I hear occasionally from groups that are considering, or have already tried, using the heavily-advertised website hosting service “Wix”. It’s a tool, and if it works for you and your budget has the $150/yr (for the minimum plan), then it may be fine. I believe it’s important to have an independent website presence, apart from just a Facebook page or Twitter account, so in my book a Wix website is better than nothing.
However.
That is an expense, and not just this year, but for every year that anyone wants to keep that site going. And here’s where a big downside of their service becomes clear: you can’t take your site with you when you go. It’s called vendor lock-in, and it means that if you ever decide you’d rather host your site elsewhere, then you’ll essentially have to rebuild it from scratch.
From Wix’s own support article on “Exporting or Embedding Your Wix Site Elsewhere”:
Your Wix site and all of its content is hosted exclusively on Wix’s servers, and cannot be exported elsewhere.
Specifically, it is not possible to export or embed files, pages or sites, created using the Wix Editor or ADI, to another external destination or host.
This is a big reason I built Indivisible.blue on WordPress. It’s an open community, built on open source code, so it’s not only free, there’s also no vendor lock-in. You can export your entire site and move it to another WordPress provider whenever you want. Or if you already have paid WordPress hosting somewhere else, you can move it here, with minimal effort. And because WordPress is so common, open, and easy to work with, other website software often supports the WordPress export format, too (Squarespace is one example, Micro.blog is an even better one).
Don’t put all your web eggs in someone else’s proprietary basket if you don’t have to!