Wix is one of the world’s most popular web design companies, offering custom-made drag and drop websites hosted on their cloud platform. It’s a really user-friendly solution which I used to recommend for my clients who are not tech-confident, are on a limited budget, and want to be able to 100% manage their own websites. Their ease of use and beginner-friendliness is second-to-none, and while the trade-off is that Wix is the most technically-limited of the web solutions that I offer, their new Wix Studio offering provides fully responsive website design – a feature that they had always sorely lacked. This was an exciting development and would have been a great option to be able to offer to my really small business clients.
Unfortunately, Wix is also an Israeli company headquartered in Tel-Aviv.
The far-right government of Israel has been actively bombing Gaza since October 7, killing more than 30,000 civilians and injuring approximately 70,000. In total, this is enough people to fill Melbourne’s MCG. Many of those killed are children. The north of Gaza is now in deep famine, with another massacre committed by the Israeli Defence Force on hungry Gazans seeking humanitarian aid since the time I first published this post on February 28, 2024. Multiple Israeli politicians have overtly compared all Palestinians to “animals” and expressed a clear intention to annihilate Palestine from the map. The IDF has even gone so far as to run over and crush civilians using tanks, and target unarmed people with precision drone. We are effectively witnessing the second holocaust and the lack of international representative response – in response to clear civilian opinion in favour of a ceasefire and ICJ ruling on “plausible genocide” – has me furious.
The rate and scale at which Gaza has been levelled by destruction, and the nature by which civilian infrastructure has been targeted, is not a reasonable reaction to the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians. Rather than listening to the international community’s calls for care and civilian protection and using a pinpointed and careful method to dismantle Hamas, the Israeli government has annihilated schools, hospitals and refugee camps with indiscriminate carpet bombing that has left millions displaced, in famine, and dying. The level of indiscriminate killing was made even clearer when Israel accidentally shot and killed their own hostages because they thought they were Hamas. The disproportionate response indicates that Israel’s objective is to make Gaza completely unliveable for civilians and to force them to leave, die, or live in complete submission after decades of conflict over the land.
As a result, I am boycotting Wix indefinitely, and will be continuing to offer web design only on WordPress, Squarespace, and Shopify.
Over the next 8 months to my renewal period, I’m also looking at alternatives to my current WordPress design approach so that I can stop using Elementor – another Israeli subscription-based web building tool – without impacting my clients’ sites. My intention is to completely sever my business from Israel and I encourage other designers to do the same.
Ceasefire now.
20 thoughts on “I’m discontinuing website design on Wix platforms due to the ongoing genocide in Gaza”
Bravo.
Thanks Dylan.
Wix is indeed an Israeli company. Not on the list of companies who profit front the Gaza genocide.
https://afsc.org/gaza-genocide-companies
To boycott all that is Israel is like punish all even if they are opposing the Israeli government.
Hi Leon! I appreciate your concern and your empathy for the citizens of Israel, but any boycott or official trade sanction will impact a country’s citizens. When people are being blown up 71km from Tel Aviv, my concern is not whether Israeli businesses suffer – my concern is withdrawing as much money as possible from Israel in general to create increased economic pressure on their government to stop the genocide. I hope this helps 🙂
Yeh isn’t that like the pot calling the kettle black? Isn’t what the israeli government is doing to Gaza akin to punishing all including the babies and children? Babies heads severed, among other disgusting things. It’s a far cry from Isreal’s fake burned babies story that the media was caught peddling and then backtracked on. We are still witnessing a real-time genocide like never before. The least we can do is boycott, so this bloodshed is not in our name.
100% agreed Chris!
Hi,
Please could you advise on what web builders to sell products are pro Palestine as I have spent an hour looking online and it seems one way or another they have ties to Is***l
Hi Ayesha!
I haven’t yet done a full audit of web builders that are “pro-Palestine”, so to speak, but what I can do is advise of the companies that are Israeli:
Wix
Elementor
Fiverr
These should be avoided if you want to stop sending money to Israel until their government stops military action in Palestine.
Many of the alternatives, including Divi, Beaver Builder, Squarespace, and Upwork, are based in the USA. While the United States has come under heavy criticism for continuing to fund and supply Israel, using a US option is not as bad, in my opinion, as directly supporting an Israeli one at this time.
Cheers 🙂
This is awesome!! Thank you for doing this and speaking up about it!
You’re welcome, I think it’s important that we use our businesses to take a stand on social issues where we can. Company employees can be bound by their employer’s ethics and code of conduct, but we’re not, so…
How many bullshit in one post!
“Unfortunately Wix is also an israeli company”??
Israel invest in her country, if the Plastelina people had invested in their country instead of being terrorists, believe me there was no war here. Blame Hamas. Not Israel. And go to educate yourself, I propose you to simply go to Gaza and stay there for one week, you will be probably killed after one hour, but nevermind.
I’m going to approve this comment so that people can see exactly what I’m protesting.
Exactly – Israel has invested in their country (with a lot of help from the USA I might add) so the action I’m taking is precisely divesting.
Gaza cannot invest in their own country when they are under the foot of an apartheid regime and are not even considered by most to be their own country despite Palestine existing prior to the official formation of Israel.
I don’t like apartheid states like Israel that ignore and gaslight the United Nations, so I’m using personal and business actions to remove my money from circulation in Israel instead. I am disgusted when I see Instagram photos of Israeli citizens having beers on their pristine beaches while children are blown up and living in annihilated refugee camps and schools just 80km down the same coast. Yes, I would probably die after a week in Gaza and it would be because of an Israeli airstrike.
I appreciate that this will affect you as an Israeli citizen and am sorry that you’ll see international protests and boycotts due to your extreme right-wing government.
Cheers!
I just did the same. An addition, my old customers want to transfer their sites too, which is awesome!
That’s fantastic! Good on you and I’m so glad to hear about your old customers making that move.
Hello
I salute you for this Heroic stance, and it is not strange for humans with pure hearts to stand against any injustice.i just canceled my Wix subscription too before even start working on the website . This article of yours were one of my references to make this decision and now i am looking for alternatives like squarespace . do you have any info. about squarespace regarding the Israel matter . you mentioned Elementor. can you please write a list of all the software tools that you know of that are israelis or support their cause . i will really appreciate it .thank you May God guide you to the truth always .
Thanks Aliya. As far as I know Squarespace is ok, it’s headquartered in New York City. I don’t have an exhaustive list of Israeli software that I’m avoiding but the big three for web design are Wix, Elementor and Fiverr.
Israel is quite a visionary for tech so the odds are, a lot of the devices and programs you use will have some Israeli components. I’m drawing at the line at Israel-registered and headquartered companies when trying to take my money out of circulation there.
Duda is another one.
DUDA is based in the US I believe but it is founded by Israelis and funded by Israelis. With the US being so complicit with the ongoing genocide I have added this company recently to my divestment list. It looked like a promising option at first.
https://www.israelhayom.com/2021/06/15/israeli-founded-website-builder-duda-raises-50m-in-series-d-pushing-total-to-100m/
You don’t have to post this, just passing on info.
Thanks for letting me know, I appreciate all new info on this.
Can you recommend another user friendly company to build a website. I’m not impressed with WordPress. It is a simple website, which will be improved when I finish this next book.
Hi Judy, I totally understand – WordPress is extremely difficult to customise unless you’ve got great design/web skills already. It’s a great system with a lot of capabilities but many of my web enquiries mention that they find it confusing and cumbersome.
Squarespace is a great drag-and-drop builder, about as easy to use as Wix, but it’s based in the US. Shopify is also a good one for eCommerce, but comes with a high annual subscription cost. I’ve also heard some people like Weebly but haven’t looked into it myself. Finally, there’s Webflow which a lot of designers like – but might be verging towards WordPress-level complexity in terms of adjusting your layout and look.
For a simple, easy to manage one-pager for someone who’s not a designer, my vote goes to Squarespace!