What the free Wix plan can and can't do

The free Wix plan lets you build and publish a real website at no cost, with no credit card. In exchange, it shows a Wix banner ad on every page, lives at a wixsite.com address instead of your own domain, is limited to 500MB of storage and 1GB of bandwidth, and cannot take online payments.

That makes the free plan a good workshop and a poor storefront. You can design the whole site, write the content, set up pages and forms and show it to people. What you can't do is present it under your own name, sell through it, or connect the tracking and search tools a business normally relies on.

Below is exactly where the free plan stops, as of October 2026, and how to tell when it's enough.

What you get for free

Wix's pricing page describes the free plan as "No credit card required", with hosting, the drag and drop editor and templates. In practice that means:

• The editor and templates. You design with the same editor paid users have.
• Hosting and publishing. The site is live on the internet at a Wix address.
• Most Wix products. Wix says free sites reach "most, but not all, Wix products", so you can try many features before paying. Access to Velo, Wix's coding platform, is limited.
• Forms. You can create 4 forms for free.
• Email marketing. Wix Email Marketing includes a free allowance of 200 emails a month.
• One collaborator seat. Every Wix site has one free seat for inviting another person.
• Customer care. Wix lists support as available on free sites, against 24/7 customer care on upgraded ones.
• Search engine access. Wix states that all site content can be crawled and indexed "whether your site is upgraded or not".

Wix's upgrade article says you can create up to 999 free websites on one account, so there's room to experiment with different designs.

Free versus the entry paid plans

The free column comes from Wix's article on upgrading your site. For the full paid lineup, including Business and Business Elite, see Wix plans compared.

Your address and the Wix ads

The wixsite.com address

A free site's URL has the format siteprefix.wixsite.com/siteaddress. The prefix comes from your account name by default and can be edited in Account Settings. The site address is the site's name and can be edited from the dashboard. Neither edit removes "wixsite.com" from the URL.

A few rules apply to the prefix. It must be 6 to 20 characters, letters and numbers only, and unique. Once any Wix user has used a prefix, nobody can reuse it, even after the account closes. And because the prefix belongs to the account, a free site's URL changes if you transfer the site to someone else's account.

You need to upgrade to a paid plan to connect a custom domain. You can buy a domain from Wix without a plan, but it won't attach to the site until the site is upgraded. Our guide to domains on Wix explains buying and connecting.

The ads

Wix states: "Your free site includes a Wix banner ad at the top and has a Wix favicon in the browser tab." A favicon is the small icon next to the page title in a browser tab. Both go away only with a paid plan. See Wix's page on removing the Wix banner ad and favicon.

One thing you can change for free is the footer text "Proudly Created With Wix". That is ordinary text and can be edited on a free site.

For a personal project none of this matters much. For a business, a third-party ad above your logo and a URL that isn't yours tell customers the site is unfinished, which is the main reason businesses upgrade.

Storage and bandwidth

Free sites get up to 500MB of storage and up to 1GB of bandwidth. One of Wix's help pages gives a lower bandwidth figure; 1GB is the number in its main storage and bandwidth article.

Storage is the total size of the files you upload: every image, video, audio file and document counts. Five hundred megabytes holds a lot of web-sized photos and very little video.

Bandwidth is, in Wix's words, "how much data your visitors can view at a certain time". The more visitors you have and the heavier your pages, the more you use. Paid plans have unlimited bandwidth. Wix says: "We'll let you know if your free site comes close to exceeding its data transfer limits." A site with a handful of visitors is unlikely to get near it; a site that suddenly gets attention might.

To see what you've used, go to Settings → Manage Storage in the site dashboard. If you build in Wix Studio, note that free Wix Studio sites include 10GB of storage until upgraded. More detail is in Wix storage and bandwidth limits.

No payments, no selling

Online payments are listed as "Not included" on the free plan. You may be able to set up selling features while you build, but customers can't pay you through a free site.

This limit continues one step up. The Light plan doesn't accept payments either. To sell products, take paid bookings or charge for subscriptions, you need Core or higher, which as of October 2026 starts at $29 per month billed yearly.

That shapes how to use the free plan if you intend to sell: build the catalog, write the product descriptions, lay out the pages, then upgrade when you're ready to open.

SEO and tracking on a free site

A free Wix site is not invisible. Wix says its content can be crawled and indexed by search engines such as Google and Bing whether or not the site is upgraded. But most of the tools that support search visibility depend on an upgraded site, a connected domain, or both.

Two consequences are worth spelling out.

First, you can't measure a free site properly. Wix's FAQ is direct: "It is not possible to use Google Analytics with a free Wix site." Once you upgrade and connect a domain, follow our guide to adding Google Analytics 4 to Wix.

Second, the address isn't yours. Any links, listings or printed materials that point to the wixsite.com URL are pointing at Wix's domain. When you later connect your own domain, Wix redirects the free URL to it, so visitors aren't stranded. Even so, a business that wants to be found in search is better off starting on its own domain than building a presence on an address it plans to leave. We look at the wider question in is Wix good for SEO in 2026.

What Wix doesn't spell out

Some limits people ask about aren't stated on the Wix pages we checked in October 2026: a maximum number of pages on a free site, per-form field limits on the free plan, and whether Wix removes free sites that sit unused for a long time. We won't guess. If one of these matters to your plan, ask Wix Customer Care before you build around an assumption, and keep your own copies of text and images in any case.

It's also worth knowing what happens in the other direction. If a paid plan lapses, the site isn't deleted. It goes back to being a free site: the custom domain disconnects, the Wix ads return, payments stop and the storage limit drops to 500MB. If the site holds more than that, it keeps running, but you can't upload new files until you remove some or upgrade again.

When the free plan is fine

• Building before launch. Design, write and get feedback, then upgrade the day you go live. The paid term starts when you buy, so there's no reason to pay during construction.
• Testing whether Wix suits you. Paid plans have no free trial, so the free plan is the trial.
• Personal and hobby sites. A portfolio for a class, a family event page, a club noticeboard.
• Short-lived pages. A one-off event or a temporary information page shared by direct link.
• Mockups. Showing a client or a partner a concept.

Whether Wix is the right platform at all is a separate question, covered in when Wix is the right choice.

When to upgrade, and what changes

Upgrade when any of these is true:

1. The site represents a business to customers.
2. You want your own domain on the site and in your email signature.
3. You need to take payments or bookings, in which case choose Core or higher, not Light.
4. You want to measure traffic or run ads.
5. You're approaching 500MB of storage.
6. More than one other person needs access.

When you upgrade, the ads come off, you can connect a domain, bandwidth becomes unlimited and the tools in the table above become available. The first purchase of a plan on a free site carries a 14-day money-back guarantee. Domains are not covered by that guarantee. Yearly plans can include a voucher for a free first year of a new domain; monthly plans don't.

The plan fee is only part of running a site. For a full picture including domain renewal, email and apps, see how much a Wix website costs.

Conclusion

The free Wix plan is generous for building and limited for business. It gives you the editor, hosting and a live site, and it withholds the things that make a site yours and make it earn: your domain, an ad-free page, payments, analytics and the marketing integrations. Use it to build and test, and upgrade when the site starts meeting customers. If you'd like a site built and launched on the right plan from day one, our Wix website services team can help. More guides are in our Wix hub.

Frequently asked questions