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Wix hits 4 million paid subscribers

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Company adds 147k net paying subscribers during Q4.

Website building system Wix (NASDAQ: WIX) (Wix review) reported earnings and subscriber numbers today.

The company added a net 147,000 premiums subscriptions in Q4, reaching 4.0 million overall (rounded). That’s 24% growth in subscriptions compared to the end of 2017.

Wix also added 5.9 million registered users in the fourth quarter, bringing the total to 142 million. In other words, about 3% of registered users are paying subscribers.

Q4 revenue was $164.2 million, up 39% year-over-year. Collections (e.g. cash receipts) hit $176.1 million, up 33%.

For the year, revenue was $603.7 million, up 42%. Collections were $658,385, up 36%.

The company forecasts $755 million – $761 million in revenue during 2019 and collections of $817 million – $827 million.

Shares were down over 10% following the earnings release.

Wix returns to Super Bowl with Karlie Kloss ad

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Website builder makes last-minute ad buy for Sunday’s Super Bowl LIII.

Website builder and domain name company Wix (NASDAQ: WIX) will have a commercial in this year’s Super Bowl, making it five Super Bowls in a row for the company. It was a last minute ad buy so it is repurposing a previous ad with supermodel Karlie Kloss.

The Wix Super Bowl commercial will promote Wix’s SEO Wiz and Pro Gallery tools.

Both Squarespace and GoDaddy, which have advertised in previous Super Bowls, will not have commercials in Super Bowl LIII.

Here’s the Wix ad:

Wix adds 177k paying customer in Q3, revenue up 40% YoY

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Website builder is also getting into the payments business.

Wix (NASDAQ: WIX) released Q3 2018 earnings yesterday.

Revenue hit $155.6 million, up 40% year-over-year. The company added 177,000 paying subscribers during the quarter, bringing its total to 3.8 million. 5.5 million users registered with Wix during the quarter. Wix converts some of these registered users into paid subscribers over time.

Collections were $163 million. That’s up 36% year-over-year but just slightly from Q1 and Q2 2018.

Wix also announced the launch of Wix Payments. It has been trialing it in Brazil and will bring it to the United States next year. I suspect adding payments became necessary after payments processor Square (NYSE: SQ) bought Weebly, one of Wix’s competitors.

Here’s a Wix website builder review from my personal experience.

The problem with WordPress

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WordPress is too complex for the average small business owner to use. The on ramp needs to be simpler.

GoDaddy’s integration with Beaver Builder makes it easier for people with no tech skills to customize a website. But it’s still not quite there.

WordPress powers 31% of the web. I’ve used it on this very blog since 2005. But WordPress has a problem for the millions of small business owners that don’t have a website: the learning curve.

That’s why I’ve reviewed WordPress alternatives like Wix, Weebly, SquareSpace, Yahoo Small Business and GoCentral.

These website builders make it much easier to get started than WordPress. The problem is that they can’t easily be exported to WordPress when a website owner is ready to harness more flexibility and customization. (One exception is DreamHost’s Remixer, although that’s not a very competitive site builder.)

With 13 years of WordPress experience, it’s easy for me to do just about anything required in the Admin interface. But when it comes to customizing the look and feel of a site, it’s difficult unless you’re a coder. Gutenberg promises to make some of this easier, but the site structure itself will still be difficult.

Some of the pre-built frameworks can help but still have a long way to go. Consider Genesis, which this site and PodcastGuests.com are built on. The Genesis framework is designed to make customizing a site easier, but I still can’t use it without a developer.

There are lots of great themes for Genesis. The problem is that the out-of-the-box experience with these themes is nothing like what you’d expect. They are installed with a default blog structure rather than what the theme looks like, and users have to then dig into widgets to recreate the desired look.

WP Engine acquired StudioPress, the maker of Genesis, earlier this year. It has a big opportunity here. It should create a one-click experience for people to choose a theme built on Genesis that matches the layouts shown on the site.

Of all the WordPress experiences I’ve tried, GoDaddy’s seems to be the closest to hitting the mark for making it easy to customize a site. This is thanks to an integration with Beaver Builder, a drag-and-drop plugin for WordPress. GoDaddy asks for your site category and contact details, layers in its Primer theme, and then lets users customize their site using Beaver Builder. Here’s an example of a site built on GoDaddy and Beaver Builder.

It’s still too difficult for someone who isn’t experienced with the WordPress admin, but at least it doesn’t require a developer to create the site.

Automattic’s WordPress.com is another viable alternative. The sign up process asks how skilled the creator is and customizes the experience accordingly.

The holy grail is to allow people to create a site on a sort of WordPress-lite. Something that doesn’t look like WordPress…something like the site builders. Then, when people are ready for the added flexibility that WordPress brings, they can unlock it be converting to the full version of WordPress.

How to set up URL forwarding with Wix (step-by-step)

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Move a site to Wix? Here’s how to forward old URLs to new ones.

I recently wrote about how I moved Comptroller.com to the Wix platform.

Unfortunately, I could not set up the URL structure on Wix the same way it was on the old site. That meant that Google had indexed pages that no longer existed and I need to let Google know the new URLs for these pages.

Fortunately, Wix has a URL forwarding tool to add 301 redirects. My site was fairly small, so the “manual” tool worked well for adding these redirects.

Here’s how to do it.

1. Log in to your Wix dashboard and select the site you’d like to add forwards for.

2. Click on “Manage Website” in the left column.

Wix URL forwarding

3. Click on “SEO”.

Wix SEO

4. Scroll down to “Manage 301 Redirects”.

5. Insert the URL (after the top level domain) of the old page in the box on the left, and select the page it should link to on the new site from the dropdown box on the right.

wix 301 redirect

Note: If you don’t see the page in the dropdown box (perhaps because it’s a dynamic page), click “Add it Manually” and paste the page hosted on Wix in the box:

Wix forwarding list