The Wix SEO setup checklist: every step, in order.

1. How to run this checklist.

Run the groups in order, because the settings depend on each other. There is no point writing thirty meta descriptions on a site that is still serving from a wixsite.com subdomain, and no point tuning layout shift on a page whose search-results toggle is switched off. Each group is cheap once the one above it is done, and expensive to redo if you skip ahead.

Every check names where in Wix you make the change. That is the part most Wix SEO advice leaves out: the platform has all the controls you need, and they are spread across the editor, the page settings panel, and three different sections of the dashboard, which is why people conclude the controls do not exist. Work from the panel back to the check and a fourteen-page site takes about half a day.

Two boundaries worth naming up front, because these pages get conflated. This is the Wix-specific setup pass. The platform-agnostic version, covering keyword selection, on-page structure, links, and measurement as a whole program, is our complete SEO checklist. The diagnostic version, for a site that used to work and stopped, is the line-by-line technical audit. If you want a machine-generated read on your own domain before you start, the free site audit report crawls the site and groups its findings roughly the way this page is grouped.

Last framing note, and it is the one that sets expectations correctly. Almost nothing in the first five groups is a ranking lever. They are disqualifiers: a written meta description will not move you a position, and a page excluded from search results loses every position it could have had. Ahrefs studied roughly a billion pages and found 96.55% of them get zero organic search traffic from Google, and settings are the reason for a small minority of that number. Clearing this list makes your pages eligible. What happens next is decided by whether they answer a question somebody is asking.

2. Plan, domain, and indexing foundation.

Six checks on whether your pages are eligible at all. Two of them are about addresses you own, and four are about whether search engines have been told the pages exist. This group is also where Wix's own tooling starts: the built-in SEO Setup Checklist asks for your business name and up to three keywords, then walks you through the Google connection, and Wix documents that the Search Console step needs a Premium plan and a connected domain. Run that wizard, finish everything it gives you, then come back here.

1. 01

   The site is on a paid plan with your own domain connected.

   A free Wix site lives on a wixsite.com subdomain, which means every link you ever earn points at an address you do not own and cannot move. This is the one item on the list that is a prerequisite rather than an optimisation.

   WHERE Wix dashboard, Domains.

2. 02

   The site is published, and the version you are looking at is the live one.

   Editor changes do not exist until you publish. Half the confusing SEO reports from Wix sites come from somebody auditing a saved draft while the live site still serves the version from three weeks ago.

   WHERE Editor, Publish, then load the live domain in a private window.

3. 03

   Search Console is connected and the property is verified.

   Without it you have no indexation data, no query data, and no field performance data, which means most of the rest of this list becomes guesswork. Verify the exact hostname the site actually serves on.

   WHERE Wix dashboard, SEO, then the connect-to-Google step.

4. 04

   One canonical hostname, with the other variants forwarded to it.

   Pick www or the bare domain and forward the rest. Four live variants of one page is the standard way a site splits its own signal four ways and ranks with none of them.

   WHERE Wix dashboard, Domains, then the domain settings for the connected domain.

5. 05

   Every page you want ranked has the search-results toggle left on.

   Wix gives you a per-page switch that controls whether the page can appear in search results. It gets flipped off during a build and nobody re-checks it, which is the cheapest possible bug on the platform.

   WHERE Page settings, SEO panel, the index toggle.

6. 06

   The sitemap resolves and the URL count matches the pages you would defend.

   Load the sitemap in a browser and count. If a fourteen-page site lists ninety URLs, the extra seventy-six are archives, tag pages, and system pages competing with your real ones for the same attention.

   WHERE Load yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml directly.

Check 06 is the one that surprises people, so do it before anything else in this group. Wix generates the sitemap automatically and keeps it updated without you resubmitting anything, which is convenient and means the file is an honest inventory of what the platform thinks your site is. Load it, count the URLs, and compare that number to the pages you would defend to a stranger. A gap of five is normal. A gap of seventy is the rest of your afternoon.

The per-page search toggle in check 05 deserves the same treatment. Do not audit it in the editor, because the editor shows you intent. Pull the indexed page list in Search Console and compare it against the pages you meant to publish, then reconcile the differences one by one. Live, linked, and in the sitemap are three separate states, and none of them is indexed.

3. Page URLs, titles, and headings.

Seven checks, all of them inside the same per-page SEO panel, and this is the group with the best ratio of effort to result on the entire list. It is also the group most affected by how Wix sites get built. A template ships with pages named Home, About, Services, and a heading hierarchy chosen for visual balance, so the defaults are not wrong exactly, they are simply about a business that is not yours.

1. 07

   Every page slug is a readable phrase, decided before the page gets traffic.

   Wix takes the slug from the page name, so a page created as Copy of Services ships as copy-of-services. Fix these while the page has no links and no rankings, because after that a slug change is a redirect exercise.

   WHERE Page settings, the URL field.

2. 08

   Every title is unique and leads with the topic rather than the brand.

   Around 60 characters before truncation. Impressions with no clicks is almost always a title problem rather than a content problem, which makes this the highest-leverage group of edits on the whole list.

   WHERE Page settings, SEO panel, the title field.

3. 09

   Every meta description is written, not left on the platform default.

   Wix generates a default from the page content. It is rarely wrong and almost never persuasive. The description does not affect ranking, it affects whether the ranking turns into a visit.

   WHERE Page settings, SEO panel, the description field.

4. 10

   One H1 per page, carrying the page topic.

   In the Wix editor a heading level is a dropdown next to a font size, so people choose H1 because it looks right. Check the live page rather than the editor, because the header and footer can contribute their own.

   WHERE Editor, select the text element, then the text theme dropdown.

5. 11

   Heading levels descend in order without skipping.

   Headings are the outline of the document. When they are picked for size instead of hierarchy, the outline stops describing the page, and on a drag-and-drop canvas that happens by default rather than by mistake.

   WHERE Editor, per text element, same theme dropdown.

6. 12

   Alt text on every image that carries meaning, and none on the decorative ones.

   Describe what the image shows, in the words a person would use. Wix template images ship with alt text describing the stock photo, which is worse than empty because it is confidently about the wrong subject.

   WHERE Editor, image settings, the alt text field.

7. 13

   The social share image and title are set per page, not inherited sitewide.

   This is the card that renders when somebody pastes your URL into a message. It does not move rankings and it does move click-through on every channel that is not search, which is where a new page gets its first readers.

   WHERE Page settings, Social Share tab.

Slugs first, because they are the only item in this group that gets expensive with age. A title can be rewritten every month at no cost. A slug changed after the page has links and rankings is a redirect exercise with a recrawl period attached. So on a site you are setting up, spend twenty minutes on the URL field for every page before you spend two hours on titles.

Titles and descriptions are where most Wix sites leave the most on the table, because the platform fills them in plausibly enough that nobody notices they were never written. If you want a starting draft for either, our SEO title generator and meta description generator are free and take a URL. Paste the result into the SEO panel, then edit it so it sounds like you rather than like a tool, which is the part neither can do.

4. Site structure and internal links.

Five checks on how the pages relate to each other. Wix is a canvas, which is its great strength for design and its specific weakness here: nothing about dragging a section onto a page produces a link graph, so most Wix sites have navigation and nothing else. The result is a site where every page is one click from every other page and no page is obviously about anything in particular.

1. 14

   The menu is organised the way people search, not the way the company is organised.

   Internal department names make terrible navigation labels. The menu is the strongest statement your site makes about what it is for, and it is read by visitors and crawlers in exactly the same pass.

   WHERE Editor, Menus and Pages.

2. 15

   Every page you care about sits within three clicks of the homepage.

   Depth is a proxy for how much the site itself thinks a page matters. A service page buried under two dropdowns gets crawled rarely, linked rarely, and valued accordingly.

   WHERE Click through the live site from the homepage and count.

3. 16

   Body copy carries internal links, not just the navigation.

   Nav links are on every page, so they say nothing about which page is relevant to which topic. A link inside a sentence does, and it is the signal most Wix sites have none of because the template did not come with any.

   WHERE Editor, select text, then the link tool.

4. 17

   No indexable page is hidden from every menu with nothing linking to it.

   Hiding a page from the menu in Wix does not remove it from the index. It removes it from the link graph, which leaves a page that search engines may keep and visitors can never find.

   WHERE Editor, Menus and Pages, the hide-from-menu setting.

5. 18

   Text lives in text elements, not baked into images or trapped in a lightbox.

   A headline rendered inside a JPEG is a picture of a headline. This is the most common way a beautiful Wix homepage ends up with 40 indexable words on it, and nobody notices because the page looks full.

   WHERE View the live page source and search for a sentence you can see.

Check 16 is the one worth actually doing rather than just reading. In-body links carry context that navigation cannot, because the sentence around the link tells search engines and readers what the destination is for. Two older pages edited to link at a new one takes ten minutes and is the difference between a page that starts cold and one that starts connected. If you want to see the current shape of your own graph before editing it, our internal link mapper shows what points at what, and the orphans fall straight out of it.

Check 18 catches the failure specific to visual builders. A Wix homepage can look completely full and contain forty indexable words, because the headline, the subhead, and the three value propositions are all inside a single image somebody designed elsewhere. View the live page source, pick a sentence you can see on screen, and search for it. If it is not there, it is not on the page as far as anything except a human reader is concerned.

5. The blog, which the built-in checklist skips.

Five checks, and this is the group that decides whether the previous four ever matter. Wix is explicit in its documentation that the SEO Setup Checklist does not analyse the blog or the business solution sections. That is a reasonable scoping decision for a setup wizard and a serious gap if the wizard is the only thing you run, because the blog is where every query beyond your handful of service pages has to live.

1. 19

   The blog exists, is on the same domain, and publishes on a real cadence.

   Your service pages cover a handful of queries and cannot cover more without becoming something else. Everything past that handful has to live somewhere, and on Wix that somewhere is the blog.

   WHERE Wix dashboard, add the Blog, then the Blog section.

2. 20

   Every post has its own SEO panel filled in, not the blog default.

   Wix Blog posts carry a separate SEO panel from site pages, and it is the one people forget exists. A post published from the mobile app with no title or description set is publishing blind.

   WHERE Blog post editor, SEO tab.

3. 21

   Categories and tags are not generating a wall of near-empty archive pages.

   One category with two posts in it is a thin page in the index competing with the two posts it lists. Use few categories, and keep the ones you use populated enough to be worth landing on.

   WHERE Blog dashboard, Categories, and the sitemap count from check 06.

4. 22

   Each post targets a query somebody actually types, checked before writing.

   A post about a topic you find interesting and a post about a question with search volume look identical in the editor and produce completely different outcomes. The difference is made before the first sentence, not after.

   WHERE Search Console query data, plus any keyword source you trust.

5. 23

   Posts link back into the pages that make money, with varied anchors.

   A blog that links nowhere is a traffic source with no destination. Two or three in-body links per post, pointed at the service or product page the post is adjacent to, is the whole mechanic.

   WHERE Blog post editor, the link tool.

The arithmetic is blunt. A service business on Wix typically has four to eight pages that can rank for four to eight commercial queries, and those queries are the ones every competitor is also targeting. Everything else people type, the questions, the comparisons, the how-much-does-this-cost searches, has nowhere to land unless you publish something for it. That is the entire argument for a blog, and it is a volume argument rather than a quality-of-writing one. The method for making individual posts rank is a separate subject, covered in our guide to making a blog rank.

Check 20 is the mechanical trap. Wix Blog posts have their own SEO panel, separate from the site page settings you just worked through, and a post published quickly from the mobile app carries whatever the platform generated. Set a rule that no post goes live without its title and description written, the same way you would not ship a page without them.

6. The technical panels Wix gives you.

Seven checks, and the honest headline for this group is that the platform objection people repeat about Wix is years out of date. You get a robots.txt editor, a redirect manager that creates a 301 automatically when you change a page URL, editable canonicals, and a structured data editor. The technical surface is not the constraint. Leaving it on defaults you never looked at is.

1. 24

   robots.txt has been read line by line in the editor.

   Wix generates a sensible default and then lets you edit it, which means the only way it is wrong is if somebody changed it. Read the file rather than trusting that nobody did.

   WHERE Wix dashboard, SEO, Robots.txt editor.

2. 25

   Every slug you have ever changed has a 301 redirect behind it.

   Wix creates an automatic 301 when you change a page URL, which covers the common case. What it does not cover is a page you deleted, or a URL that existed on the site you migrated from.

   WHERE Wix dashboard, SEO, URL Redirect Manager.

3. 26

   Canonical tags are left on the default self-reference unless you have a reason.

   Wix writes a self-referencing canonical for you and it is almost always right. Overriding it has a documented side effect that catches people out, covered in the prose under this group.

   WHERE Page settings, SEO panel, Advanced.

4. 27

   Structured data is shipped for the type each page actually is.

   Wix adds markup for some page types and gives you an editor for the rest. Ship the type the page genuinely is, validate it, then stop. Extra schema types on a page that is not that thing do nothing.

   WHERE Page settings, SEO panel, Structured data markup.

5. 28

   Multilingual, if you run it, returns hreflang in both directions.

   Every language variant must point at every other one, including itself. Wix Multilingual handles this when you use it properly and does nothing at all if you hand-build a second-language section as ordinary pages.

   WHERE Wix dashboard, Multilingual.

6. 29

   Pages that should not rank are actually excluded, not just unlinked.

   Thank-you pages, members-only areas, checkout steps, and any page that exists to be landed on from an email. Each one in the index is a thin page representing your site to somebody who searched for something else.

   WHERE Page settings, SEO panel, the index toggle.

7. 30

   A removed page returns a real 404, and the 404 page routes people somewhere.

   A custom 404 that returns a 200 status is a soft 404: the crawler keeps requesting it and the index keeps a page with no content. Say what you mean in the status code, then help the visitor.

   WHERE Editor, the 404 page, plus a status check on a deleted URL.

Check 26 comes with a platform-specific gotcha that is worth reading twice, because it is not intuitive and it is documented: changing the default canonical tag on a Wix page can drop that URL from your sitemap, and restoring it means removing the custom canonical again. So the default self-referencing canonical is not just the safe option on Wix, it is the option that keeps the page in the inventory. Override it only when you have a duplicate you genuinely cannot merge.

Structured data closes this group because it is the most over-invested item on it. Google's own introduction to structured data frames it as eligibility for richer presentation, not as a ranking input. Ship valid markup for the type the page actually is, validate it once, and move on. The adjacent work that does pay off on AI answer surfaces is a content question rather than a markup one, and we cover it in our answer engine optimization guide.

7. Speed and Core Web Vitals on Wix.

Five checks, and the only group on this page with published numeric thresholds, so use the real numbers rather than a general sense that the site feels quick: Core Web Vitals sets largest contentful paint at 2.5 seconds, interaction to next paint at 200 milliseconds, and cumulative layout shift at 0.1, measured at the 75th percentile of real visits. The percentile is the part people drop. A quarter of your visitors are allowed a worse experience than the threshold and you are still passing.

1. 31

   Largest contentful paint under 2.5 seconds on field data.

   Field data means real visits at the 75th percentile, not a lab run on your laptop. On Wix the LCP element is nearly always the hero image or a video background, which makes this a content decision more than a code one.

   WHERE Search Console, Core Web Vitals report.

2. 32

   Images are uploaded at something close to the size they display at.

   Wix serves responsive variants, and it cannot undo a 6000-pixel photograph used as a background on a phone. This is the single easiest win on most Wix sites and it takes an afternoon.

   WHERE Editor, Media manager, re-upload the heavy assets.

3. 33

   Every installed app is counted and can be justified out loud.

   Apps accumulate because installing one takes eight seconds and nobody ever removes anything. Each one is script on the page. List them, name what each is for, and uninstall the ones that fail the question.

   WHERE Wix dashboard, Apps, Manage Apps.

4. 34

   Video backgrounds and entrance animations are kept out of the first screen.

   An autoplaying video behind the headline is the heaviest thing on the page and it sits exactly where the largest contentful paint is measured. Move it down the page or replace it with a still.

   WHERE Editor, strip settings on the top section.

5. 35

   Cumulative layout shift under 0.1, checked on a phone.

   Most of the score comes from two or three elements arriving late: a web font, a banner, an app widget. Fixing it is a short job once you know which ones, and the field report tells you.

   WHERE Search Console, Core Web Vitals report, mobile tab.

Keep this group in proportion, and keep it specific to the platform. On a Wix site you do not control the framework, the bundle, or the hosting, so the levers you have are the ones in these five checks: image weight, installed apps, what sits in the first screen, and how much moves after load. Those four account for nearly all of the difference between a fast Wix site and a slow one, and none of them requires touching code.

Then stop. Performance is a tiebreaker between pages that are otherwise comparable, not a lever that lifts a weak page, and it absorbs disproportionate attention because it is the easiest layer to measure and produces the most satisfying numbers. If the thresholds pass on field data, write it down and go back to group five.

A worked example: one Wix site, start to finish.

Take a fictional cabinetry studio, Fernpost Joinery. Built on a Wix template two years ago, 14 pages, a blog with three posts from the launch month, a paid plan and a real domain. Around 90 organic visits a month, flat for a year, and nobody can say why. Here is what running the 35 checks in order actually returns and how long each group took. The company is invented. The distribution of findings is not.

About four hours to diagnose and roughly a day to implement, and every finding was a platform default that nobody chose. That is the normal outcome on a template-built site. Note also what was not wrong: nothing in the technical group, which is the group Wix gets criticised for and the group that was already correct because Wix sets sensible defaults and nobody had overridden them.

The part worth copying is the ending. Groups one through four are a fixed, finite job: a day of work, done once, never repeated. Group five is not finite, and it is the only one that compounds. Which is why the honest version of this checklist ends with a staffing question rather than a settings one, and why we built an AI SEO agent that runs it: keyword selection against live search data, drafts checked against real sources, and native publishing straight into the site.

Common mistakes on a Wix site.

1. Treating the built-in wizard as the whole job. The SEO Setup Checklist is a good setup wizard and it is scoped as one: up to three keywords at build time, and no analysis of the blog or the business solutions. Completing it means your foundation is right, not that your site is done.
2. Blaming the platform for a page count. The most common Wix SEO complaint is that the site does not rank, on a site with eight pages and no blog. No platform ranks for queries it has published nothing about. The technical group on this page exists partly to retire that argument.
3. Designing headlines into images. A visual builder makes this easy and it is the fastest way to ship a page that looks full and reads as empty. If the sentence is not in the page source, it is not on the page for any purpose except a human reader who already arrived.
4. Changing slugs after pages rank. The automatic 301 protects most of the value, and it still costs a recrawl period and leaves your own internal links hopping through a redirect. Fix slugs at setup, then leave them alone unless they are genuinely wrong.
5. Overriding canonicals to fix duplicates. On Wix this can quietly pull the URL out of your sitemap, which is a worse problem than the one you were solving. Two pages targeting the same query should be merged and redirected, not labelled.
6. Publishing three posts and calling it a blog. Three posts is a launch, not a channel. Recurring traffic comes from cadence, which means the real question at the end of this checklist is who writes the next forty posts, not which settings are left.