Theo vs Wix for a small business website (October 2026)

The scorecard

Eight rounds, one question each, scored on who does the work after launch, what the owner keeps, and what it costs each month; Wix facts from Wix's US plans page and help center, Theo facts from Theo's pricing and product pages, all read on October 2, 2026.

Tally: Theo 5, Wix 2, split 1.

Round 1: Who builds the site

Wix starts from a prompt. Its AI website builder turns a description of the business into a first draft with copy and images in place, and an assistant named Aria stays in the editor while you finish it yourself. Connecting your own domain or taking payments needs a paid plan.

Theo starts from a brief or from the address of the site you already have, and can match that look. A first preview, a starting draft to refine, is usually ready in minutes; from there you say what to change, in plain English, and Theo changes it. There is no editor to learn, and the first build is free, so you see the site before choosing a plan.

Round result: Theo.

Round 2: Who makes changes after launch

A small business site changes every month: a price, a new service, a staff photo. On Wix each change is yours to make in the editor. When you would rather not, Wix's Marketplace lists independent professionals who take on site updates at prices they set, from roughly $25 to several hundred dollars; you agree the price with the person you hire.

On Theo a change is a sentence typed in chat, on every plan, by you or anyone you invite from the site's settings. Changes draw on the chat credits that come with each plan: 1,500 a month on Basic, 4,500 on Starter and 7,000 on Pro. A small edit uses a little, a new page more, a redesign the most; top-up credits roll over and never expire.

Round result: Theo.

Round 3: Who does the SEO and growth work

This is the decisive round. Wix gives every site, free or paid, a set of SEO tools: a setup checklist built from your business name, location type and three keywords, and an SEO Assistant that gives a checklist of recommendations for each page. Connecting Google Search Console requires a paid plan and a connected domain. Wix's help center says SEO requires some work; each tool ends at a task for you or for a Marketplace professional.

On Starter and Pro, Theo carries those tasks out: it researches keywords and competitors, writes dedicated pages, blog posts and landing pages, fixes technical SEO issues, improves page speed, submits new pages to Google through Search Console and tracks the results. New pages and fixes arrive weekly as drafts in the Growth tab and go live when you publish them or turn auto-publish on; a weekly report lists what was done. The growth work uses no chat credits.

In Theo's audit of 5,974 small business websites, 48 percent of the 4,027 sites with search data got an estimated zero visitors a month from Google search; for the 272 Wix sites with search data, the estimated share was 47 percent. The sample is owners who ran the free audit, and the figure does not say why any one site sits at zero; the breakdown is in The State of Small Business Websites 2026.

An example of the workflow, not a customer result: an HVAC company trying to rank for heat pump installation in its town. On Wix the checklist says to put the phrase in a title and a heading; writing the page, adding it in the editor and submitting it through Search Console are yours or a hired professional's. On Theo Starter the page is researched against the installers already ranking nearby, drafted, held in the Growth tab for your approval, published and submitted through Search Console. Theo for HVAC companies lists the pages that trade needs.

Search traffic builds over months, not weeks. Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO puts the payoff at four months to a year. In the first 30 days, expect the site live, the first pages published and submitted to Google, and impressions starting to appear in Search Console; clicks follow as the pages move up.

Round result: Theo.

Round 4: Sticker price

Wix prices by the year. As of October 2026 its US plans page lists Free at $0, Light at $17 a month, Core at $29, Business at $39 and Business Elite at $159, each on yearly billing; monthly billing exists, and its prices are not shown on the public plans page. A plan bought at a discount renews at the standard rate, and there is no free trial of a paid plan, only a full refund within 14 days of a first purchase. Theo bills by the month with no term. On the sticker, Light and Core cost less per month than Basic, and Free costs nothing.

Round result: Wix.

Round 5: Site plus the work, cost per month

The question here is what the weekly search and content work adds to the monthly bill. No Wix plan includes that work, from Light at $17 a month to Business Elite at $159; Wix's SEO page sends an owner who wants help to its Partner Program and Marketplace, where each professional prices each task, and no Wix page read for this comparison describes Wix itself maintaining a customer site. So a Wix month is the plan price plus whatever the hired professional charges for that month's tasks, a second number agreed in conversation rather than printed on a plans page.

On Theo that work is on Starter and Pro. Starter is $69.99 a month, free for the first 30 days, and that one monthly price covers the hosting, the chat edits and the weekly pages, posts and fixes, with no second number to agree with anyone. Pricing lists the paid extras: top-up credits, a domain bought through Theo and the optional backlink packages in the Boost checklist.

Round result: Theo.

Round 6: Online store

Wix runs the store itself. Wix Stores takes orders once the site is on Core, Business or Business Elite; Light cannot accept payments, and when a plan lapses checkout stops with it.

Theo does not run a checkout; it connects to one. Wix Stores and Shopify connect directly on every Theo plan: products, prices and stock appear on the Theo site with a cart, the customer pays on the store, and you click Refresh my products after a change there. A Wix store owner can keep the store on its Wix plan with the Theo site in front of it and pay both.

For a Wix store owner who wants the store off Wix as well, the order of options is fixed. The first is Shopify: Theo recommends it and connects to it directly, Shopify and Theo covers the setup, and Shopify Basic is $39 a month, or $29 a month on yearly billing, as of October 2026, so Starter plus Shopify Basic comes to $108.99 a month on monthly billing, again arithmetic. The second is to leave Wix Stores running at shop.yourdomain.com and give the main domain to the Theo site. The third, for an owner who finds the address change too much, is to leave the Wix site and store as they are and add a separate Theo site on a subdomain such as blog.yourdomain.com.

Round result: Wix.

Round 7: Domain and email

On Wix a custom domain needs a paid plan. Yearly plans include a voucher for a new Wix domain's first year; monthly plans do not. After the free year the domain renews at a price that depends on the extension and term and is billed apart from the site plan, so canceling the site does not cancel the domain. Business email is not part of any Wix plan; Wix resells Google Workspace as a separate subscription and shows no per-mailbox price on its US pages.

On Theo you connect the domain you own on any plan or buy one inside Theo; no plan includes a domain or email. The email records are left alone when the domain is pointed, so mail keeps arriving where it does today. A Wix domain can be pointed at Theo from Wix or transferred out once unlocked, with no Wix fee stated; a domain registered or changed in the last 60 days waits out that window.

The split comes from two kinds of owner. Starting a site from nothing, a Wix yearly plan covers a domain's first year and Theo covers none of it; an owner who already has the site and the domain keeps that domain at its registrar and the email untouched on either platform, and Theo asks for no transfer.

Round result: split.

Round 8: Ownership and leaving

A Wix site runs only on Wix. Wix's help center says the site is built with Wix's technology and has to be hosted on Wix's servers, so there is no export. What leaves is data: store products as CSV files of up to 5,000 rows each, digital products excluded, and orders as CSV.

A Theo site is the owner's on every plan: the site and its images can be copied out at any time, there is no long-term commitment, and the pages and posts the Starter and Pro work produced go with them. On Pro the site's code is also open to read-only access through GitHub.

Round result: Theo.

How to move from Wix to Theo

Because the website cannot be exported, leaving Wix means a rebuild, and Theo does the rebuild from your Wix address. Moving your website from Wix has the detail on each step:

1. Run the free audit on the Wix site; it reports the site's estimated search traffic, rankings and search health and lists specific fixes.
2. Give Theo the Wix address and review the free first build; the pages, photos and wording come across, and refinements are typed in chat.
3. Publish to a temporary address, then point your domain at Theo when you are ready; the Wix site keeps serving visitors until the registrar's records update, usually within a few hours. Only an owner whose Wix checkout uses the domain unassigns it inside Wix first.
4. Connect Google Analytics and Search Console. On every plan the old Wix addresses that still bring visitors get redirects to their new pages; on Starter and Pro the new pages are then submitted through Search Console and the weekly search work starts.

The bottom line

Theo wins the tally, five rounds to two with one split, and the decisive round, and is the pick for a small business owner who wants the website to bring in customers. On Starter and Pro, Theo researches the keywords, writes the pages and posts, fixes the technical issues and submits the new pages to Google each week; every Wix plan leaves those tasks to the owner or to a professional hired from its Marketplace. Wix takes the sticker-price and store rounds on its own facts; the domain round is a split. If you have a Wix site, the free audit shows its estimated search traffic before anything moves; if not, build the first version free and see it before choosing a plan. Prices and terms as of October 2, 2026.

Frequently asked questions