Wix Scales Hyper-Personalization With Real-Time Web Analytics

If you know of Wix primarily as a no-code website builder, then you’ve only scratched the surface of what the company does for its ecommerce and enterprise customers. 

Wix¹ is the leading SaaS website builder platform to create, manage and grow a digital presence. Organizations trust Wix to deliver a robust, reliable platform that not only allows them to scale and meet peak demand but also unearth and act on business insights in real time.

You’ve likely had hyper-personalized experiences or used a website developed and iterated on with Wix Analytics, even without realizing it. And its all-in-one website creation platform equips ~288 million users to do so much more than build these websites. Wix delivers the real-time data and event-driven operations businesses need to turn digital experiences and operations into increased innovation, revenue, and customer acquisition.

Building a real-time, multicloud data architecture with Confluent has been integral to that success. Adopting the data streaming platform has allowed Wix to build a real-time data engine that delivers contextual insights instantly. And Wix is able to implement these use cases at massive scale—processing more than 30 billion daily business events across regions and clouds—while reducing its infrastructure costs.

Learn why Wix chose Confluent’s cloud-native data streaming & advanced stream processing to accelerate its strategy for smarter, more data-driven operations, products, and users.

“Our overall goal as an organization is to make data-driven decisions. My team has been focused on reducing data latency—or what we call speed to insights. The faster our developers can innovate and analytics teams can provide data-driven insights, the better our business and client experience becomes. Confluent allows us to deliver the enriched, governed data any business unit or customer needs in real time.”

Josef Goldstein, Head of R&D, Big Data Platform, Wix

*¹ based on number of active live sites as reported by competitors' figures, independent third-party data and internal data as of Q1 2025.

Data Access & Analytics Challenges With Self-Managed Apache Kafka®

Over the last decade, Wix has expanded its focus beyond its acclaimed plug-and-play website builder to deliver an all-in-one platform for website creation and analytics. As the company added new capabilities, its architecture became increasingly complex and difficult to manage. 

To better ensure scalability, Wix’s Backend Infrastructure team moved to a fully event-driven architecture—but this migration revealed other roadblocks in Wix’s journey to building a real-time data engine for analytics and AI. The team soon came to operate thousands of microservices across dozens of business units, which made it difficult for the Big Data Platform team to make data widely accessible and consumable for analytics. 

Implementing an event-driven architecture with Kafka in 2017 allowed Wix to start building a highly extensible data platform for others to interact with, including developers using the Wix platform. Despite these early wins, the Backend Infrastructure team immediately faced operational challenges with managing open-source Kafka—stalling the Big Data Platform’s plans to build data pipelines for streaming analytics and scale new use cases across the organization.

Due to the amount of data its internal teams and end-users produced and consumed, on the analytics side, this growth triggered a major architectural shift. Wix realized that batch processing on S3 could no longer meet the latency and freshness requirements of the business. As a result, its internal teams began transitioning the analytical data pipelines from batch processing to a fully real-time, streaming architecture powered by Kafka. This move aimed to ensure up-to-date insights and faster decision-making across teams.

Building a Real-Time Data Engine With Connectors, Governance, and Apache Flink®

The Wix team knew they needed a new solution, so when evaluating managed Kafka services to run on AWS, the team took note of Confluent’s unique capabilities and product roadmap. Other solutions lacked the features Wix needed, including tiered storage and the ability to instantly scale up or down..

Wix migrated from self-managed Kafka to Confluent Cloud in 2019. Since then, the ability to elastically autoscale its microservices has not only lowered its infrastructure costs, operational burden, and unplanned downtime but also enabled real-time use cases across a multiregion analytical estate. Confluent Cloud has become a critical part of Wix’s data infrastructure. Leveraging Confluent’s fully managed, cloud-native data streaming platform allows data infrastructure and product teams to focus on work that adds value for customers’ businesses and their developers. 

At this scale, offloading operations to Confluent has made it easier for the Backend Infrastructure team to ensure reliable service to Wix customers. This allowed the Big Data Platform team to adopt Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink® and further evolve the company’s data-driven operations with streaming analytics.

Today, data from every corner of the business streams through Confluent, ready to be governed and then filtered, aggregated, and joined with Flink. And as a result, the Big Data Platform team has been able to deliver deeper insights, actionable business intelligence, and faster decision-making. 

Adopting Confluent has allowed Wix to: 

• Scale and accelerate website rendering for visitors around the world

• Eliminate the need to manually tweak infrastructure during peak traffic and significantly reduce platform downtime

• Increase developer velocity by streamlining integrations with pre-built Kafka connectors

• Use Stream Governance and Confluent Cloud for Apache Flink® to build contextual, trustworthy data products for internal teams and end-users to consume

The end result? A real-time data engine for analytics and AI that power highly responsive customer experiences that give Wix and its customers the competitive edge. 

“At Wix, we weren’t looking for a regular cloud solution—we needed a platform that could meet the scale, elasticity, and long-term vision of our data strategy. Confluent stood out not just for what they offer today, but for their clear commitment to evolving with us. Their real-time capabilities help us deliver the responsive, intelligent experiences our users expect, and give us the technical edge to stay ahead. As expected from the team who wrote the engine.”

Avi Perez, Head of Backend Engineering, Wix

Elevating Wix Analytics With User-Facing Analytics Built Using Flink SQL

Within a single team at Wix, there are often dozens of analysts, engineers, and data scientists. In the past, ensuring each had access to the data they needed was incredibly challenging. 

Thanks to streaming data pipelines built using Flink SQL, the company’s data engineers can readily consume and act on real-time business intelligence. This, in turn, allows product teams to: 

• Access, analyze and share data on user behavior on their sites almost instantaneously. 

• Feed data from real-time analytics engines into AI/ML models across the business

• Expose analytics on user behavior to external developers building sites on the Wix platform

• Use Confluent Cloud features like Flink SQL to build universal data products

• Accelerate delivery of new product features that depend on user-facing analytics

• Power hyper-personalization, robust A/B testing, better user experiences, and faster, more iterative web launches for Wix customers

For example, imagine a developer wants to track user behavior on a landing page. The Wix platform will register on-page behavior like a button-click event or a scroll-depth event. Once those events are streamed into Clickhouse via the streaming analytics data pipeline, they can be used to measure against key performance indicators (KPIs) set by the product team 

Web developers using the Wix platform can leverage Wix Analytics, a user-facing product that provides real-time insights into website activity, to better understand visitor behavior. Internally, Wix’s development teams use this activity data to power real-time personalization and AI/ML models, enabling more effective web optimization, enhanced client experiences, and continuous product innovation.

“With Wix Analytics, the value of user feedback is tremendous for our customers’ developers. That’s what differentiates us from other platforms, and Confluent makes it possible, in real time and at massive scale. We frequently hear that those real-time insights are what keep us the preferred platform for some of our longest-standing customers. The ability to know what is happening in your business—especially a virtual business—as near to real time as possible is invaluable for Wix and for its users.”

Josef Goldstein, Head of R&D, Big Data Platform, Wix

What’s Next for Wix and Confluent

Over the last several years, the Wix platform has seen significant growth in traffic. Migrating from open-source Kafka to Confluent Cloud has allowed the company to successfully scale its infrastructure to not only meet the needs of its expanding customer base but also deliver new, innovative developer capabilities.

With less operational complexity to manage, the backend infrastructure and data engineering platform teams have been able to focus on new technical challenges and business opportunities.

In the coming months and years, they plan to pursue more innovative use cases with Confluent, including:

• Self-serve data for complex streaming pipelines

• Scaling analytical insights to power generative AI chatbots and agentic workflows

• Analytical data looping into operational plane

• Streamlining data lake integration between Kafka topics and Iceberg tables with Tableflow

“We’re evangelizing data streaming as the central nervous system of the modern business throughout the org. As we expand adoption out to other lines of business and applications, we anticipate scaling our current footprint, while we continue to evolve our how we use real-time business intelligence & AI analytics.”

Josef Goldstein, Head of R&D, Big Data Platform, Wix

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