Wix Online Programs Review 2024: Is It Any Good?

Wix is a popular website builder that allows you to add a variety of content to your site, including online courses. It has an app called Online Programs for creating and managing online courses.

But is it any good? What features does it offer, and how does it compare to the top online course platforms?

We created this Wix Online Programs review to provide an in-depth analysis of the app’s features, pros, cons, and everything in between. By the end of this review, you’ll have a clear answer to whether Wix’s courses app is the right choice for you or not.

What Is Wix Online Programs?

Wix Online Programs is the platform’s app for course creation. It allows you to add public and private online courses to your Wix website and monetize them using different pricing models.

The courses app has an intuitive curriculum builder, supports multiple lesson types, and offers decent learning and engagement tools.

It also seamlessly integrates with other Wix apps, allowing you to leverage more features and functionalities, such as online communities and coaching.

And obviously, you get access to Wix’s website builder and other marketing tools, so you can create a professional website and promote your courses to potential students.

With this in mind, let’s dive deeper into what features Wix Online Programs offers.

A Closer Look at Wix Online Programs

In this section, we’ll explore everything Wix offers for course creation, including its course builder and learning and engagement tools.

Course Builder

Wix’s course builder has a gentle learning curve and lets you easily create a course outline. It uses sections to organize your lessons (known as steps in Wix), which is where the course material resides.

One tiny detail that caught our attention is the section and lesson title character limit. If your section title is over 50 characters, it gets cut off. While this isn’t a deal breaker, it doesn’t look nice.

The course builder supports a variety of content types. You can add videos, audio, quizzes, and lesson downloads. If you use other Wix apps, such as Bookings or Events, you can also embed your services and events inside the lesson area.

Additionally, the lesson editor is quite flexible in adding multiple content types to the same lesson. You can add multiple videos, text blocks, and embeds to a single lesson.

One important feature missing from Wix’s course builder is the ability to upload your lesson files in bulk and turn them into lessons automatically. This is a time-saving feature offered by many other course platforms.

Otherwise, the course builder is intuitive, allowing you to build your curriculum and add content easily.

Learning and Engagement

Wix Online Programs offers a few features to enhance course engagement and improve the learning experience. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Wix has a native quizzing tool that supports several question types, including multiple-choice, multiple-response, open-ended, and file upload questions. You can also set a passing score for your quiz.

And since the tool supports open-ended questions and file uploads, you can also create assignments for your students.

Having said that, it doesn’t include advanced quizzing features like timed exams and randomized questions.

Regarding certificates, Wix lets you create and send certificates to your students. You can choose from a couple of templates and customize them completely.

You can also create badges and award them to students for completing specific lessons or sections.

Additionally, Wix gives you a couple of options for controlling how students progress through your course:

• You can drip feed your course sections instead of making everything available immediately.
• You can enable the fixed lesson order option to prevent students from skipping lessons.

Another important feature Wix supports for student engagement is online communities. It has an app called Groups that lets you create a community for your students.

You can create rich discussion posts, create topics to organize your discussions and chat with other members.

Finally, Wix has an app for creating live events. You can schedule and host live classes that can be integrated into your course curriculum or inside your community groups.

Content Delivery

Wix’s course player has a conventional layout— a navigation bar on the left and lesson content on the right side of the screen. It also displays the student’s progress and a link to access the community group.

The students can easily navigate between the lessons from the sidebar or using the Complete Step button at the bottom of each lesson.

However, there are a couple of issues that affect the user experience:

• The course player doesn’t cover the whole screen by default. Instead, you’ll need to click the expand icon to make it full-screen.
• The Complete Step button is sticky at the bottom of the lesson and blocks part of the lesson content.

Regarding the mobile experience, the course player has a responsive design that works well on smaller screens.

Wix also has a free mobile app called Spaces for students to access your courses and communities on the go. You can also get branded apps for your courses by paying an additional fee.

What We Like About Creating Courses on Wix

Now that you know what Wix offers for online courses, let’s talk about what makes it stand out from other course creation platforms.

Powerful Learning and Engagement Tools

Wix Online Programs supports a range of learning and engagement tools. It supports quizzes, assignments, certificates, content dripping, and sequential learning.

Additionally, you can extend the functionality by using other Wix apps, such as:

• Groups for building a learning community
• Events for adding live sessions to your course
• Loyalty Program for rewarding your students

Wix also has an automation feature that you can use to perform actions based on student activities in your courses and communities. For instance, you can send a congratulatory email to students upon lesson completion or award loyalty points for finishing an assignment.

Membership Site Features

You can also use Wix for membership sites. You can create custom pages with members-only content and combine it with your courses and community. You can also create access levels and charge recurring subscriptions for your membership site.

Powerful Website Builder

Wix is, first and foremost, a website builder. As such, it has plenty of features to create and customize your website.

It has a huge library of premade site templates for every industry, including online courses. You can also customize your site with the drag-and-drop page builder, making adding and moving elements on the page easy.

Access to Wix’s Suite of Tools

We have already discussed Wix apps in the context of course creation, but there are many more apps to explore.

You can find apps for marketing, analytics, customer support, and more. This means you can use Wix to run a major part of your business. Here are some popular apps:

• Wix Bookings for scheduling and appointment management
• Wix Chat for adding a live chat widget on your website
• Wix Blog for creating a blog section on your site
• Wix Stores for creating an eCommerce store
• Wix Forms for lead generation

Additionally, there are third-party apps that you can integrate with your Wix site, so the possibilities are endless.

Affordable Entry-Level Pricing

Wix is competitively priced. While the pricing starts at just $24/month, you’ll need the Core plan ($36/month) or the Business plan ($43/month) to accept payments for your online courses.

Both plans support all the course creation tools, and there is no limit on the number of courses or students on any plan. However, you can host up to 5 hours of video on the Core plan and 10 hours on the Business plan.

What We Don’t Like About Creating Courses on Wix

Now, let’s talk about the areas where Wix may not be as strong and might require some improvements.

The Whole Process Is Overly Complicated

The learning curve for using Wix to create courses is steep. The way Wix works, you’ll need an app for everything, which can be overwhelming and time-consuming to set up.

For example, you need Online Programs to create courses, Groups to build communities, Members Area for memberships, and Pricing Plans to monetize your courses. Even something core to website builders, such as blogging, is a standalone app on Wix.

Sometimes, there are even multiple apps for doing the same thing. For example, there are two different apps for creating communities—Wix Groups and Wix Forums.

Issues With End-User Experience

The biggest issue with Wix courses is the end-user experience.

We found some bugs in our testing where we couldn’t access the courses after enrolling in them. We also couldn’t log in to the Spaces mobile app in several instances.

Other Wix users have also complained about their students being unable to access courses or groups they’ve joined. In fact, the Online Programs app has an average rating of 3.7 out of 5 on the app store, and most negative reviews mention issues with course access.

This is the most basic job of an online course platform, and Wix needs to fix these issues to become a reliable option for online courses.

Basic Course Reporting Tools

Wix Online Programs provides basic information about your courses, such as the number of students and average completion rates. You can also see the progress of individual students.

However, it lacks a more detailed reporting tool to give insights into student engagement, quiz results, lesson completion rates, or video engagement.

Checkout Process Isn’t Optimized

Wix’s checkout process isn’t optimized for conversions. When students try to buy a course, they must create an account before going to the checkout page. In fact, it requires four clicks just for account creation, which isn’t how it should be.

Steep Pricing on Higher Plans

While the platform has reasonable pricing for its entry-level plans, it can get expensive quickly.

If you have more than ten hours of video, you’ll need the Business Elite plan, which costs $172/month. This is quite steep compared to other online course platforms that provide unlimited hosting on all paid plans.

Moreover, if you want branded mobile apps, you need to pay $200/month, which is too high for what the app offers.

Wix Online Programs vs the Competition

Before we conclude this Wix Online Programs review, let’s look at how it stacks up against the top online course platforms.

Thinkific is the highest-rated online course platform on our list, and for a good reason. The platform is easy to set up, and the end-user experience is seamless.

It offers a more robust course builder, powerful course creation tools, and better reporting and administration tools. Additionally, the platform is fully-extendible with a dedicated app store.

Its pricing is highly competitive, as its paid plans provide unlimited courses, video hosting, and student capacity starting at just $49 per month.

Next is Kajabi, an all-in-one platform for creating and selling online courses and membership sites. Being a specialized platform, it is easier to set up than Wix and provides a better end-user experience.

You can use Kajabi for your products, website, blog, podcasts, checkouts, email marketing, and sales funnels, making it a true one-stop shop for online businesses. But Kajabi is priced significantly higher than Wix, starting at $149/month.

If you want to compare Wix with these platforms side-by-side, try out the online course platform comparison tool.

Wix Online Programs Review: Final Thoughts

Simply based on features, Wix Online Programs is a good option for creating and selling online courses.

It has a flexible course builder that supports features like quizzes, assignments, certificates, and content drip. You can also use Wix apps to create a community, host live classes, and start a rewards program.

However, where Wix falls short is the user experience. For creators, it is complicated and time-consuming to set up everything. And for students, there are frequent issues with accessing courses and content.

Until Wix improves its user experience, we suggest using it only for existing Wix users on a tight budget. If you want to test it out yourself, Wix has a generous free plan.

We hope you found this Wix Online Programs review helpful. Let us know if you have any questions about the app in the comments.

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