entrepreneurs start, manage and promote a business directly from the Wix web development platform. Wix introduced Wix Fitness, an all-in-one solution for fitness entrepreneurs to grow and promote their business and manage customer relationships in November 2019.In February 2020, Wix unveiled Editor X, a new platform to offer advanced capabilities for designers and web agencies.
As of June 2020, with the continuous improvement to its features updates and releases, Wix claimed it had more than 180 million registered users from 190 countries around the world. At the end of 2020, and as a result of Adobe's decision to end their support for the Flash Player, Wix stopped allowing their users to create websites in the Flash Editor as well as getting support for the Flash sites and deleting all the Flash sites, thus officially ending the life of Wix's first product.In 2021, Wix partnered with Vistaprint and then partnered with LegalZoom a year later to better support entrepreneurs starting a business.By 2022, the Wix platform had more than 220 million registered users worldwide.
King of Website Builder
Wix makes money by selling subscriptions to its website building platform. These subscriptions range in price and functionality. For instance, an e-commerce plan will set you back $20 a month but a Combo plan, without selling capabilities costs $14.50. And of course, the plans are discounted for longer subscription periods.
But Wix also offers a freemium model to allow people to tinker with the platform and eventually subscribe to it. At the latest count, the amount of total registered users was 125 million, up 22% from 103 million a year ago. In comparison, the number of premium subscribers is only a fraction of the total, at 3.5 million, up 48% from 2.7 million a year ago. What this tell us is that Wix is doing a good job of signing on subscribers as a portion of registered freemium users. Of course, this is the key driver for the business.
What’s more is that Wix’s ecosystem is very strong. Without any coding knowledge, user created a halfway decent site. And there are all sorts of upsell opportunities. From creating a Gmail account for your business, to buying apps from the App Market, to purchasing more automated emails, to upgrade your account storage, the list is practically endless. This has created a sticky platform that is hard for users to back out of once they are too far in.
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