Advice
Wix, Squarespace or a web designer: an honest comparison
A builder platform is sometimes the right answer and we will say so. But the subscription is not the real price, and there is one clause worth checking whichever route you take.
We build websites for a living, so you can reasonably expect us to say “never use a website builder”. We are not going to, because it would not be true. For some businesses Squarespace or Wix is the correct answer and paying us would be a waste of money.
Here is where the line actually falls.
What the builders are genuinely good at
They have got a lot better, and the snobbery about them is out of date. A modern Squarespace site is responsive, reasonably quick, secure by default and updated without you thinking about it. For roughly £150–£400 a year you get hosting, software, SSL and templates designed by competent people.
If you are pre-revenue, testing an idea, running something part-time, or genuinely enjoy fiddling with this sort of thing, that is a good deal and you should take it.
The cost that is not on the price list
The subscription is not really the price. Your time is.
Building a five-page site yourself, properly, with the words written, the images sized, the pages structured and everything checked on a phone, realistically takes somewhere between twenty and forty hours if you have not done it before. Most of that is not the software. It is staring at an empty About page trying to describe your own business, which is genuinely difficult and which almost everybody underestimates.
Put your own hourly rate against thirty hours. For most working business owners the DIY route costs more than paying somebody, and it is paid in evenings.
There is a second version of this cost that is worse: the site that never gets finished. A half-built website with a placeholder page and no contact details, live for eight months because there was never a quiet weekend, is the most common outcome of the DIY route and it is worse than having no website at all.
Where DIY sites tend to fall down
They look like the template
Not badly designed, but generically designed. Which is fine for a lot of businesses, and a real problem if your customer is choosing between you and two competitors partly on who looks more established.
The writing is the giveaway
Far more than the design. “We pride ourselves on providing a professional and reliable service to all our customers” appears on tens of thousands of small business websites and tells a reader nothing. It is what people write when they are stuck, and being stuck is the normal condition of writing about your own business.
The structure is built for you, not for a customer
Self-built sites tend to have one page called “Services” listing eight things. That gives a customer nothing to read and gives Google nothing to distinguish. Eight separate searches, one page.
It gets heavy
Full-size photographs straight off a phone, three apps for things that did not need an app, a slideshow nobody asked for. Speed drifts away a bit at a time and nobody notices, because you always load it from the same phone on the same wifi.
Use a builder if
- You are testing whether the business works at all
- The website is a formality rather than a source of customers
- You genuinely have the time and quite like doing it
- Budget is the binding constraint and there is no way round it
Pay someone if
- Customers compare you against competitors before ringing
- One customer is worth more than the cost of the site
- You have been meaning to do it yourself for over a year
- Writing about your own business fills you with dread
- You would rather spend those thirty hours on the actual job
The thing nobody mentions: getting out
A builder platform site is not portable. If you leave Wix, you do not take the website with you. You take the text and the images and start again. That is not a scandal, it is how the product works, but it is worth knowing before you spend three years building something on it.
A WordPress site can be moved between hosts. Whichever route you take, one rule matters more than the rest: make sure the domain is registered in your name. The website can be rebuilt. The domain, if somebody else holds it, is genuine leverage over your business.
The honest summary
A well-built Squarespace site beats a badly-built custom one, every time. A well-built custom site beats a template, especially when it comes to being specific about what you do and where.
The real question is not which platform. It is whether the website is going to be finished, whether the words are going to be written, and whether it will be specific enough to be worth finding. Those are the things that decide whether it works, and the platform is a long way down the list.
