Wix Website Tutorial: How to Build Your Site in 2026

Head to Wix and create a free account using your email, Google, or Facebook. Once signed in, you land on the Wix dashboard—the backend administration area only you and any invited team members can see. Visitors never see this screen.

From the dashboard you can:

• Launch the site editor
• Manage domain settings and company information
• Assign roles and permissions to collaborators
• Access the App Market, analytics, and inbox
• Restore previous versions of your site from history

If you get stuck at any point, the built-in Wix support center is accessible directly from the dashboard.

Wix gives you two routes: use the AI to generate a layout, or browse and select a template manually. The transcript covers the manual template route in detail, and it is worth understanding before relying on automation.

Wix offers over a thousand templates, all available at no cost—every single one, including those in premium-looking categories. This is a meaningful difference from platforms like Shopify, where some themes carry an additional purchase price.

Templates are organised by category: business, health and wellness, beauty, restaurants, tourism, online stores, blogs, and portfolios. You can preview any template by clicking it and scrolling through the layout before committing. Templates also come pre-optimised for mobile, so switching to the mobile preview from inside the template library already shows a well-structured result.

For the tutorial walkthrough, a portfolio template was selected—clean, well-organised, and straightforward to customise.

Tip: Pick a template that already feels close to your vision. You will replace text, images, and colours, but the underlying structure should feel right from the start.

Before editing individual sections, set your Global Design (Site Design in the left panel). This is the most important step most beginners skip.

Global Design controls your colour palette and typography across the entire site. If you change a heading font or brand colour here, every heading and button updates automatically. Without it, you end up manually adjusting colours each time you add a new element.

• Click the colour swatch you want to change (for example, the template's default green)
• Use the colour picker or paste your hex colour code directly (hex codes are the standard in web design, formatted as a hashtag followed by six characters)
• Fonts work the same way—set your heading and body font once

If you do not have brand colours yet, browse the preset palette options Wix suggests, or leave the template defaults in place and revisit later.

With global settings in place, you can edit sections confidently. Here is the general workflow in the Wix editor:

1. Click any text element → select Edit Text → type your content directly
2. Replace images → click the image → Change Background or Change Image → Upload Media (supports drag-and-drop from your computer, or connections to Google Drive, Facebook, and Instagram)
3. Edit buttons → click the button → change the label text → click the link icon to assign a destination (internal page, external URL, anchor, or downloadable file)
4. Reorder sections → hover over a section → use the up/down arrow to move it above or below another section
5. Delete unwanted sections → hover → click Delete
6. Add new sections → click Add Section at the bottom of any existing section → choose a pre-designed layout, ask the AI to generate one, or build from individual elements

For body copy, you can use Wix's built-in AI writing tool or draft text in a separate tool and paste it in. The editor works similarly to a word processor: you can adjust font size, weight, colour, and heading level (H1, H2, etc.) from the text toolbar.

Keep image file sizes reasonable before uploading. Wix applies its own optimisation, but starting with a file already in the kilobyte range rather than several megabytes gives the optimiser less work to do.

To embed a video, click Manage Video on the relevant section. From there you can either upload a file directly to the Wix media library or link a YouTube (or other supported service) URL. Once added to your library, go to the video element's settings, select the video, and it appears in the section.

If the video stretches full-width and looks oversized, click Layout inside the video settings and switch to the Compact view.

Mobile optimisation is a separate editing mode in Wix. Switch to the mobile view using the icon in the top toolbar. Check that:

• Text is not cut off at the edges
• Images scale correctly
• Buttons are tappable at a reasonable size
• Sections stack in a logical reading order

The templates start in a mobile-ready state, but after you move or resize elements in desktop view, always verify the mobile layout before publishing.

A real website needs more than a homepage. Add pages from the Pages panel in the left sidebar. Common pages to create include:

• About Us / About Me – introduce yourself or your team
• Services or Offers – describe what you do with dedicated landing pages
• Contact – a form, address, and map
• Legal pages – Imprint and Privacy Policy (required in many jurisdictions); Wix can help generate these
• Blog – for content marketing and SEO

You can also create a submenu by nesting pages under a parent menu item, keeping navigation clean as your site grows.

Once you have multiple pages, update your buttons and text links to point to the correct internal destinations.

Each page in Wix has its own SEO settings, accessible from the Pages panel. For every page:

• Write a descriptive page title that includes your primary keyword
• Write a meta description (roughly 140–160 characters) summarising the page
• Use a single H1 heading that reflects the page topic
• Add descriptive alt text to all images

For keyword research, tools like Google Keyword Planner can help you find terms your audience actually searches for. Focus on specific, lower-competition phrases rather than broad terms—if you run a local business, a phrase like "web design in New York" will be more achievable than "web design" alone.

For a deeper look at how Wix handles search visibility, see the Wix Review 2026: Is It Still the Best Website Builder? or compare it against an AI-first alternative in the Base44 vs Wix comparison.

Before publishing, click the domain area in the top toolbar to connect your own custom domain. This requires upgrading to a paid plan. Once the domain is connected and your content is ready, click Publish in the top-right corner of the editor.

Your free Wix subdomain (yourname.wixsite.com) remains available during the free trial, which is useful for sharing a preview before you commit to a paid plan.

The Wix App Market lets you add functionality without touching code. The most commonly used additions are:

The tutorial covers each of these in dedicated chapters. For the online store specifically, setup includes configuring shipping options, VAT/tax rules, and payment methods (credit card and PayPal are both supported).

Start with only the apps you need now. Each app you install adds a section to your dashboard and potentially slows the admin experience if you are not actively using it.

Beyond the editor, a few dashboard settings are worth handling before you go live:

• Company information – name, address, and contact details used across the site
• Favicon – the small icon shown in browser tabs; create one and upload it here
• Language, timezone, and currency – important if you serve international customers
• Marketing integrations – connect Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics from the dashboard
• Professional email – set up a branded email address via Google Workspace, also managed from the dashboard
• Email marketing and automations – Wix includes tools to build an email list, send newsletters, and automate follow-up emails

Wix is free to start. A free account lets you build and preview your full site on a Wix subdomain. Upgrading to a paid plan unlocks:

• A custom domain connection
• Removal of Wix branding
• Online payment acceptance
• Additional storage and bandwidth

The tutorial does not state specific plan prices, so check the current pricing on Wix's official site before choosing a tier.

For a side-by-side look at how Wix compares to beginner-focused alternatives, see the Webador Review.

Wix is a strong choice for anyone building a portfolio, business site, blog, or online store without development experience. All templates are free, the editor is intuitive, and features like bookings, e-commerce, email marketing, and multilingual support are available through the App Market without needing a developer. The free plan is genuinely useful for building and testing before you commit financially.

If you are ready to get started, try Wix for free and work through the steps above at your own pace.