Squarespace, Wix or custom built: which is right for you?

I build custom websites, so you can reasonably assume I’m about to tell you that website builders are terrible. I’m not, because for some businesses they’re the right answer and I’d rather say so than talk someone into a build they don’t need.

Here’s how I’d actually decide.

What you’re really choosing between

Website builders (Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy) give you templates and a drag-and-drop editor. You do the work, you pay monthly, everything lives on their platform.

WordPress with a page builder sits in the middle. Enormously flexible, enormously common, and it comes with plugins, updates and a fair amount of maintenance.

A custom build means someone designs and codes the site around your business specifically. It costs more up front and it’s built to fit.

Where builders genuinely win

Cost, at the start. £150 to £400 a year all in. If you’re testing whether a business idea has legs, spending £2,500 on a website first is the wrong order to do things in.

You can change things yourself. No emailing anyone to swap a photo. For businesses that update constantly, that matters.

It exists by Friday. If you need something online this week, a builder will get you there.

It’s a lot better than nothing. A tidy Squarespace site beats an empty domain, and it beats a half-finished custom project that stalled because nobody had time to write the copy.

If you’re pre-revenue, if the site is essentially a business card, or if you genuinely enjoy fiddling with it, use a builder. That’s not a consolation prize, it’s the right tool.

Where builders start to hurt

Speed. This is the big one. Builders ship a lot of code to cover every feature you might use, whether you use it or not. That’s why builder sites tend to be sluggish on a phone, and why speed there has a floor you can’t get under however carefully you optimise. Speed affects both your ranking and whether visitors stay.

The template becomes the boss. You start designing around what the template can do instead of what your business needs. Small compromises pile up, and the site ends up looking like the other four hundred businesses using the same theme.

SEO ceilings. You can do reasonable SEO on a builder. But page structure, URLs, structured data and technical control are all partly out of your hands, and that gap widens the more competitive your area is.

You’re renting. Prices change, features get retired, and getting your site off the platform later means rebuilding it. Your content is portable. Your site isn’t.

The time cost is invisible. “Free” costs a lot of evenings. If your hourly rate is £40 and you spend thirty hours building it, that’s £1,200 you’ve spent without noticing, plus the jobs you didn’t quote for.

Where a custom build earns its money

Custom is worth it when the website is doing real work rather than existing for completeness. Specifically:

• You compete on search. If customers find you by searching rather than by referral, the technical difference is a competitive difference.
• Speed matters to you. Custom builds can be genuinely fast, in a way builder sites can’t quite reach.
• You need it to do something. Bookings, logins, quoting tools, anything connected to software you already use. That’s web app territory.
• Your process is unusual. If explaining what you do needs a specific structure, a template will fight you the whole way.
• You’d rather not do it. Plenty of people can build a Squarespace site and simply don’t want to. That’s a completely legitimate reason to pay someone.

What about WordPress?

WordPress runs a huge share of the web and it’s a perfectly reasonable choice, particularly for content-heavy sites. Two things to go in with your eyes open about.

First, it needs looking after. Core updates, plugin updates, security. Either you do that or you pay someone to, and an unmaintained WordPress site is a liability rather than an asset.

Second, most WordPress small business sites are really page-builder sites, and they inherit the same speed problem as the hosted builders. “WordPress” on its own doesn’t tell you whether a site will be fast.

An honest way to decide

Ask yourself three questions.

Where do your customers come from? Mostly word of mouth and repeat work? A builder is probably fine. Mostly people searching who’ve never heard of you? The technical difference starts paying for itself.

What is one new customer worth? If it’s £50, be careful what you spend. If it’s £2,000, a website that brings in two extra jobs a year has paid for itself several times over.

Do you have the time, and will you actually spend it? Be honest. A builder site you never finish is worse than either option.

The route I’d suggest for most people

If you’re starting out: put something simple on a builder, get trading, and see where the enquiries actually come from. Buy your own domain and point it at the builder, so the domain is yours whatever happens next.

Once the business is established and you know that being found online matters to you, that’s the point where a custom build starts making sense. Not before.

If you’re at that point and want a straight answer about whether it’s worth it for your business specifically, tell me what you’re working with. If the honest answer is “stay on Squarespace for now”, I’ll tell you that instead of quoting you.