You are starting or rebuilding, and the two options in front of you are wildly far apart. One evening and a Wix or Squarespace subscription, or a quote for six thousand from someone who seemed to know what they were talking about. Everyone you ask has an opinion, and almost all of them are describing their own situation rather than yours.
The question that decides this is not your budget. It is what the site has to do, and how often it will change. A five-page site that shows who you are and takes an enquiry is a builder job, and paying thousands for one is money you will wish you had spent on photography. A site that has to connect to other systems, be published to constantly, or do something a template does not do is where hiring starts to pay, and doing it yourself becomes the expensive option in a way that only shows up in year two.
The five-minute test that decides it
Answer these five honestly, about the site you will have in two years rather than the one you need next week.
- Does it need to do anything beyond showing information and taking an enquiry? Bookings against real availability, accounts, payments, quoting, member areas, anything with rules.
- Does it need to connect to another system? Your CRM, your accounts package, your booking software, your stock, your property or job management system.
- How often will it change? Once a year is a different product from twice a week, and the second one is what a design system with page blocks is for.
- Who will change it? Somebody in your team, or you at eleven at night, or nobody and it will rot.
- Is being distinctive worth money to you? For some businesses looking like everyone else in their sector is genuinely fine. For others it is the whole point.
No to the first two, and rarely to the third: buy a builder. Yes to either of the first two, or a strong yes to the last one: get quotes for a company website built properly. Everything else in this article is detail underneath that.
Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress, honestly
| Squarespace | Wix | WordPress | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best at | Looking good with no design skill. The templates are the strongest of the three and it is hard to make an ugly site. | Doing more, with a bigger feature set: bookings, restaurant ordering, more control over layout, a large app market. | Going furthest. It runs everything from a five-page site to a large publication, and the ecosystem covers almost any requirement. |
| Worst at | Anything unusual. When you hit a limit there is often no way round it, and the limits arrive sooner than on the others. | Restraint. The freedom to place anything anywhere is how non-designers make a mess, and the app market is uneven. | Being left alone. It needs updating, and an unmaintained site is the single most common way small businesses get hacked. |
| Who runs it after launch | You, easily. This is its real strength. | You, with more to learn. | Someone, definitely. Either you on a schedule, or a maintenance arrangement you pay for. |
| Watch out for | Migration later is a rebuild: the design does not travel. | The same, plus an app bill that grows quietly. | The hosted service and the self-hosted software are different products with the same name, and people buy the wrong one. |
There is no wrong answer among these for an ordinary five-page site. Pick by which editor you find least annoying after an hour of actually using it, because that is what decides whether the site stays current.
One correction, because it derails this decision constantly: the argument between these three is not the same as the argument between a builder and a custom build. Two of the three can host a perfectly good business site for years, and the honest version of that comparison is in our guide to what a website costs.
When hiring is the cheaper answer
- When it has to connect to something. The moment your site must talk to a CRM, a booking system, an accounts package or a stock system, you are past what a builder does comfortably, and the workarounds cost more in fragility than the build costs in money.
- When you will publish often. A business shipping a landing page a month wants a library of on-brand blocks to assemble, not a fresh design decision every time. This is where the three-year arithmetic flips hardest.
- When the site has to do something. Bookings against real availability, quotes with rules, member areas, anything where being wrong costs money.
- When being distinctive matters commercially. If you are competing on craft or premium positioning, looking like a template is a real cost, even though it is one nobody puts on an invoice.
- When your time is the expensive part. Plenty of owners have spent four weekends on a builder to produce something they are not proud of. Four weekends is not free, and it is usually more than the difference in price.
The hybrid almost nobody offers you
There is a middle route, and it fits more service businesses than either extreme. You keep the builder, and pay a designer or a small studio for two or three days to make it genuinely yours: proper typography and colour, a real logo lockup, photography direction, the pages structured to sell rather than to describe, and the copy rewritten around what a customer is deciding.
Illustratively $1,500 to $6,000, and you keep every advantage of the builder: you can still edit everything, nothing breaks when you change it, and there is no developer between you and a price change. For a service business with an ordinary site, this is very often the highest-return option on the table, and it is rarely proposed because it is a small job for the person proposing it.
What each actually costs over three years
| Route | To get going | Per year after | Three-year total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Builder, done yourself | $0 to $500, plus your weekends | $200 to $600 in subscription and domain | $600 to $2,300 |
| Builder, with a designer for a few days | $1,500 to $6,000 | $200 to $800 including occasional help | $2,100 to $8,400 |
| Hired, brochure site | $3,000 to $15,000 | $600 to $2,400 in hosting, care and small changes | $4,800 to $22,200 |
| Hired, marketing site with a CMS | $15,000 to $75,000 | $1,800 to $7,200 | $20,400 to $96,600 |
Excludes photography and copywriting, which every route needs and which people consistently underestimate. Our guide to what a website costs breaks down the five things that move any of these numbers.
The column that matters is the third one, and it is the column people ignore at the start. A builder site that you never update is cheap and stays cheap. A builder site you fight with weekly, or pay a freelancer to change every month, quietly costs more than the thing you decided was too expensive. The full arithmetic, including what usually gets left out of a quote, is in our guide to what a website costs.
Not for you if
The decision you are actually making
You are choosing how much of this you want to own. A builder means you own all of it, including the evenings. Hiring means you own the outcome and someone else owns the work, at a price. The hybrid means you own the day-to-day and buy the judgement, which is the answer more often than either camp will tell you. Run the five questions, look at the three-year column rather than the first number, and be honest about who is actually going to update this thing in eighteen months.