Wix Free Plan Review (2026): The Strings Attached to the $0

The Wix free plan is the industry's most generous editor attached to the industry's most visible strings. Nothing about the plan is hidden, exactly — the ads are on the page, the URL is in the address bar — but the sum of it changes what the plan is for, and the pricing page will not do that arithmetic for you. We will.

Below: what $0 buys at Wix, what the constraints look like in practice, what the first paid rung actually costs, and the domain-voucher clause we consider the finest fine print in the business.

What the Wix free plan includes

Credit where due: Wix gives away the whole editor. Not a lite version, not a timed demo — the full drag-and-drop builder, with 500 MB of storage, no credit card at signup, and no expiry date. Among the ten free tiers in our builder-by-builder comparison of what “free” actually includes, nobody hands over more tooling at $0. The exclusions are equally clear cut: no ecommerce or selling of any kind, no marketing tools or email campaigns, and no custom domain — the site lives on Wix's address or not at all. Nothing times out, either: the free site keeps rendering whether you open the dashboard weekly or annually, which is more than the trial-shaped end of this market can say.

The URL: your account name, in lights

A free Wix site publishes to username.wixsite.com/sitename — not a subdomain of your site's name, but a path underneath your account name. It is the longest free URL of the ten builders we track, and structurally the least flattering: whatever you called your account the day you signed up now precedes your project everywhere the link travels. Rivals hand you sitename-first addresses; Wix hands you a filing reference. On a business card, in an email signature, read aloud over the phone — this is the string that quietly disqualifies the free plan from client-facing work. And there is no workaround short of paying — the address is the address, and every share, index and backlink carries it.

The ads

Wix ads appear on every free site — that much is verified and unambiguous. In our checking, the usual arrangement is the familiar top-of-page banner inviting your visitors to go and build their own website, plus a smaller Wix badge in a lower corner, though Wix does not formally document the exact placement. The banner is the point: it converts your page into an acquisition channel for Wix, at a position — above your own headline — that no self-respecting layout would volunteer for. For the builders that decline to do this, see our roundup of free website builders without ads.

Storage and bandwidth

Storage is a documented 500 MB — workable for a text-led site, tight the moment photography enters. Bandwidth is where the documentation goes quiet: at the time of checking, the cap appears to sit somewhere between 500 MB and 1 GB a month, and Wix's own free-plan pages decline to commit to a number. We flag that not because the estimate is alarming but because the silence is: a plan limit you cannot look up is a plan limit you discover the hard way, mid-month, with a site that has stopped serving images.

The upgrade ladder, and what $17 buys

The free plan doubles as a showroom, and the editor makes sure you know it — locked features and upgrade prompts are never more than a click away. The 2026 ladder runs Light $17, Core $29, Business $39, and Business Elite $159 per month, all billed annually. The relevant rung for most free-plan refugees is Light at $17 a month billed annually — roughly $204 a year — which removes the Wix ads, connects your domain, doubles storage to 2 GB and adds two collaborators. Pay month to month and the same plan appears to run about $24, at the time of checking. For scale across the market: Framer's comparable exit is $10 a month billed yearly, Squarespace opens at $19, and Carrd's Pro Standard does the domain-and-forms job for $19 a year — an order of magnitude less. Wix's $17 buys the biggest editor of the group, but it is not the cheap seat. And one thing Light does not obviously include: the free-domain voucher, which brings us to the fine print of the year.

The catch: the free-domain voucher

Wix advertises a free domain with its yearly plans. The voucher terms, which we read so you don't have to, say: it applies only to “selected yearly or multi-year Premium or Studio plans”; it must be redeemed within two months of buying the plan; it covers only new domains purchased through Wix; it is not included when you renew or upgrade; and redeeming it requires entering payment details so the domain auto-renews at full price after year one.

That word “selected” is doing quiet work: the voucher page pointedly declines to list Light, so as we read it, the cheapest plan is likely not invited to the free-domain party. As for renewal, Wix quotes a .com at around $9.90 for the first year with renewals “at the regular price” — which our best reading puts in the neighbourhood of $16 a year. A two-month fuse, a stored card, and an undefined regular price is the pattern we catalogue in free-plan upgrade traps, and Wix's version of the free-domain offer is the reference specimen in our guide to free website builders with a free domain.

What to do with all of that if you upgrade anyway: diarise the voucher's two-month deadline on the day you pay; decide up front whether you would buy the domain at Wix's renewal price, because after year one you effectively are; and check the voucher's plan list before assuming your tier qualifies. “Selected” is a word with a job.

Verdict: what the free plan is actually for

Score the free tier on its own terms and 6.8 feels right: the most complete free editor on the market, wrapped in advertising and a URL that between them rule out professional use. As a rehearsal space before paying, it is excellent — you learn the real editor, and your work upgrades in place when you do commit. As a website, it is a billboard for Wix that you decorate. If genuinely free publishing is the goal, our Google Sites review covers the one builder that manages it without an asterisk, and our ranking of the best free website builders places all ten in order.