Is a Wix site enough for a holistic practice?

The short answer

Sometimes a Wix site is enough, and I would rather tell you that first.

If you are starting out, you have one offer, and everyone who books found you through a friend, a template does the job. Your people already know your name, so they only need a place to see the dates and a button to write to you.

It stops being enough the moment you want someone who has never heard of you to find you. Someone in another city, typing what you do into Google at eleven at night, or asking ChatGPT where to find a sound healer near Lisbon. That person does not know your name yet, and this is where most template sites go quiet.

A flyer, a stall and a shop

The easiest way I found to explain it is with something everybody knows, the way a small business shows up in a town.

A flyer works beautifully when you hand it to someone, and nobody ever finds a flyer by searching for it. That is what a site that only lives in your bio really is. If that is all it needs to be, a link page or even a well made PDF does the same job, for free.

A stall in someone else’s market gets people walking past, with the market’s banner hanging over it and an address that belongs to the market. That is Wix on its free address, the one that ends in wixsite.com. Google can find it, and it rarely puts it in front of anyone. Wix’s own help pages say you need a paid plan and your own domain to connect a site to Google’s tools, and if you leave one day, the address stays behind, along with every link anyone ever shared.

A shop with your own name on the door is a real step, because with your own domain the address is yours for good. Still, a shop with a blank sign, dark windows and no opening hours on the door loses most of the people walking past, and that is what a template looks like to Google when nobody filled in the parts you don’t see.

The last shop, the one on the map, can be a Wix site too. What takes a site from the blank sign to the map is mostly work nobody sees, done by someone who knows it is there.

What the passer-by sees, and what Google reads

When you look at your site, you see your photos, your colours and your words. Google and the AI assistants read something else, the small labels underneath: the name of each page, the line that appears under it in the search results, a description of every photo, and whether the text says clearly what you do and where.

On most template sites I open, those labels still say what the template said on the first day.

Both could be the same site, with the same photos and the same person behind it. The second one says what it is, in the words someone would actually type. That is most of what people mean by SEO, a word most of my clients have heard many times and nobody ever explained to them.

Where everyone is asking now

More and more people skip Google and ask ChatGPT, or the assistant on their phone, a whole question at once: where can I join a cacao ceremony near Sintra this month? The assistant answers with a few names, and it picks the ones whose sites it can read clearly.

It reads text. A site that is mostly photos with one line on top, or a programme that only exists as a picture of a poster, tells it almost nothing. These assistants also lean a lot on what Google and Bing have already found, so a site that is invisible on Google is usually invisible to them too.

Getting ready for them is the same work as the labels. Say plainly who you are, what you offer, where, for whom and how to book, in real text on the page.

When the advice comes from ChatGPT

There is another side to this. More and more, people ask ChatGPT the questions they used to ask a person, someone who does this work for a living. The answer arrives in a few seconds and sounds very sure of itself, and when you have no way of knowing better, it is easy to take it as right.

Some people work like that, and that is fine. I do it too, with things I know nothing about. The catch is that ChatGPT tends to agree with the way you asked, and it has never seen your site. So the advice turns into decisions, a plugin here, a new template there, a section copied from someone else’s site, and only months later does it become clear that some of them were wrong. That is usually when people go looking for someone with experience.

It is a bit like cars. Today anyone can watch a video and change their own oil, and they should. A car that has been fixed for years by whoever had a video open is another story. New parts end up screwed onto old rusty ones that no longer come out, and by the time it reaches a real mechanic, getting it running again can take three times the work. Sometimes the honest answer is that a new car costs less than saving the old one.

Websites age the same way. When someone writes to me wanting to change one thing, that one thing is often stuck to ten others, and the only clean way out is to start again. I wrote about one of those cases in the post about the client I told not to redesign.

Asking ChatGPT is a good first step. Asking someone who does this every day, before you act on the answer, costs much less than asking after.

The step at the door

Accessibility sounds like a word for big companies. In your world it means very ordinary people. Your client of sixty-five who left her glasses in the other room. Someone reading your retreat page on their phone, in the sun, on the beach. Someone who sees colours differently, or who moves through a page with the keyboard, or listens to it instead of reading it.

In a shop, it is the step at the door and the size of the letters on the menu. On a site, it is pale grey text on beige, buttons too small for a thumb, and photos with no description for someone who listens to the page. Templates choose these for looks, and they are often the first thing I change when someone moves their site to me.

The door should also open quickly. On mobile data in the countryside, a site that takes several seconds to appear has already lost part of the people who tapped on it.

The rent

A stall in a market pays rent, and on Wix the rent comes every month, for as long as you stay, plus the apps you add along the way for bookings, a shop or a newsletter. For a small practice that is often fine. It is worth knowing what it adds up to in a year, and what you get for it.

I wrote the whole comparison, with a calculator for your own case, in What doing it yourself really costs.

A five minute test you can do today

You don’t need me for this, and I would like you to try it before you pay anyone. Tick whatever happens to you.

• ✓When I search for what I do and my town, my site is not on the first page.
• ✓When I ask ChatGPT who does what I do near me, my name does not come up.
• ✓The tab of my browser still says "Home", or the name of the template.
• ✓Outside, in the sun, some of my text is hard to read on my phone.
• ✓Someone older in my family could not book or write to me without help.
• ✓My address still ends in wixsite.com, squarespace.com or something like it.

If you ticked none, your site is doing its job, so stay where you are. If you ticked a few, most of them can be fixed without moving anywhere, and I am happy to tell you which ones.