Michal Bignitz serves as the
General Manager and Head of Partners at
Wix. Since joining Wix over nine years ago, Bignitz has headed Wix Product Management, Wix International Growth, responsible for the company’s growth in all non-US markets, the Wix App Market – Wix’s distribution platform for web apps, as well as other strategic projects in Wix, among them Wix Blog and Wix Events. In this
feature Bignitz talks us through the evolution of Wix, web trends and tips for building your first site.
Please share the story behind Wix: Where did it start and how has it evolved so far?
In 2006 Wix founders, Avishai, Gig and Nadav were three developers working on a different startup. When it was time to build the website for the company, they were shocked at how hard it was – if they were experiencing this kind of struggle, they couldn’t even imagine how small businesses or self-creators are supposed to build a website. As a result of their own pain point, they decided to create a company that can help make it easier for anyone, to build a beautiful and professional website and get their business online.
Fast forward to 2022, Wix is home to over 230 million users worldwide, and has evolved into a leader in website creation, providing users with the solutions they need to create a professional online presence and then manage and grow their business. Today, Wix can be used by any level of user, web designer, developer, or professional agencies who build sites for others. We are always adding more and more advanced capabilities to extend the platform even further.
Our mission has always been to be a platform where any type of user and any type of business can create their dreams online. We are always improving our products to provide any type of business owner with a complete solution. By listening to our users, understanding their needs, and adding capabilities to expand our offerings accordingly, we are able to provide our users with go-to solutions, and create a pleasant and seamless experience for the end-users.
In your opinion, what are the biggest advantages of using Wix to create a website?
Since our founding, we’ve been layering more and more capabilities and integrations into our platform so that any type of user – a self-creator, a small business owner or professionals of any kind – designers, developers, marketers, can have a unique and flexible experience that is tailored to them so they can best create, manage and grow their or their clients’ online business.
We have different creation tools and fully customizable platforms. Other than the Editor, we have Editor X, supporting more design capabilities, responsive experiences, and advanced layouts and control. We have built-in solutions for almost every industry including restaurant owners, service providers that require booking solutions, bloggers, and eCommerce users. Along with these solutions, we also provide complete management capabilities and business tools like
CRM, marketing tools, and advanced
SEO customizations. Users can have as much control and flexibility as they choose to have, with Wix offering custom functionality with code and pre-designed templates.
We are always adding more tools and functionalities, but to make sure we really answer every need our users might have, our platform includes the coding tools and APIs developers might require to extend the core offering. Furthermore, we are always adding tools and localizing our products to ensure that our users can grow their business from anywhere in the world.
What are some of the major trends currently in the website building market?
Currently, at Wix, and in the world, we are seeing a shift towards users wanting to use platforms that are more open, and provide more flexibility and options for customization. For example, there’s a shift from using no-code and low-code platforms to using platforms that provide more control and customization. Web developers are building longer and more complex projects than ever before, so it’s important they have platforms that support them to do so and businesses are constantly evolving and need a website that evolves with them.
Another trend is that businesses are becoming multi-businesses, meaning they are not just an online store, but they are also creating content, events, workshops and more, and doing so across many channels simultaneously. When creating a website, users are looking for offerings to help them seamlessly tie in their other channels so that their content, theme and brand are consistent and they can manage logistics such as inventory or calendars for booking services from one unified platform.
Do you have any top tips for teams that are building their first website?
It’s important to take a comprehensive approach to ensure an outcome of a fully functioning online presence. This comprehensive approach can include anything from overall design, site content, marketing, to communications, and the site visitors experience. For teams that are building their first website, I recommend:
- Visual content is a highly important element in making a great website. Without quality visuals and a normal loading time, visitors won’t have the chance or the patience to engage with your site. Use high-resolution images and ensure it’s in the right format. The Wix Editor helps ensure Wix websites are outstanding to the eye, and seamless to browse.
- Having a mobile-friendly website. It’s not only important that the website looks good from a desktop, but it also should quickly load and be user-friendly from any mobile device.
- Master search engine optimization (SEO) to increase the traffic to your website and improve your brand’s recognition and online presence. Wix provides advanced SEO tools to our users, helping to make SEO more accessible to all business owners, no matter their SEO level.
- If building a website to sell goods or services, it’s important to ensure the entire check-out and booking processes are secure and seamless for the user. There are many things to think about – from offering different payment methods such as credit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Buy-Now-Pay-Later, incorporating autofill by having automatic settings to help fill out the form, localizing the checkout form with the local language, currency, and more.
Any new updates or developments that you would like to share?
Our focus is on advancing our platform for any type of user to create and manage their own or their clients’ online presence, and we heavily invest in our product development to ensure they have the tools they need for growth. For example, we recently launched Wix Portfolio, for users to seamlessly create a professional online portfolio. Our data indicated that about 40% of users are showcasing a portfolio page on their website, which led us to develop Wix Portfolio, broadening the scope of the existing portfolio capabilities on the platform, to help users focus less on the web design process and more on executing the creation of their vision. Wix Portfolio enables users to swiftly and rapidly showcase their work online with uniquely designed and customizable layouts, and sync their work across external portfolio platforms on the web.
Whether a user is a self-creator or an agency, Wix has invested resources into evolving our products to provide our users with a seamless and holistic experience that aligns with their needs. An example of this is the release of the new
Wix Editor. This offering simplifies complex design capabilities and enables all users to swiftly turn their web creation visions into realities by providing a unique creation experience paired with advanced AI features.
In order to provide our users with an advanced platform, we are constantly integrating with some of the best companies that build specific products to help solve specific needs and requests from users that we haven’t yet developed. An example of this is our recent integration with
Semrush. The integration provides our users with Semrush’s SEO keyword data and insights that can help them identify the right keywords for their website and improve their ranking in search results, helping democratize SEO by enabling our users to conduct better research and choose the right keywords and topics to focus on in their content strategy.
We are always listening to our users, understanding their needs, and adding capabilities to expand our offering accordingly.
