Why You Should Avoid Wix for Web Hosting (And What to Use Instead)

Wix cut a fifth of its workforce in 2026, slashed its own growth forecast, and is being sued by its investors. If your business website lives on their platform, you cannot move it. Here is the public record, and what it means for you.

For years the case against building your business website on Wix was straightforward: the renewal price jumps, and you can never move your site anywhere else.

Both are still true. But there are two things most Wix customers have never considered, and in 2026 they became a great deal more important. The first is where your subscription actually goes. The second is what has happened to the company receiving it.

None of what follows is our opinion. It is drawn from financial reporting, court filings and the company’s own disclosures to its shareholders.

Where Your Money Goes

Here is a fact most Wix customers have never checked, and it is a matter of public record rather than opinion. Wix.com Ltd. is an Israeli company, headquartered in Tel Aviv. It trades on the Nasdaq, but the company, its leadership and its payroll are based there: more than 60% of its staff work in Israel. That is why a stronger shekel against the dollar turns up in its financial results.

So this is not just a question of where a company is registered on paper. It is where the wages are actually paid.

This is not a comment about any country or any people. It is a straightforward point about your money. When a US small business pays a monthly subscription to an overseas platform, that money leaves the American economy. It does not pay an American wage, it does not support an American family, and it does not circulate through an American town.

Twilight I.T. is 100% United States based. The company, the team, the support, and the services we build on. There is no offshore support queue and no outsourced call centre. When you pay us, that money stays in the US economy and pays American people.

What Happened to Wix in 2026

On 28 May 2026, Wix announced it was cutting roughly 1,000 jobs, about 20% of its entire workforce, the largest layoff in the company’s history. Headcount has fallen from 5,277 at the end of the first quarter to 4,371 today. The restructuring carries $30 to $35 million in pre-tax charges.

At the same time the company cut its own forecast for the year, reducing expected bookings growth from the mid-teens to the low-teens and revenue growth from the mid-teens to the low-to-mid teens.

The market reaction has been severe:

Market figures read on 18 August 2026 and listed in the sources below. Share prices move daily; the dated events above do not.

There is also litigation. A securities fraud class action, Yappi v. Wix.com Ltd., et al. (No. 26-cv-8852), has been filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. It covers anyone who bought Wix shares between 19 February 2025 and 12 May 2026, and alleges that Wix told investors its AI product offerings were competitive and its AI-related costs were decreasing, when in fact its AI business prospects were declining and those costs were rising. The deadline for lead plaintiff applications is 22 September 2026.

To be clear about what that is: a complaint is an allegation that has been filed, not a finding by any court. Nothing has been proven. But it is on the public record, and the substance of it is about the same AI shift described below.

Why It Happened: AI Changed the Business

This is the part that matters most, because it is not going to reverse.

The whole proposition of a drag-and-drop website builder was that building a website was hard, so you paid a monthly fee to make it easy. AI has taken a large bite out of exactly that promise. Generating something generic and template-shaped is no longer worth much, and that was the premium a builder subscription was charging for.

Note what has not changed: a genuinely good website still takes real work. AI has commoditised the easy end of the market, which happens to be the end a subscription builder was selling.

Wix has been spending heavily to respond, acquiring an AI coding platform and rolling out AI design tools. That spending is a large part of what went wrong: operating expenses jumped 46% year over year, and the resulting hit to profitability is what the earnings miss and the lawsuit are both about. Their own restructuring announcement ties the job cuts directly to AI making entire categories of internal work unnecessary, with development and design roles taking the brunt.

They are also squeezed by something outside their control. Wix earns most of its revenue in US dollars while paying most of its costs in Israeli shekels, and the shekel has strengthened sharply against the dollar, rising roughly 14% in 2025 and a further 7% in the first five months of 2026. Their costs went up without anyone deciding anything.

How We Use AI, Briefly

We are not anti-AI. Twilight I.T. is a WordPress shop, and we build WordPress sites with AI-powered development. But we will be straight with you: we do not describe a website to a machine and ship whatever comes out. A real business site still takes many hours of skilled human work, the design and direction are ours, and AI earns its place on the repetitive groundwork and the speed of deployment.

The other half is what you can do afterwards. If you want your WordPress site connected to your own AI tools, so you or your team can work with your content, your enquiries or your data directly, we can set that up. That is possible because WordPress is open and you own it. A closed builder will not hand you those keys.

A website builder uses AI to make its own platform stickier. We use it to get you a WordPress site you own, built properly, ready to plug into whatever you want to run alongside it.

The Problem That Was Always There: You Cannot Leave

Set the financial news aside for a moment, because this next part has been true the whole time and remains the single strongest reason we steer clients away.

Wix runs on a closed, proprietary platform. There is no export. If you decide to leave, for any reason, you do not move your website. You rebuild it somewhere else from scratch, page by page, copying your own words across by hand.

Your domain name transfers normally. Your text and images can be saved down manually. Your design, your layout, your page structure and years of accumulated tweaks do not come with you.

And the Renewal Pricing

The original complaint has not gone away. Wix uses introductory pricing: a deep discount up front, then the regular rate. Users report the pattern consistently:

• Renewal costs doubling or more, with users reporting increases of over 100%
• Plans withdrawn, pushing people onto higher tiers with features they never asked for
• Increases noticed only on the bank statement, with no warning beforehand
• The retention discount, offered when you threaten to cancel. It is temporary, and the same cycle repeats next year

Worth noting: a company under pressure to improve its margins is not usually a company about to lower your renewal.

What We Do Instead

We build on WordPress, with AI taking the load on the groundwork and the deployment. What that means for you:

1. You own everything. The files, the database and the domain are in your name from day one
2. You can leave. A standard WordPress site moves between hosts as routine work. We would rather earn your business every month than rely on you being stuck
3. Flat pricing. No introductory rate, no renewal jump. The same in year three as in month one
4. A US-based person answers. Someone who has worked on your site and can open your server while you are on the phone
5. Built on WordPress, which is going nowhere. It runs 41.1% of all websites on the internet, it is open source, and it is not owned by any single company that could restructure it out from under you