Wix, Squarespace, or a custom website: an honest comparison

Let me get the awkward bit out of the way. I build custom websites for a living, which gives me every commercial reason to tell you that Wix and Squarespace are rubbish and you should pay me instead. I’m not going to do that, because it isn’t true, and because you’d smell it a mile off.

The honest position is more boring. Builders are the right choice for a lot of businesses and the wrong choice for others, and the trick is knowing which one you are before you sink a year into the wrong foundation. So here’s the fair version, from someone who’ll happily tell you to go and use Squarespace if that’s your answer.

First, the fair bit: builders are good now

There’s an old line, usually from people who sell custom sites, that website builders “can’t do SEO” and produce “toy” websites. That was arguably true a decade ago. It isn’t now.

In 2026, both Wix and Squarespace handle the fundamentals perfectly well: clean URLs, automatic sitemaps, editable page titles and meta descriptions, proper heading structure, mobile layouts. Wix has gone further still, adding native schema markup, an SEO dashboard, and even an “AI visibility” view that tracks how you show up in AI answers. A tidy builder site, set up with a bit of care, ranks on Google just fine.

They’re also pleasant to use, cheap to start, and get you online in an afternoon. Pretending otherwise would make me a liar. So the real question was never “are builders any good.” It’s “at what point does the convenience start to cost you something.”

When a website builder is the right call

Plenty of the time, honestly. If most of these describe you, stop reading and go sign up. You don’t need me:

• Your budget is tight. If the choice is between a £16-a-month Squarespace site and no site at all, the builder wins every time. A live, decent site beats a perfect one you can’t afford.
• Your needs are simple and stable. A few pages, your services, your hours, a contact form, maybe a gallery. If that’s the whole job and it won’t change much, a builder does it cleanly.
• You want to run it yourself. If you actually enjoy tweaking your own site and want to change a photo at 11pm without emailing anyone, builders are built for exactly that.
• You need it live this week. A custom build takes weeks and involves another human (me). A builder can be live tomorrow. Sometimes speed is the priority.

None of that is a consolation prize. For a huge share of small businesses, a well-made builder site is the correct decision, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

Where builders hold you back

Here’s the other side, and I’ll keep it fair. The problems with builders are rarely dramatic. Nothing breaks. It’s more that a few ceilings sit just above your head, and you don’t notice them until you try to stand up.

Page speed

Builders load a lot of general-purpose code to make their drag-and-drop editors work, and it shows. Independent testing in 2026 put Squarespace’s median mobile performance score around 30 out of 100, with Wix roughly double that. Both are still short of a lean, hand-built site that only ships the code it needs. On a fast connection you won’t notice. On a phone with two bars, a slow site loses visitors and a little search ranking with them.

SEO and schema limits

The fundamentals are covered, but the deeper controls aren’t always there. Squarespace, for instance, won’t let you edit your robots.txt, locks its default schema markup so you can’t extend it, and has no bulk redirect tool. For a simple site none of that matters. The day you’re seriously competing for search traffic, those locked doors start to matter. The same goes if you want to be quotable by AI, which leans heavily on rich, custom schema.

Template sameness

Squarespace offers around 150 templates; Wix, several hundred. That sounds like a lot until you realise thousands of businesses are choosing from the same set. Squarespace sites in particular have a recognisable house style: tasteful, and increasingly, everywhere. If looking distinct from your competitors is part of the point, a template you share with them is working against you.

Ownership and lock-in

This is the one people underestimate. You own your domain and your content, but you don’t own the site. It’s built inside the platform’s proprietary editor and can’t be exported and rehosted elsewhere. Leaving means rebuilding from scratch. You’re also renting forever: stop paying and the site goes dark.

A builder site is a house you rent, beautifully furnished. A custom site is one you own. Which is right depends entirely on how long you plan to live there.

Notice that none of these are dealbreakers on day one. They’re the tax you pay later, once the site is doing real work and you want more from it than it can give.

The real cost comparison nobody likes

Builders look cheaper, and month to month they are. Wix starts around £17 a month, Squarespace around £19 on an annual plan, climbing to £30 to £35 once you want the better features. Watch the small print, too: Squarespace’s entry plan skims a 2 to 3% cut off every sale you make, which adds up fast if you’re selling anything.

A custom site costs more up front: a real project fee, not a subscription. But the honest comparison isn’t month one, it’s over five years. Rent adds up. And if you outgrow a builder and have to rebuild custom anyway, you’ve paid twice: once for the builder years, once for the eventual rebuild. Sometimes the cheap option is only cheap until it isn’t.

That’s not an argument for always going custom. It’s an argument for being honest about the time horizon. A site you’ll replace in eighteen months should be cheap. A site that’s meant to be a serious, long-term asset is worth building once, properly.

How to decide honestly

Forget “which platform is best”. It’s the wrong question, and the answer is always “it depends.” Ask this instead: how hard is this site actually going to have to work for me?

If the answer is “not very. It just needs to exist, look tidy, and let people find my phone number,” then a builder is the sensible, grown-up choice. Spend the saved money on your actual business.

If the answer is “quite hard. It’s how I win customers, it competes for search traffic, it has to make a small operation look as good as the big ones, and I want to own it,” then the builder’s ceilings will start to press down on you, and a custom build earns its cost.

Most people already half-know which they are. The mistake is choosing the cheap option out of habit when the site is actually meant to be doing heavy lifting, or over-building a bespoke site for what is really a digital business card. Match the tool to the job and you rarely go wrong.

Common questions

Are Wix and Squarespace bad for SEO?

No. The myth that builder sites can’t rank is out of date. Both handle the fundamentals: clean URLs, sitemaps, editable titles and meta descriptions. The real limits are further down. Squarespace won’t let you edit robots.txt or your schema markup and has no bulk redirect tool, and both platforms tend to load more slowly than a lean custom build, which matters as your ambitions grow. For a simple local business, a well-set-up builder site ranks perfectly well.

Can I move my site off Wix or Squarespace later?

Your content and domain, yes. You can copy the words and images and point the domain elsewhere. The site itself, no. It’s built with the platform’s proprietary editor and can’t be exported and rehosted, so moving means rebuilding from scratch. That’s worth knowing going in, because a rebuild in two years costs more than starting on the right foundation once.

When is a custom website actually worth the money?

When the site is doing real work for the business: bringing in enquiries, competing for search traffic, representing you against bigger rivals. That’s when speed, ownership, and being distinctive start to pay for themselves. If the site is a digital business card that just needs to exist, a builder is fine and a custom build is overkill. Match the tool to what the site actually has to earn.

And to close the loop honestly: if you weigh all this up and custom is the right answer for you, that’s exactly what I do. Hand-built, fast, properly owned small-business sites. But I’d rather you reach that conclusion on the merits than because I talked you into it.