Website builders
Wix Holiday Let Website Pros and Cons for Owners
Wix is a fair place to start a holiday let or glamping site. Here is where it works and where owners outgrow it.
You built your holiday let or glamping site on Wix, and it looked fine. Now the calendar is awkward, bookings are patchy and you wonder if the site is the problem.
Wix is a decent start for a Wix holiday let website, and plenty of small owners run on it happily. It tends to fall short when you need booking that fits your rates. It also struggles with calendars that match listing sites, and with control over speed and SEO. If you’re getting steady direct bookings, stay put. If you’re not, the points below will show you why.
Why a Wix holiday let website suits some owners
Wix is good for holiday lets that want a simple, self-managed site. You can have something live in an evening, with no coding, and change it yourself whenever you like.
The trouble starts when the website has to do more than look nice. A holiday let site is a booking tool. It needs to show dates, work out prices for different stays and keep up with the calendars on every other place you list.
What Wix does well
Wix is easy to learn, flexible to edit and cheap to begin with. For a first site, that counts for a lot.
- Drag and drop editing. You can move things around without a developer.
- Templates for holiday rentals. Wix offers holiday let templates, so you start with a layout that suits the job.
- Built-in tools. Wix has its own booking products, including Wix Hotels, plus a domain, hosting and basic SEO settings in one place.
- Low commitment. You can try it and change your mind.
If you’re a one-hut owner with a handful of photos and you take enquiries by email, this is often enough. We’d say so to anyone who asked.
Where Wix booking gets limiting
Wix can take bookings, but it’s built as a general tool, so UK holiday let quirks take effort to set up. Think of a shepherd’s hut with a two-night weekend minimum, a cheaper midweek rate and a hot tub supplement.
Owners tend to hit these snags.
| Need | What often happens on a builder |
|---|---|
| Midweek and weekend rates with minimum stays | Hard to model, so owners fall back on a price list and an enquiry form |
| Calendar matching Airbnb, Booking.com, Canopy & Stars and CoolStays | Needs an extra tool or manual updating |
| Online payments and deposits | Possible, but set-up varies by tool and country |
| One calendar for several units | Can get fiddly as you add pods or huts |
You can embed outside booking tools. Bookalet, for example, publishes instructions for adding its availability and booking widget to a Wix site. That’s a sensible route, though you’re now running a booking tool and a website side by side, and each has its own settings and costs.
The double booking problem
The biggest worry is a guest booking dates you’ve already sold on another site. If your Wix calendar doesn’t sync with your listings, you’re updating several calendars by hand. That’s fine at two bookings a month and stressful at twenty.
SEO and speed on Wix
A Wix site can rank, but you have less control over how fast it loads and how it’s structured. Wix has SEO settings for page titles, descriptions and URLs, which covers the basics.
What it can’t do for you is the thinking. Each page needs to match something guests actually search, such as “glamping near Hay-on-Wye with a hot tub”. A site with one long homepage and a gallery won’t compete with listing sites that have thousands of pages.
Speed matters because guests often browse on their phones. Big photos, animations and add-on apps slow a page down. On a builder you can trim these, but you can’t always remove what the platform adds.
Listing sites matter too, but they don’t stop guests looking for you directly. People often find a place on Canopy & Stars or CoolStays, then search for the owner’s own site hoping for a better deal. If your site is slow or hard to book on, you lose that guest after you’ve already won them. That’s the main reason a good site matters alongside a listing.
Signs it’s time to move on
You should move when the site costs you bookings or time. Run through this list honestly.
Two or three ticks usually means the builder is holding you back. One tick may only need a tidy-up.
Different kinds of stay need different things
A single pod and a larger site have different needs. If you run a treehouse, yurt or other unusual stay, the story and photos matter as much as the booking tool, and our page on unique and quirky stay websites covers that. Bigger sites with static caravans or pitches have different needs again, which we cover on holiday park and caravan park websites.
What moving off Wix involves
Moving means building a new site, pointing your domain at it and keeping your best content. It’s less scary than it sounds, and you can often keep your domain name, text and photos.
Before you start, save these.
- Your original photos at full size.
- The text from your pages, especially pages that already get visitors.
- Your domain login details.
A good new site also sets up redirects, so old links still land on the right page. You can read more about how we work if you’d like to see the steps.
Millie the Hut is a good example of this approach. It’s a shepherd’s hut site with its calendar, enquiry form and seasonal rates on one booking page, and it brought 42 direct bookings in its first year, saving the owners over £3,000 in commission.
When a Wix holiday let website is enough
Wix is enough if your site is small, your pricing is simple and bookings are steady. It isn’t enough once you’re juggling calendars, rates and listing sites, or if the site doesn’t bring in guests.
Don’t switch for the sake of it. Switch when the numbers or your evenings say so.
FAQs
Is Wix good for a glamping site?
Wix is good for a simple glamping site with a few pages, photos and an enquiry form. It gets harder once you want a booking calendar that matches your rates, syncs with listing sites and loads quickly on phones. Many owners start there and move later.
Can a Wix website take holiday let bookings?
Yes. Wix has its own booking tools, including Wix Hotels, and you can embed third-party booking widgets such as Bookalet. How well it suits you depends on your rates, minimum stays and whether you need your calendar to sync with Airbnb or Booking.com.
Will a Wix site get me found on Google?
A Wix site can appear on Google, and Wix has SEO tools built in. But rankings depend on your content, page speed and how well each page targets what guests search for. The builder alone won’t put you on page one.
Can I move from Wix and keep my domain name?
Usually yes. If you registered the domain yourself, or can transfer it away from Wix, you can point it at a new site. Your pages and photos need rebuilding or copying across, so keep your text and original images safe before you start.
Find out if your Wix site is holding you back
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