Make any AI project business-ready in one prompt. Try Wix Headless
Building a custom website doesn’t have to mean building everything from scratch. With Wix Headless, you can create a frontend that looks and works exactly the way you want while relying on Wix for the backend that powers it.
I’m Ran, Wix’s Global Developer Advocate, and I’ve built countless Headless websites myself using an AI coding assistant to design the frontend, while Wix handles everything else.
If you’re a small-to-medium business owner, budding entrepreneur or just curious about how to build a Wix Headless website in practice, this is the fastest way to find out.
TL;DR: how to build a Wix Headless website
Wix Headless lets you build a fully custom frontend with an AI coding assistant such as Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, while Wix handles the backend, including the Wix Headless CMS, payments, forms and members area. The frontend is what visitors see and interact with, while the backend runs behind the scenes.
Getting started is simpler than it might sound. You give your AI assistant a prompt pointing it to Wix's skill.md file, which helps scaffold the site and connect it to your Wix account. If you're new to how modern websites are structured, it's worth getting familiar with frontend infrastructure for beginners first.
You can build and test for free. You only need a Premium plan when you're ready to accept payments and take your site live.
You get Wix's backend without being locked into a Wix-designed frontend. That means you can build the experience you want while using Wix for products, content, forms and member data.
Wondering do I need a CMS for my website? If you're managing products, blog posts, forms or member data, the answer's yes, and Wix Headless gives you one without locking you into a fixed frontend.
Back to basics: what is Headless?
Imagine a power drill. It has the body, where the motor resides and the drill bit attached to the front. If every drill came with a fixed, single-size drill bit, that would be pretty inconvenient, wouldn’t it? If you wanted to drill a hole of a different size, you’d have to take apart or replace the entire drill. That’s why drills come with detachable bits, allowing you to change the head to suit your needs (without modifying the drill’s body).
Headless works the same way for both websites and web apps. The drill’s “body” is the website’s backend: the payment system, the databases, the form-processing logic and the Content Management System (CMS), basically all the hidden machinery needed to power an eCommerce website. The head is the website’s frontend, the part users see and interact with: buttons, headers, images, forms, checkout carts and the like. And just like in our drill analogy, Wix Headless allows you to create an infinite variety of frontends and connect them to the same backend, taking advantage of Wix’s rich ecosystem of business solutions and third-party apps.
But why would you do that? After all, Wix already offers a great solution for frontend design: Wix’s drag-and-drop Editor, which connects seamlessly and automatically to the Wix backend.
Building websites used to be hard work. You needed a professional developer or designer just to get something polished online. Wix changed that with its editor, which made it possible for even on-technical people to build a great site. Today, AI coding assistants have leveled the playing field even further with tools like Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, Cursor and similar platforms.
But “can” doesn’t always mean “should.” Letting an AI assistant generate a button or submission form isn’t the same as asking it to build a full, end-to-end payment system, a database or a CMS. Those backend systems are much more complex to design and build because they must meet demanding requirements: reliability, security, regulatory compliance and performance under load. Asking an AI agent to write a complete backend infrastructure is like asking your handy neighbor, the one who fixes his Honda on weekends, to build a Formula 1 engine for a race. It might turn on, but you’re far more likely to end up in the ditch.
A smarter approach is to let the AI assistant design the frontend portion of your website, which is lighter and less risky and connect that frontend to Wix’s existing backend infrastructure. Thousands of engineers have spent nearly two decades ensuring that exact infrastructure can handle whatever demands millions of eCommerce websites throw at it. You’ll sleep much better at night knowing that critical machinery is handled by battle-tested professionals.
The bottom line: let the AI assistant build the frontend, and connect it to the Wix backend. That way, you get the best of both worlds, a website tailored to your business’s exact needs, running on a reliable and finely tuned backend infrastructure.
New to Wix Headless? Start here:
Wix Headless gives you access to the full Wix business stack through a single connected backend: stores, bookings, events, a CMS and payments, all managed from one Wix Business Manager dashboard. There’s no separate charge per feature, no API fees and no enterprise tier to unlock. Connect for free today.
Let’s build a Wix Headless website together
In this guide, we’ll work with an AI assistant to create a custom website, then connect that frontend to several Wix business solutions. Our AI assistant will do most of the heavy lifting, but we’ll take a look “under the hood” to understand what it’s doing so you can make better decisions as you build.
Everything we cover here is completely free to try (no credit card required), so fire up your computer, create a project folder, open your preferred AI coding tool and follow along. You’ll only need a paid Premium account if you decide to launch your website and start accepting live payments.
For this demo, I’m creating “Ran’s Wacky Portraits,” an online store selling funny caricatures of some of my Wix colleagues! The store will include a product catalog, a payment integration, submission forms, a members area, a CMS and a blog, basically everything a small business needs to start selling right away.
01. First prompt
Head over to the Wix Headless site, where you’ll find the following prompt:
build a [Your website’s description] using https://wix.com/headless/skill.md
This prompt consists of two parts. The second part tells our AI assistant where to find a file called skill.md, which contains all the instructions the agent needs to communicate with Wix’s backend services.
The first part, in brackets, is where we define how we want our website to look and behave. Building a website is an iterative process, so you’ll have plenty of opportunities to refine things along the way. However, a clear initial description helps point the AI assistant in the right direction from the start. For my store, I described the basic premise: a store selling funny portraits and listed key features like a product catalog and a members area.
For the design portion, I took a shortcut. Since my design skills leave a bit to be desired, I browsed the web for existing AI-generated sites and looked for the exact prompts used to build them. There are plenty of great online prompt libraries; I ended up choosing a clean design style from designprompts.dev. I copied the prompt and asked my AI assistant to adapt it for my site’s needs. The tool suggested a few helpful adjustments, like tweaking the color palette to improve contrast and readability, giving us a solid design blueprint.
With the initial prompt ready, I let the AI assistant go to work. First, it prompted me to log in to my Wix account by displaying a link and an 8-digit authorization code. I clicked the link, authenticated with Wix, entered the code and the tool took over from there.
Want to get better at writing prompts? Explore these guides for tips on writing effective AI prompts, refining your instructions and getting better results from AI tools:
02. Building the website
Much of the AI assistant’s work happens automatically, but under the hood, it executes command-line interface (CLI) commands in the background. Each command invokes a tool to modify local project files or configure remote Wix settings.
For example, the first command the agent ran looks like this:
node
"/Users/ranl/.codex/plugins/cache/openai-curated-remote/wix/6.0.0/skills/wix-headless/scripts/init-site-json.mjs" \
"$(pwd)" \
"Ran's Wacky Portraits" \
"Playful handmade comic-studio" \
"stores,ecom,cms,gift-cards,blog,forms" \
--frontend astroIt might look a bit intimidating at first glance, but you don’t need to memorize any of it to use Wix Headless. In this example, Node executes a script called init-site-json.mjs, passing configuration parameters like the site name (“Ran’s Wacky Portraits”), site description, requested business features and the selected frontend framework (Astro). This command creates a configuration file that saves these choices for future build steps.
For anyone learning how to make a website with a modern development setup, the important part is what happens next. Over the next few minutes, the AI assistant ran a series of commands to generate a basic starter template (a scaffold), connect it to Wix services and construct our customized frontend layout, complete with pages, image placeholders and interactive forms.
At this point, the website files live locally on your computer, making it easy to test and refine everything in a local sandbox before publishing. Even though the frontend is running locally, it's connected to live Wix backend services, allowing you to test backend workflows in real time.
Learn more: Wix Headless vs Shopify Headless Commerce
03. Customizing and testing the website
To enable such local testing, the agent spins up what’s known as a “development server”: a simple, lightweight web server running on our computer, which serves the website's pages much like a real web server would. The agent provides us with a link to open in our browser; note the URL in the address bar, “https://localhost:[xxxx],” that’s a clear sign telling us we’re interacting with a local, undeployed site.
As you can see from the above screenshots, the agent’s initial design is a solid starting point: it followed the design guidelines accurately, and the website already has a shop, a shopping cart (“bag”), a FAQ section and even a blog journal with six demo articles. The shop is even pre-populated with demo products. For a closer look at the principles behind creating a site like this, see our guide to web design.
This is the point where we step in. Agents are powerful, but they’re far from perfect: we now need to test every piece of functionality on the website to make sure the AI wired it correctly to Wix’s backend. And indeed, the first time I tried submitting a contact form, I got an error message. Fixing such errors is, in almost all cases, as simple as asking the agent to take a look, but we can make the agent’s life easier (who knows, maybe it will pay off if they take over the world someday) by providing it with detailed error messages emitted by the browser.
If you’re still working out the basics of how to design a website, this testing stage is worth paying attention to: good design isn’t just about how the pages look. Every form, button and interactive element needs to work as intended.
To do that, right-click on any part of the website’s page and select “Inspect”. A sidebar will open in the browser with a tab called “Console”, where error messages will appear in red. Right-click on the console, select “Copy console” and paste the selection into the agent’s chat.
It took several iterations of the agent trying various fixes and me copying and pasting errors from the console until the problem was resolved. I tried submitting another form and received a confirmation message, but that wasn’t enough. The agent provided me with another link, this time to the Wix Dashboard: the backend control panel where you can view and manage all the information flowing to and from your website.
Browsing the dashboard, you can view our store’s catalog with the demo products, set basic options like currency and location and read the simple blog posts created by the agent. What we’re interested in right now is the form submission page: you’ll find it under Customers & Leads → Forms and Submissions. Click the Submissions tab, and voilà, our test message is stored safely in Wix’s database. I also received an email notification about the message.
Next, I tried shopping: clicking a product, adding it to the cart and opening the checkout page. That didn’t work right out of the box either, but again, it took the agent only a few minutes to figure out the kinks in the connection to Wix’s backend. Note that since we’re using a free account, we can’t test the full purchase flow because a free account can’t process real payments. That’s something we’d need to test again fully if we decided to upgrade to Premium.
Finally, I tested the Members area: I created a test member using a different email address, and as expected, the test account appeared in the dashboard.
Learn more: How to make a website with Claude design
04. Finalizing the website
With all the major functionality tried and tested, it was time to populate my website with actual products. Naturally, since I can’t even draw a stick figure, I used ChatGPT to transform a few nice shots of my office friends into wacky caricatures.
I asked the agent to remove all the demo products and replace them with my generated images. Once it did, I used the Dashboard product catalog interface to set the prices and descriptions.
I did one final check of all the pages on my demo site, verified that everything was as it should be, and then asked the agent to deploy the site to Wix’s servers. “Deploying” simply means uploading our local website to Wix’s servers so it becomes accessible to visitors across the web. Here’s the live site, check it out!
Even though I’m quite enamored with these wacky and cute caricatures, my main goal with this guide was to demonstrate how quickly and easily you can create a fully functioning e-commerce website using Wix Headless. By letting the AI assistant build the front end in minutes and connecting it to Wix’s existing business solutions, you get remarkable speed without sacrificing the site’s reliability or security - which are backed by Wix’s battle-tested infrastructure. Plus, an added benefit of Headless is that you can design and tailor your website’s front end to fit your exact needs in any way you like.
Already built your site with AI? Upload it to Wix Headless
Ran's walkthrough starts from a blank folder, but you may be further along than that. Plenty of people open Claude or ChatGPT, describe a site and end up with a folder of working files on their laptop. Then they hit the part nobody warned them about: the site works on localhost and nowhere else.
So can Claude build a website? Yes, and so can ChatGPT. Both will write you a frontend that looks good, usually in a single sitting. What they can't give you is a place for that site to live, a database behind it or a way to take a payment. That's the gap Wix Headless fills.
If you already have an AI-built site, you can upload your AI built website here and skip the rebuild. Wix hosts it with free website hosting, and you can connect it to the backend tools you actually need.
Wondering how to host an AI built site in general? You have two jobs: put the files on a server and keep the business logic somewhere reliable. Most people solve the first with a hosting service and then lose a weekend wiring up the second. With Wix Headless both sit under one login, so deploying and managing your store happen in the same place. That also covers the question of how to upload a website: you push your project to Wix instead of configuring a server yourself.
Ready to make your own Wix Headless website?
Ran's demo was a portrait shop, but the same setup fits a bakery, a course business or a small apparel brand. The pattern doesn't change. Your AI assistant designs the frontend and Wix runs everything that has to keep working when you're asleep.
Here's what that backend gives you, with nothing extra to install:
A CMS. Products, blog posts and page content live in the Wix dashboard, and your frontend reads from it. If you're still asking yourself do I need a CMS for my website, the short version is that you do the moment someone other than a developer needs to change the content.
Payments. Wix Payments is Wix's built-in payment solution. It lets your store accept credit and debit cards and other local payment methods, with the checkout and compliance work already handled. It's available in select countries, so check that yours is covered. Testing is free, and you only need a Premium plan when you're ready to take real orders. Learn more: what is Wix payments?
Forms, members and a blog. All of it was in Ran's build, and all of it shows up in the same dashboard.
On the question of the best headless CMS, there isn't one answer, because it depends on who's editing and what you're selling. The honest pros and cons of a headless CMS go like this. You get total freedom over the frontend, your content can feed a website and an app at once and you're never stuck with someone else's layout. The cost is that you take on more setup, and with a pure CMS you still have to find your own checkout, forms and hosting. Wix Headless trims that last part because the CMS comes bundled with the commerce and hosting you'd otherwise assemble yourself.
If you're wondering how to add an online store to an AI-built site, this is the shortest route. Name the store features in your first prompt, as Ran did with products, cart and members area. The assistant connects each one to Wix, and you set prices and descriptions in the dashboard like any other Wix store.
Next steps:
Open the Wix Headless page and copy the starter prompt.
Describe your business, your key features and the look you want.
Test every form and checkout step locally before you deploy.
Upgrade to Premium when you're ready to accept payments and go live.
Got a site idea and an AI assistant? That's all you need. Build the frontend your way and let Wix run the payments, CMS and hosting behind it. Try Wix Headless free.
How to build a Wix Headless website FAQ
How do I make a Wix Headless website?
Give an AI coding assistant like Claude Code, Codex or Cursor the prompt from the Wix Headless page, which points it to Wix's skill.md file. The assistant builds a frontend, connects it to your Wix account and lets you test it locally. When it all works, you deploy to Wix's servers.
Learn more:
How do I host an AI built site?
Your AI-built files need a server to run on. You can deploy to Wix's servers from your project, or upload your AI built website if you've already built one elsewhere. Either way you get hosting and backend services under one account.
Learn: how to host an AI built site
Is Wix Headless free?
Wix Headless is free to build and test, and Wix Headless does not require a credit card to start. You can create a custom frontend with an AI coding assistant, connect it to Wix backend services and test forms, members and the CMS end to end at no cost. Wix Headless requires a Premium plan only when you're ready to accept live payments with Wix Payments and launch your site.
