At some point, almost every small business owner asks themselves whether they should just build their own website on Wix or Squarespace. The platforms have spent a lot of money making that feel like an obvious yes. And honestly, they’re not entirely wrong. You can get something live. The question is whether what you end up with actually does anything for your business, and that part they tend to be a little quieter about.
I’ve looked at enough of these sites to tell you: usually it doesn’t.
What the Ads Are Selling vs. What You’re Actually Getting
The pitch is always the same. Small monthly fee, pick a template you kind of like, and you’re basically done by the weekend. And if you genuinely just want to swap your logo in, update the copy, and leave everything else exactly where it is, that can work. I’ll give them that.
But that’s almost never what actually happens.
What happens is you get into it, something doesn’t look quite right, so you start moving things around. Then the layout doesn’t cooperate. The font sizing is off and you can’t figure out why. The mobile version looks completely different from the desktop. You spend an hour trying to fix one thing and break two others. And at some point you’ve put way more time into this than you planned and you still don’t have what you pictured.
That part doesn’t make it into the ad.
What We Find When Clients Show Us Their Wix Sites
We’ve had clients come to us after building their own sites on Wix or Squarespace, and the conversation is almost always the same opener. They say something like, “I know something’s wrong with it, I just can’t tell what.” So we take a look.
What we find is usually a mess, and I mean that kindly. There are multiple sections on the page all tagged as the most important heading when there should really only ever be one. (Quick explanation on why that matters: think of it like a book where every single chapter is labeled “Chapter 1.” Search engines use that heading structure to understand what your page is about, and when everything’s labeled the same way, they can’t make sense of it.) Under that, there’s no real structure at all. The fonts are too big. The color combinations don’t have enough contrast for a lot of people to read comfortably. Pages look like they were put together on three different days by three different people with three different ideas about what the site should be. And almost always, at least one link that goes nowhere.
None of that happened because the business owner wasn’t trying. It happened because design has actual rules, and most people don’t know them, and Wix is not going to stop you from breaking them.
We also had a client come to us who specifically wanted us to build their site in Wix. Not themselves, they wanted us to do it there so they could go in and edit things on their own later. Totally reasonable. We started on it and pretty quickly realized it wasn’t going to work. What they needed design-wise was just outside what the platform could support. So we had an honest conversation, and convinced them to let us build it in WordPress instead.
The Cost Comparison Nobody Actually Does
Most business owners look at $17 to $35 a month for Wix or Squarespace, compare it to what a professionally built website would cost upfront, and decide the math is obvious. It usually isn’t, but the only way to know is to understand what a professional website actually costs and what you’re getting for it.
It isn’t, really.
A WordPress site built with a page builder like Elementor needs hosting, which runs about $10 to $30 a month depending on the provider, and an Elementor license that comes out to around $60 to $100 per year. Add that up and you’re sitting in basically the same monthly range as Wix. Sometimes lower.
So the platform itself isn’t where the savings are. What you’re paying for on Wix or Squarespace is the convenience of getting started without a developer. That’s a real value if you’re using it for what it was designed for. But if you’re fighting the design constraints, or the site isn’t ranking, or you’re trying to grow into something it can’t support, that convenience starts costing you more than you saved.
Where Wix and Squarespace Actually Struggle
Search engine performance and design flexibility. Those are the ceilings, and they’re real ones.
On the search side, Wix and Squarespace both have SEO settings you can fill out and they’re not completely useless. But research comparing WordPress to Wix consistently shows WordPress sites ranking better in organic search, and a big part of that comes down to how each platform handles the technical foundation underneath your site. Things like page speed, code quality, and how cleanly Google can read through your content structure. If you’re counting on your website to get found, that gap matters more than it might sound.
On the design side, you can customize within the template but you can’t always get it to do what you actually want. And as your business grows and you want to add new features or sections that the template never anticipated, the options thin out fast. WordPress runs over 40% of all websites on the internet largely because it’s built to scale with almost anything. Wix has a much shorter ceiling before you’re stuck.
Okay, So When Does Wix Actually Make Sense?
I’m not going to pretend these platforms are never the right call. That wouldn’t be honest.
If you’re early in your business, you need something live quickly, and you’re genuinely okay with choosing a template and not pushing it very far, then go for it. Pick something you like, put in your information, and launch. You’ll have a real website up fast without a big upfront cost and that version of the story works fine.
The version that doesn’t work is when you start with that plan and then slowly try to turn the template into something it was never designed to be. At some point you’ve spent 40 hours fighting it and you’re still not happy with it. The thing that was supposed to be the cheap option still cost you, just in time instead of money.
What Clients Notice When They Switch to a Custom Site
The thing that surprises people most isn’t the design. It’s the cost. Not because it’s expensive, but because it’s so close to what they were already paying on Wix or Squarespace. That one lands differently every time.
The other thing that catches people off guard is how easy it actually is to use on the backend. There’s this assumption that a professionally built website must be complicated to maintain, that you’d need to call someone every time you want to change a sentence or swap out a photo. That’s not how we build. We use Elementor specifically because it’s genuinely easy to learn, and before we hand anything over we make sure clients actually know how to use it. Most of them are in there editing things on their own within the first session.
And then there’s just the way the site looks. The consistency from one page to the next. The spacing that makes sense. The fonts that work together instead of competing with each other. The whole thing feels like someone sat down and thought about it. Because we did.
That’s what the difference between something designed and something assembled actually looks like.
So Should You Build Your Website on Wix or Squarespace?
If you need a website that ranks in search, represents your business the way you want it to, and can grow as you do, a template builder probably isn’t where you want to land long term.
If you need something quick to bridge the gap while you get started, and you’re genuinely keeping it simple, it can work. Just go in knowing what you’re signing up for.
And if your site already exists and it’s not doing what you need it to do, the platform you built it on might be part of the reason.
If you’ve decided to go the professional route, knowing what to look for before you talk to anyone is worth reading through first. We help businesses figure out what they actually need and then build something that delivers it. If that sounds like a conversation worth having, reach out to Guerrilla Bee.
