Answer
Wix, Squarespace or a custom website?
Website builders are a reasonable choice if you will maintain the site yourself and need fewer than five pages. They cost $20 to $50 a month forever, are slower on phones than hand-built pages, and you cannot take the site with you. A custom build costs more once and nothing monthly.
What builders genuinely do well
You can have something live this afternoon, change it yourself at eleven at night, and never talk to anyone. For a business that wants to fiddle with its own site, that is worth real money.
They also solve hosting, security updates and certificates, which are the boring parts that kill self-managed sites.
Where they cost you
Builders ship a lot of code to do a little, because the page has to be editable by anyone. On a phone on mobile data, that shows: heavier pages, slower first paint, and Core Web Vitals scores that are hard to fix because you do not control the output.
The other cost is the exit. The content is yours in principle, but the site is not portable: leaving means rebuilding. A ten-year customer and a one-month customer both pay the same monthly fee, forever.
When custom is worth it
Custom wins when you want the site to bring in work rather than exist, when you need more than about five pages, or when you would rather pay once than monthly.
It also wins when you will not maintain it. A builder is only cheap if the person editing it is free, and most trades discover their own time is the most expensive thing they own.
Builder versus custom, for a trade business
| Builder / Custom | |
|---|---|
| Up-front cost | Near zero / $499 to $1,399 |
| Monthly cost | $20 to $50, forever / $0 hosting, optional $49 care |
| Live in | An afternoon / Two to three weeks |
| Speed on a phone | Fair to poor / Fast, it is plain HTML |
| You edit it | Yes, easily / Yes, or a Care plan does |
| Take it elsewhere | No, you rebuild / Yes, the files are yours |
| Best for | One to four pages you maintain / Five or more pages that must be found |
Questions people ask
Is WordPress a better middle ground?
It can be, and it is what a lot of London trade sites run on. The catch is maintenance: plugins and core need updating, an unpatched site gets compromised, and the page builders most trade sites use are the main reason those sites are slow. It is a good option with someone maintaining it and a poor one without.
Can you move my Wix site to a custom one?
The content and photos, yes. The site itself cannot be exported, so it is rebuilt, which is a normal $499 to $1,399 build. Your domain moves with you as long as it is registered in your name.
Do builders hurt my Google ranking?
Not by themselves. Google has said plainly that builder sites can rank. What hurts is what people build on them: one long page instead of a page per service, slow heavy templates and duplicate content. Those are fixable on any platform.