Rebuilding our own site on Wix headless: the decisions, dead ends and results
3 November 2026 / 3 min read
In September, an audit measured our own website's mobile Largest Contentful Paint at 17.1 seconds. One custom font file weighed 1,443 KiB, 39% of a 3,946 KiB page. We design and build sites for a living, and that is an awkward thing to learn about your own.
We rebuilt it. This is why, what we decided, what we threw away, and what changed.
Why we rebuilt it
The old site was a year old, and we had moved on from that style of design. We wanted it to look different. More than that, we wanted a site that was easy to understand, fast, and quick to get information from, so that someone arriving with a question could find the answer without hunting.
What Wix headless changed for us
In the Wix editor you work inside the editor's limits. With Wix headless we write the front end ourselves, in code, and Wix stays in the stack behind it. That opened up a lot of complex code that the editor could not take. The result was better animation and faster pages.
The thing that stood out most was being able to bring in custom libraries. We used GSAP to polish the animations, which gave us a level of control over motion that the editor does not offer.
The decision we reversed: the hero
The hero section was the part we redid the most. It went through three versions.
A big video.
A traditional layout, text on the left and an image on the right. Nothing about it stood out to us.
A custom shader with big type. This is where the style of the design is most visible and the brand name comes through.
We kept the third. The lesson was a simple one: a hero that is correct is not the same as a hero that is yours. The shader version tells a visitor what kind of studio we are before they read a word.
Before and after
All figures below are for mobile. The before numbers come from an automated SEO audit on 11 September 2026. The after numbers come from PageSpeed Insights on 3 November 2026. They were measured with different tools, so read them as a clear direction rather than a controlled test.
Before (old site):
Mobile Largest Contentful Paint: 17.1 seconds
Page weight: 3,946 KiB, of which one custom font was 1,443 KiB
Four overlapping structured-data blocks
50 of 83 images with empty alt text
66 blog tags spread across 58 posts
After (new site):
Performance score: 98
First Contentful Paint: 0.9 seconds
Largest Contentful Paint: 0.9 seconds
Total Blocking Time: 100 ms
Cumulative Layout Shift: 0.002
Speed Index: 3.6 seconds, the one metric still in amber
We would rather show you the amber number than pretend everything is green.
What we would do differently
Next time we would build a different homepage and take it further, possibly with some 3D elements. The current design gets a visitor to the information quickly, and that was the point of this version. Later, once the studio carries more weight in the market and does not need to spell out who we are and what we do, the homepage can become more abstract.
What we gave up
Leaving the Wix editor cost us drag-and-drop editing, and it is the thing we missed most during the rebuild. Every change is now a change in code. For a team without a developer, that would be a serious cost.
Who should and should not do this
Headless pays off when design ambition or performance needs outgrow the editor, and when someone is around to look after the code. It is the wrong call when your team restructures pages every week without a developer, or when nobody owns the codebase afterwards.
If you are weighing a move like this for your own site, our custom development and integrations page describes how we approach it.
Related services: web design and digital platforms, mobile app and product design.
