RV Park Sites vs Wix for an RV park website.

What Wix is

Wix is a drag-and-drop website builder. You pick a template, drop in text and photos, and publish. It has an AI setup wizard, a large app market, and more than 800 templates. It hosts the site for you. As of this writing, the plans that remove Wix ads and allow a custom domain run from about $17 a month for a basic site to about $36 a month for a business site with payments, billed yearly. There is a free plan, but it shows Wix advertising and uses a Wix address, which no park should use.

Wix is good at what it promises: a reasonable-looking site, live in an afternoon, with no code. Millions of small businesses run on it.

Where Wix works for a park

• You like doing this. Some owners enjoy the site. If that is you and you have the off-season, Wix will let you make something decent.
• You need something tonight. A one-page site with the phone number, the rates, and a map is an evening's work.
• Budget is the only factor. At $17 a month for a basic plan, nothing we offer is cheaper on the invoice. The cost is elsewhere.

Where Wix falls short for a park

• The reservation system is not built in. Wix Bookings is for appointments, not campsites, seasons, rig lengths, and site types. You will embed or link to Campspot, RoverPass, Firefly, or whatever you use. That works, but it is on you to wire it and keep it working when the platform changes its embed code.
• You cannot switch templates. Once a Wix site is built on a template, changing the look means rebuilding. Parks that started with a generic template in 2020 are still on it.
• You cannot take the site with you. Wix does not let you export a site to another host. If you leave, you start over. The domain moves; the site does not.
• Speed on a phone in a canyon. Wix pages carry a heavy script bundle. On a strong connection you will not notice. On one bar of signal at a highway rest area, the guest waits, and the guest is always on a phone.
• Search takes work you have to know how to do. Wix has the tools: titles, descriptions, sitemap, structured data through apps. It does not know that a gateway park needs a page about the distance to the entrance, or that Google marks down thin town pages. That is judgment, and it is where most DIY park sites stall at page three.
• Nobody is watching it. The rates change in May. The season dates change in October. A phone number changes. On Wix, that is your Saturday, or it does not happen.

What the real cost looks like

Take a 60-site park. A Wix business plan is about $36 a month, $432 a year. Add a domain after the free first year, about $20. Add the hours: building it, four to twenty hours depending on how picky you are, and then a couple of hours a month keeping rates, photos, and dates current. At even $40 an hour for the owner's time, that is more than $85 a month by the second month, and the site is still only as good as the owner's eye for design and search.

Our $85 a month includes the build, hosting, security, changes when you send them, connection to your booking system, the search setup done correctly, and a person on the phone. No build fee. Twelve months minimum, then month to month. Pay the year up front and get two months free.

What you get with us that Wix cannot sell you

• A site designed for your kind of park. Gateway, destination, roadside, or long-term parks sell different things to different guests. We have built for each and we start from what that guest is deciding.
• Search that starts right. Page titles that say what and where, a Google Business Profile that matches, a page per kind of guest, FAQ blocks machines can read. Yellowstone Grizzly RV Park went from about 15,000 users a year to 90,000 on that foundation.
• Your map. In the Listings + Reviews band, we draw the park map, put it on the site, and print it.
• Ownership. The site, the source code, the domain, and the content are yours. If you leave, you take them. That is the opposite of the Wix arrangement.

When to choose Wix anyway

If you have a single-site campground with a handful of regulars, no competition, and you genuinely enjoy tinkering, Wix is fine and we would tell you so on the phone. If you are moving from a Wix site to us, we rebuild from your content and photos, move the domain, and the Wix site simply stops renewing. Nothing to export because nothing can be.