Wix website builder does not offer clean & pretty urls

Update June 2016: Wix now offers clean & pretty urls to its customers on the main pages, but not all pages like product pages, as noted on their website.

If you choose Wix as your website builder, you will not have the benefit of clean & pretty urls.  But on the other hand, the Wix website itself does enjoy this benefit.  It is pretty clear they are not using their own website builder.  You may be wondering, why not?  To be fair, most website builder companies do not use their own website builder for their website.  But…the UltimateWB website DOES use the UltimateWB website builder!  We stand by our product, love it, and it is so flexible and advanced that we happily use it too.  UltimateWB is secure and truly great for any website.

What are clean & pretty urls?  In summary, they are good and you want them for your website!  A url is pretty or clean when it is in easily readable format for people – and search engines. (see “What are pretty or clean URLs? They are good and UltimateWB has them!“).  If you browse through the Wix website, you will find that their page urls do not include the “#!” (hashbang) or other extras that they would require your page urls to include.  For example, their features page is accessible at wix.com/about/features and their premium plans page is accessible at wix.com/upgrade/website .  While they are not the urls we would choose for a website – we would make them even cleaner & prettier, shorter like wix.com/features and wix.com/upgrade – the urls are still deemed as clean & pretty.  It is much more desirable than having “#!” and other extras in each of your webpages, especially for your main pages.

You don’t want to be referring to pages in your website with these type of unnecessary extras – you want to say check out our portfolio at “your-website.com/portfolio”, not “your-website.com/portfolio#!portfolio/c1p0o”.  This issue is addressed by a Wix customer complaint at “Creating a clean URL link to page pages“.  The support thread is from a couple years ago, but the issue is still there.  Wix explains the necessity of such bulky urls:

Your Wix HTML5 website is built using HTML5 and AJAX technology. This has many benefits, such as animations on your page transitions, the ability to have your background, header and footer stay static while only the content changes, the ability to use all of the new HTML features as they are released, dynamic page sizing, optimization for mobile devices, etc.

To support using this technology, the URL’s of your website need to be built in the following manner…

But if it’s so beneficial and so good and necessary why doesn’t Wix opt to use such a url formation and website loading?   Actually, all the good/advanced features Wix mentions in their explanation for the necessity of the url bulk is doable with pretty & clean urls.  UltimateWB uses HTML5 and AJAX, does not require page refreshes for everything (for user friendliness), and also offers dynamic page sizing, optimization for mobile devices, with a built-in Responsive App.  You don’t need to have bulky urls to have a responsive website – i.e. a website that functions and looks good/reformats based on your screen size, whether you are on a laptop, tablet, or smartphone.  The reason it is necessary with the Wix website builder is because of their software coding – the backend.  They are using javascript to load/serve the webpage content, and use this url formation to differentiate between pages.  You can have your header/footer and background not refresh when changing webpages – but is this so good and beneficial? Or advanced…for all your webpages?  UltimateWB uses javascript for menu animations and photo gallery/slideshow animations – a good alternative to flash which, unlike javascript, is not compatible with most smartphones and can have huge search engine ranking problems.  Also, in UltimateWB software some sections are loaded through javascript/AJAX rather than a full page refresh, for example when going through pages of a section.  We designed UltimateWB software around the key concepts of user friendliness, search engine opotimization, compatibility, and flexibility for both design and advanced functionalities.

Besides the user friendliness of clean & pretty urls, useful for marketing and promotions, there is also the issue of search engine ranking.  When you don’t have full control of the url, you can’t easily transfer the search engine ranking/traffic from one page to another.  So if you create a new page to replace another page, you lose any search engine ranking built from the old page, and you lose all the traffic you got to your old page from links on other websites – unless you code some 301 redirects, possible on Wix only if you upgrade to their Premium plans.  And Wix currently put a limit of 50 redirects for your website, which can’t be surpassed by editing the .htaccess file (which is the usual method), as Wix does not support .htaccess files.

Wix did make an upgrade to their website builder from the time they offered flash websites.  The replacement has been javascript with this backend system of not prioritizing the user friendliness of urls, and also their impact on search engine ranking.

You can compare other features/aspects of Wix to UltimateWB, GoDaddy, and other website builders in the website builder comparison chart here.  What has your experience been with Wix?