Zipper vs. Wix: Which is Best for Small, Local Businesses?

Zipper is a website platform built for small local, service-based businesses, not designers and expensive agencies


Wix is a great website builder, but it’s built for designers and agencies, not service-based business owners who have a million other things to worry about. While powerful, Wix is complicated to set up and keep up-to-date, and having an outdated website is not a good look for any small business. Your web presence is the face of your brand after-all.

Zipper is purpose-built to enable local business owners to get online quickly, improve their online presence, and market their business in less time and at a fraction of the cost of a marketing agency. We help you launch a new, professional and modern website fast, allowing you to rest assured that you’re making a beautiful first impression. We ensure your website not only has the right content but is also optimized for great performance and leads.

Why small, local businesses choose Zipper over Wix

Here are some of the top reasons wellness business owners prefer Zipper.

Done for you
Unlike do it yourself solutions, Zipper takes care of everything from design to development to launch.
Modern Designs
Zipper stays up to date on modern design and trends to ensure that your website is always professional and reflecting your brand well.
Integrated Tools
Zipper not only helps wellness businesses launch new, professional websites, fast, but we also have tools to help with SEO, social media and more.
Coaching and Support
Unlike Wix which forces wellness business owners to essentially become digital marketers, Zipper provides top-notch support and coaching to make sure your marketing will be effective.

Zipper vs Wix: Which is Right for Me?


Both Zipper and Wix are excellent options for building and maintaining a web presence. With both services, you can create an attractive website, showcase your team, take online bookings, and promote your local business's services. The key difference between Zipper and Wix lies in the time, effort, and expertise required to establish a great online presence.

Wix provides all the tools you need to design and optimize your website, but it has a steep learning curve and can be easily misconfigured. Without proper search engine optimization (SEO), your site may not perform well in search results. Additionally, ensuring your website looks great on all devices—phones, tablets, and computers—requires experience and thorough testing.

In contrast, Zipper not only offers the tools to create an impressive website but also provides world-class support. Zipper handles everything for you, though it includes an easy-to-use website editor if you wish to make changes yourself. Our simple process involves asking for basic information about your business, such as your services, operating hours, team members, and location, as well as gathering any photos or videos you may have. Most customers complete this onboarding process in a 10-minute survey.

From there, Zipper takes the collected information and builds a professional, technically sound website that aligns with your brand. This process typically takes less than a week.

4-12 Weeks

Time to launch a new Wix website

24-48 Hours

Time to launch a new website on Zipper

Since we built Zipper specifically for wellness businesses, we have deep industry expertise that allows us to deliver high-quality websites that help you book appointments and attract new high-quality clients.

Do-it-Yourself versus Do-it-For-Me

One of the main differences between Zipper and Wix is who is responsible for creating content and setting up your website. Wix is a DIY website builder. While it offers the same technical capabilities as Zipper, it requires you to handle the actual implementation. For many businesses we've worked with, this can be daunting. Even if you make your website look great, there can still be issues with performance and Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Zipper, on the other hand, is a DFY (Done-for-you) website platform. While you can still use our dashboard to make common content changes, the initial website setup and design are handled by Zipper. Our dashboard allows you to update your business's hours of operation, contact information, photos, staff profiles, and service listings.

Customizability

Both Zipper and Wix offer customization options for your website content.

Wix is a comprehensive website builder that allows you to customize every aspect of your site's layout and design elements. This high level of control is powerful but can also be prone to errors. Since Wix is designed primarily for agencies and experienced designers, it is easy to make mistakes that affect usability, performance, mobile-friendliness, and SEO. Fixing these issues can be costly, with skilled Wix designers charging $75 or more per hour. In fact, many of Zipper’s customers started with Wix and switched when they encountered challenges in building or managing their websites and web presence.

Zipper provides less customization than Wix, focusing more narrowly on the needs of wellness businesses. While extensive customization might seem like a plus, it often leads to more problems than benefits. Many wellness business websites underperform because they are poorly designed, lack optimization, and miss vital information about the business.

Zipper offers a dashboard that allows you to customize your website's content, photos, and branding. For 90% of our customers, this level of customization is sufficient for a great website. For the remaining 10%, we provide expert website managers at no additional cost to add custom content and sections to your website.

Online Bookings

Technically speaking, Wix doesn't provide support for online appointment bookings out of the box, while Zipper does.

Do you offer an Online Booking feature?

Yes, Zipper does support booking. However our booking tools are light-weight and not intended for businesses with advanced booking needs, such as advanced reporting and analytics.

Essentially, Zipper can do everything that Wix can do from a booking standpoint, but if you have advanced needs, there are great platforms that specialize in booking to check out. We can handle your online presence.

We designed Zipper to work great for small, service-based and local businesses (if you have more than 6 locations, consider hiring an agency to build out your website).

Do you use templates?

All website builders use templates, at least as a starting point. The difference with Zipper, is we've built our website builder with a "block-based" model. This means that 5-7 blocks, or sections, make up a template page. With the dozens of different blocks we have, this means there are thousands of different template variations, so no two websites look the same.

With Wix, you will also use templates, but you will not have hundreds of different block variations to further customize your pages to make them truly your own.

100% customized templates built by an agency can cost anywhere fm $5,000 to $25,000 depending on your needs. If you have a massive website budget (ie you're a large franchise), then getting custom templates developed by an agency might be the best bet.

Zipper is the in-between of a standard Wix website template and a 100% customized website.

Who should use Wix vs Zipper?

Wix is a perfect fit for wellness businesses that meet any of the following criteria:

  • Local service-based businesses with more than 6 locations or 100 coaches or practitioners.
  • Local service-based businesses that employ a full-time designer/developer or have a significant budget for a website.
  • Local service-based businesses willing to spend $5-50K to hire out the development of their website.
  • Local service-based business owners with the time to vet potential designers and ensure they are experienced working with wellness businesses.
  • Local service-based business owners who are experienced building websites and have ample time to spend on building, testing, optimizing, and maintaining a website.

Zipper, however, is a better fit for a local, service-based businesses that:

  • Have a small number of locations (fewer than 6).
  • Have a limited budget to spend to take a website live.
  • Don’t have an owner or operator with deep expertise in building websites.
  • Don’t have an owner or operator with ample time to build out the website.
  • Want to have a new website that ranks higher on Google live in 24-48 hours.

Cost Comparison of Zipper vs Wix


At first glance, Zipper may appear to be more expensive. But, when you consider all of the costs of building, optimizing, and maintaining a website, Zipper is a smart choice.

Zipper
Wix Business
Setup Cost
$0
$0
Time Spent Building ($)
$50 (1 Hour @ $50/hr for your time)
$4000 (80 Hours @ $50/hr)
Consulting Cost
$0
$1500 (20 hours @ $75/hr)
Monthly Cost
$149/mo
$32/mo
Total Cost of Ownership
$5,414 (3 yr cost)
$6,652 (3 yr cost)

It's recommended to redesign your website every 3 years which is included with Zipper, as we stay up to date on current designs and trends

Overall, small business owners who choose Zipper over Wix save time, avoid frustration, and end up with a website that looks and performs better. If you’re looking to quickly establish a professional online presence for your small business, Zipper is the clear choice. Get in touch and we'll build you out a free draft.