Wix Studio (formerly Editor X) Review: Is It Right for You? [2023]

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Editor X is in the process of becoming Wix Studio! It’s a relatively new offering, but it’s not just a run-of-the-mill website builder. No, it’s designed for a whole different audience. Instead of targeting beginners and small businesses, Editor X aims for professional designers, coders, and agencies looking for a powerful, but intuitive, builder.

With an advanced drag-and-drop editor, Editor X does (spoiler alert) have some interesting features, which I’ll be talking about below, of course. But interesting or not, that still leaves us with the big question: what are its chances? If you dabble in design, is Editor X right for you and your website?

Also important: Will complete beginners benefit from Editor X, or is it just a little too advanced for amateurs?

What Makes Editor X Different from Other Builders?

Besides the (honestly fun) interactive homepage, and the secret-project-sounding name? Plenty.
Like I said above, this product is not designed for beginners. In fact, a representative told me it’s specifically “not for your average Joe, or grandma starting a website for her[…] shop.” It’s designed for people who don’t mind getting their hands at least a little dirty. It’s for people who want near total control over not just the design, but the functionality of their site as well.

So yeah. If you’re building your first ever site, check out our top ten website builders for 2024 instead. But, if you understand some of the underlying principles of web design (or are willing to take the time to learn), stick around.

There are 28 good-looking templates  at time of writing. I know, I know. It doesn’t seem like much, but more are constantly being built. Truth be told, it doesn’t matter as much for Editor X, because it’s very much designed to be a tool where you can start from scratch.

That said, the templates here are clean, pretty, and generally quite usable. They range across generic categories like “Online Beauty Store,” “Digital Marketing Agency,” “Product Showcase,” and more like that. These are not meant to be nearly pre-built sites, but starting points.

As the templates page literally says at the bottom, “the rest is up to you.”

I have to give this section a perfect score for the sheer ambition on display. It’s like a regular website builder on steroids.

It should be noted that there’s e-commerce functionality, blogging, event management, member site systems, and third-party add-ons. These features are very similar to those of other builders, just lightly overhauled for Editor X.

Because these features are somewhat run-of-the-mill, I won’t be going over them in detail here. Instead, I’ll be focusing on everything that’s exciting about Editor X.

Here’s what you, a professional, will need to know.

A Completely Fluid-responsive Site Builder

Many builders claim to have fully responsive editors, but their overall approach is closer to “adaptive design.” That means there’s basically one version of the site for desktops, and one for mobile devices.

Truly responsive (or fluid-responsive) web design is based on the idea that there’s one website version of the website that adapts itself to every screen size. This approach is the de-facto “right way to design websites” these days. And now, Editor X is embracing that concept to the fullest. It’s about time.

Every design and layout feature in Editor X is oriented around making proper modern, responsive design easy to achieve. You can change the styling of elements per breakpoint (the screen size at which the site drastically changes layout / appearance), and you can have as many breakpoints as you want.

You can dock elements to the closest edge of their parent containers, and manually define the distance between the edge of the parent element and the child element. Then, you can decide if those elements will be fixed in sized, fluid, or scale with screen size. There’s also a customizable grid, of course.

You can set “focal points” for every image and video you upload, so those parts of the image / video will always be visible. There’s a full, customizable design system, and a library of thousands of vector shapes and illustrations to boot.

And you can upload your own fonts.

It’s not the best site builder I’ve ever used… not yet. It needs some polish, and I’d never want to look at the actual HTML that gets generated, but it has potential.

Animation

You can customize literally every element on the page with animations if you want to. I wouldn’t — they’d take forever to load — but you can. These animations are kept simple, and you won’t be making any full cartoons like in the days of Flash.

No, it’s limited to things that bounce around or fade in when the page loads. Then again, most people don’t need much more than that.

Custom Content Management & Databases

While Editor X does have built-in blogging, stores, and event management already set up, you can use the Content Manager features to build a completely custom site. This is the functionality you’ll want to use to build something more complex, like listings, a magazine, or even a full on newspaper site.

Create all the custom content types, taxonomies, and anything else you want, because it’s literally a database. That database can, of course, be manipulated via APIs, and displayed on your site more or less however you want. You can also collect data from forms on other sites, or on the front end of your own site to populate these databases. You can literally connect any element on any page to data from the content manager.

There are some preset content types for news, team member listings, and simple things like that, but these databases can be as complex as you want them to be.

More Features for Coders

So most of Editor X’s features are designed for people who have no desire to work with code. And you know what? That’s fine. But for the people who like writing back-end code, and also like drag-and-drop design, there’s quite a bit for you here, too.

Specifically, there’s very nerdy stuff like:

• The ability to write Node.js backend code – If you want to turn your Editor X site into a whole app, or just a really complex website, you can. As long as you like writing JavaScript, you’ve got nearly unlimited power and complexity at your fingertips. And yes, it supports importing NPM packages.
• Built-in code editor – It’s a full web-based IDE with syntax highlighting and all the usual goodies. I didn’t play around with this much myself, but it’s a bit Node-focused, as you might imagine. Still, you can edit your code on the go.
• APIs – Access your content from anywhere.
• Release manager – It’s a bit like version control. You can leave your current site live and working as intended, while experimenting with a release candidate. You can also roll new versions of your site out to small portions of your users at a time.

Even for professionals, there’s a learning curve. It takes some time to actually understand the software you’re using, and all the things you can do with it. Normally, this wouldn’t reflect very well in our Ease of Use score, but well…

It’s understandable in this case. Again, this isn’t software for beginners. It’s for people who want to do this regularly, perhaps even for a living.

You’ll need to know at least some basic principles of responsive design, such as breakpoints, min-width and max-width, and other little tricks. Mind you, Editor X has produced some tutorials and lessons on these very topics, which I’ll go over below.

A Light Feature Tour & Tooltips

At the beginning, you’ve not actually given a lot of instruction to work with. There is a light feature tour to get you started, but it honestly won’t teach you how to use the whole program. I’d strongly suggest checking out the next section:

Academy X

This is where you’ll be getting most of your information about Editor X. Academy X is a collection of in-depth tutorials that teach you about every aspect of the site builder, but they go further than that: There are primers on the basics of responsive web design, design grids, basic content management, and more.

On the YouTube channel, there are also lectures from expert designers to help you get the most out of using Editor X. If I sound over-enthusiastic, it’s only because I really like it when companies put this much work into training customers.

Built-In Access to the Help Center

It’s a small touch, but you can access a lot of tutorials and resources straight from the Help menu at the top of the screen. If you’re the “learn by doing” type of person, this feature can save you a lot of time, and you don’t even have to go to another browser tab.

Photoshop should be this easy to learn.

You can now access a dedicated support bot from your Editor X’s dashboard. There, you can request a callback or open a ticket.

Yes, to actually contact support, you have to run the gauntlet through one of those useless chatbots that are designed to keep you away from real people. But the experience has improved a lot since the last time I tested it, and it’s a lot more streamlined.

 Phone Support

The callback system has improved massively since the last time I tried it. Back then, I had to suffer through a 40-minute wait and getting hung up on. This time, I got a call in under 25 minutes, and on the first try, too!

The agent was helpful, patient, and informative. I had three burning questions:

1. Are there options for multilingual sites?
2. Are there features to hide specific pages from search engines?
3. Is Editor X a good option for a personal blog?

The answers were as follows:

1. Yes. There’s a specific app meant to translate your site automatically (or give you manual translation options). When the app is active, visitors can toggle which version of the site they want to see.
2. Once again, yes. All you need to do is go to the SEO options of a specific page and toggle off “let search engines index this page.”
3. The agent said that he wouldn’t recommend it. I then asked what kind of site would benefit from Editor X. His answer was simpler than I imagined: Agency sites and designer sites.

Editor X requires a lot more website-building skills than other builders, he explained. So unless you really need those advanced features, there’s no point in making your life harder. This led me to ask a final (bonus!) question:

Is Editor X (along with Academy X) a good place to develop those skills? He said yes, but I got the feeling that it was a “could I learn to swim by jumping into the ocean and hoping for the best?” kind of yes.

Ticket/Email

Like a proper pseudo-customer, I asked about moving a site from WordPress. Hey, that’s something people might want. Well, apparently there are no features to migrate pages from WordPress to Editor X, but you can migrate blog posts.

The overall support experience was generally satisfactory. My questions were answered, and the support representatives were patient and thorough.

Even so, you’d better believe I’m taking points off the score for that chatbot.

Could the people who make this software always sell it cheaper? Well sure, but I think the payment plans are fair for a product targeted at professionals and agencies. A little over $20 USD per month for the cheapest plan might be a bit steep for a brochure site, but for all the tools you’d need to create a basic app?

It’s not bad at all.

The cheapest business plan is just a few dollars more, making it an affordable option. If you start selling memberships and/or products, there’s a chance the website could pay for itself in about a month. Of course, that depends on how things go.

Cancellation & Refunds

You can, of course, cancel your service at any time, but the only way you get any money back is if you do it in the first 14 days. And then, you get all your money back. 14 days is pretty good for what is essentially a trial period.