Wix, Squarespace or a web designer? An honest comparison

I design websites for a living, and for a business that early a builder is still my answer. You will have something respectable online inside a month, and you will not have spent real money on a site you might scrap by Christmas.

The point where a builder starts costing you more than it saves is fairly specific. It arrives when one new customer is worth a few hundred pounds, when you have more than one service or town to rank for, or when your own hours have become the scarcest thing in the business. Below that line the maths favours the builder. Above it, the ceiling on what a hosted platform lets you control stops being a design opinion and starts showing up in your enquiry count.

Where builders genuinely win

Builders are not a compromise in every situation. There are four cases where I think they are the correct choice, not the cheap one.

• You are testing an idea. Nobody should pay a designer to validate demand. Put up four pages, run £200 through Google Ads, and find out whether anyone wants the thing before anyone designs a brand around it.
• One location, one service, low competition. A mobile dog groomer covering three villages does not need custom architecture. She needs a phone number, a price list, photos and a Google Business Profile.
• You actually enjoy fiddling with it. Some owners like editing their own site on a Sunday evening. If that is you, a builder gives you a fast feedback loop and I would only get in the way.
• The budget is genuinely tight. £900 spent on a builder site plus a decent camera phone and £500 of local ads will beat £1,400 spent on the cheapest custom site you can find.

What builders are not is free. They are cheap in pounds and expensive in your hours, and most people costing this up forget to price the second part.

The comparison, line by line

Figures below are for a small UK service business with somewhere between five and fifteen pages. Builder prices are from mid-2026 and they move, so check before you rely on them.

Read the last row carefully, because it is the one designers skip. Werehouse Media is me. If Wix goes down at 11pm someone is awake and working on it, and if your site goes down at 11pm you are emailing me and I am probably asleep. That is a real trade you are making for the control you get everywhere else.

What you cannot change on a hosted builder

Both Wix and Squarespace let you paste code into the head on their paid plans, and both handle 301 redirects. The limits are not in the settings panel, they are underneath it.

Server response. Time to first byte is set by their shared infrastructure and your position in it. On a hand-built static site served from a CDN edge, first byte is usually 50 to 200ms and it is something I can attack. On a builder it is a number you observe.

The platform's own JavaScript. A builder ships its editor runtime, animation library and analytics to every visitor whether your page uses them or not, which is frequently 400KB to 1.5MB before your content loads. You cannot delete code you did not add. This is why builder sites so often pass on desktop and fail on a mid-range Android.

The markup the template generates. Heading order, how deeply your content is nested, whether a "section title" comes out as an h2 or a styled div, all decided by the template. Usually fine. Occasionally it means your most important page has three h1s and no way to fix it.

Add to that partial control of structured data beyond what the SEO panel exposes, no access to server headers or cache rules, no log files to see how Google is actually crawling you, and redirects that have to be listed one at a time rather than pattern-matched. None of it is fatal. All of it is friction, and friction only matters when someone is beating you by a small margin. If you want the detail on that, I have written the longer version in why website speed costs you customers.

The tipping points where a designer pays for itself

The argument for hiring someone is arithmetic, not taste. Five things move it.

Your leads are worth more than about £200 each. A £4,000 site needs to produce twenty extra customers over three or four years to break even. For a dental practice at £600 lifetime value, or a bathroom fitter at £4,000 a job, it needs two. For a £25 haircut it needs 160, which is a different conversation entirely.

You have more than one service or location. This is the most common reason people outgrow a builder. Six services across four towns is twenty-four real search intents, and one page listing everything ranks for none of them properly. Building those pages so each one is genuinely useful, cross-linked and easy to update is architecture work, and architecture is exactly where builders get tiring.

Your local market is saturated. If there are forty plumbers competing in your city and the top five all have decent sites, the small margins are all that is left: page speed, internal linking, review schema, how quickly a new page gets indexed. Where nobody local has bothered, none of that matters yet and you should not pay for it. Have a look at how I approach SEO before deciding which situation you are in.

The site has to fit how you work. A garage needs a booking form that knows its ramp diary. A dental practice needs online enquiries to arrive in the practice management system rather than an inbox. This is where builders get genuinely expensive, because you end up paying £30 a month for an app that half solves it. I have written up what a booking flow shaped around a real diary has to handle in the garage booking article.

Your time is the constraint. Sixty hours of your evenings is not free. If your billable rate is £45 an hour, a self-built site cost you £2,700 in unbilled time and you still own something you have to keep maintaining. Some owners want those hours back badly enough that this alone settles it.

The middle path, and what it actually costs

The middle path is a small, properly built site rather than a big one: a one-page build at £495, designed and written for you, owned outright, with no subscription holding it hostage. It costs less over three years than most builder plans and takes none of your weekends.

Builder now, custom later is a sound plan. I recommend it regularly. Just go in knowing it is a rebuild, not a migration.

Wix does not offer a full site export. Squarespace offers a limited one that carries pages, text, images and a single blog, but not the design. So when the time comes, the content transfers and everything else is done again from scratch. Realistically that is from £1,800 for a multi-page rebuild, a few days of mapping every old URL to its new one, and a fortnight or two of rankings moving about while Google reprocesses the site. My redesign without losing rankings piece covers the redirect map in detail.

Two things make that future cheaper. Own your domain at a registrar you control rather than through the builder, and keep your written content somewhere outside the platform as you go. Doing both costs you nothing now and saves a fortnight later.

The wrong reason to move off a builder is that a designer told you it was unprofessional. The right reason is that you have a specific thing you need the site to do and the platform will not let you do it.

I turn work down over this most months. If someone comes to me with a two-week-old business, no proof of demand and £1,500, taking the money would be the wrong outcome for both of us. They need customers before they need craft. I would rather they came back in a year with a revenue figure and a real problem to solve. You can see what I do and what it costs and decide for yourself whether you are at that point.

Three questions I get asked

Is Wix bad for SEO?

No. Wix sites index fine and give you titles, descriptions, alt text, clean URLs and a redirect table, which covers most of what a small site needs. What you cannot reach is the layer underneath: server response, the platform's own JavaScript, and the markup the template produces. In an uncompetitive market that gap rarely decides anything. In a saturated one it can be the difference between position four and position one.

Can I move a Wix or Squarespace site to a custom one later?

Yes, but you rebuild rather than migrate. Budget from about £1,800 for a multi-page rebuild, keep every old URL mapped to a new one with a 301, and expect a few weeks of movement in the rankings afterwards. Nothing about it is difficult if the redirects are done properly.

How much should a small business site cost in England?

From £495 for a single-page site, and £1,795 upwards for a multi-page site from a one-person studio once keyword research, service or location pages and conversion work are part of the scope. Under about £1,000 a builder is usually the better use of the money. The full breakdown is in how much a website costs in the UK.

So which one

Write down what one new customer is worth to you and how many you want next year. If the site needs to find you five customers, build it yourself on Squarespace and spend the saved money on getting found. If it needs to find you fifty, in a market where other people are already trying, the technical margin and the hours are worth paying for.

Either way the site is not the point. The point is whether the right people find you and get in touch, and there is more than one honest route to that.