In 2018, I signed up with Wealthy Affiliate while looking for legitimate ways to build an online business. I wasn't looking for get-rich-quick schemes and intended to treat this new venture as an actual business with hard work and dedication.
Right away, I was concerned with what seemed to be a too-simplified approach to making money online, but honestly, was a complete newbie at the whole process and thought maybe they knew something I didn't. A lot has changed in the online world, and in 2023, creating a website, and writing some (hopefully) high-quality articles with affiliate links in them believing traffic (customers) will come and buy through them is not a reality. Any online business will tell you that getting traffic is HARD! Getting targeted traffic is even harder. To rank well in Google, there is a lot involved -- even with many low-competition long tail keywords. For this reason, I feel WA gets people's hopes up for a successful website, and therefore sales, without telling people that sustainable success often takes YEARS of work -- and for some, it never happens.
The community within WA is actually not bad at all. There are some genuinely helpful people and kind souls who are there to help you when you feel stuck, discouraged, or need fresh ideas about something. For some people, WA's 'social community' aspect could make their subscription worth it. However, their internal 'ranking system' for members leads many people to leave unhelpful and spammy comments in response to questions asked just to 'rank higher in the community.'
Another positive (for me) was having Jaaxy keyword research tool included in your membership. This is the ONLY reason I have kept my WA subscription to this point. Using Jaaxy I have been able to rank pretty well on some of my websites for different keywords and have had some success because of it. I like the interface and trust its results. Yes, I can get Jaaxy without WA but it's more expensive.
However, the absolute WORST part about Wealthy Affiliate is their included website hosting and customer service. OH MY GOODNESS --- PLEASE DO NOT use this service if you start a website. I just went through one hellish experience with our local plant nursery website and it led me to write this review for anyone reading.
WA servers are SLOOOOOOW. My websites performed absolutely terrible there, and as you know, this hurts the customer experience and Google rankings. So no big deal then, just transfer it to another host. Uh huh, that's where the problem is.
My new website host wanted to use a migration tool so that I could transfer my complete site over. With WA, this is not allowed. They have blacklisted plugins such as Jetpack, All in One WP Migration, etc. We also tried transferring it via SFTP and this also did not work because critical files were inaccessible. This led to me having a broken site on my new server, a skeleton of what it should have been without theme files, media files, plugins, etc. When I contacted Site Support about this issue, they very rudely told me none of this (migrating my site elsewhere) was allowed with them and all they would offer was a backup file that my new provider could restore on their end.
When I shared that file with my new host (Wordpress.com Business), they explained to me that many of the required files were still missing and the permissions for other files were wrong, and therefore, could not be restored without a ton of manual labor.
The ONLY reason my site got restored outside of Wealthy Affiliate hosting was due to the incredibly hard work of my new host's team and willingness to help me out of this crappy situation with WA. They saw how I was being treated and it made them pretty angry too. We both agreed that we had never seen such shady business from a hosting company before. I have migrated sites from other providers before and have never had them make it hard, until Wealthy Affiliate.
They made it outrageously difficult for me to take my site somewhere other than them. Many people would have had to make the choice to stay with crappy hosting and service at WA or lose their site because not every hosting company would be willing to put in this much work for their customers, as mine did.
Also, be aware that if you stop paying for Wealthy Affiliate Premium service, your website gets disabled and then deleted once it has been dormant for a period of time.
*****PLEASE DO NOT HOST ANY SITES WITH WEALTHY AFFILIATE ******
I hope & pray that people will read this and not have to go through what I've just gone through these past few days. It's truly unbelievable.
Be aware also that WA does not offer refunds. If you pay for one year's worth of subscription, it's a done deal. You're not satisfied? Too bad. There is just too much here that should cause you to pause.
There are other places that offer valuable affiliate marketing training with up-to-date, realistic expectations. Maybe consider them instead.