Wix or Squarespace vs a custom website

A builder like Wix or Squarespace is cheaper in the first year, and you can change anything on it yourself, whenever you like, at no extra cost. A custom site costs more up front, then nothing a month, and it is designed and written for you. Over five years the totals land closer than most people expect. The real differences are who does the work, who pays for changes, and whether you can ever take the site with you

I build custom sites, so weigh what I say with that in mind. Every outside price here is from the company's own page, and there is a section near the end on when a builder is the better choice

What each one costs over five years

Builders charge every month. A custom site charges once. Below are each builder's starter plan and the step up, at the yearly-billed price, with the website name counted where its price is known

A few things the table leaves out. Squarespace gives you the website name free for the first year on yearly plans only, then it renews at $20 a year, which is in its totals. Wix gives you a free year with your first premium plan, and I could not confirm what it renews at, so after that year its rows count the website name at $10.46, the at-cost price at Cloudflare, as every row without its own renewal price does. Wix Light does not include taking payments, and booking starts at Core. Squarespace Basic adds a 2% fee on sales through its online store

Read the other way, the table also says this: in year one a builder is far cheaper. Wix Light is $204 for the first year against $500 for my cheapest site. If the next twelve months are what you can afford, that matters more than a five-year total. There is more on how a one-time price adds up in the guide to a website with no monthly fee

Who builds it and who writes it

On a builder, you do. You pick a template, swap in your photos, write every word on every page, and work out the settings that help Google find you. Plenty of people enjoy that. Plenty of others start one and never quite finish it

Some people hire a designer to build on Wix, Squarespace or Showit. That gets you the design, and the monthly plan still runs underneath it

With me, I build it and I write it. We start with an hour on a call, I write every page from what you already have, and you tell me where I got your voice wrong. Changes before launch are not capped, and the whole thing takes one to two weeks

Changing it yourself, or paying for changes

This is where a builder genuinely wins, and I would rather say so plainly. On Wix or Squarespace you can log in at midnight and change anything, as often as you like, and it costs nothing beyond the plan you already pay for

My sites do not work that way. You get a month of free fixes after launch. After that, changes are $70 an hour, or $240 for four hours banked, and a whole new page is $150. Most changes are a photo, a price or a date, and those take minutes and come out of one hour. I quote anything bigger before I start

So here is the honest sum. If you bought four hours of changes every year, my multi-page site would come to about $2,252 over five years, more than any builder plan in the table. At one hour a year it comes to about $1,402, still under Wix Core or Squarespace Core

Whether you can take it with you

This is the part nobody reads until they want to leave. Here is what each company says in its own help pages

• Wix: "In order for your site to work properly, it needs to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers"
• Showit: "Showit designs and templates are exclusive to Showit hosting and are not offered to be exported or used with a different web host"
• Squarespace exports only in a WordPress format, and your style settings do not come with it. It also says "It's not possible to export content from one Squarespace site and import it into another"

None of that is hidden, and none of it is unusual for a builder. It does mean the design you paid for, or spent your weekends on, stays behind if you leave

A one-page or multi-page site I build is a folder of files on a free hosting account in your name. The full build runs on a small server that costs about $5 a month, and I pay it. Either way the website name is registered to you, you get every login, and if we ever part ways you keep all of it

A template is a website somebody else already has

Builders sell templates, and a template is made to be sold again and again. That is how the business works, and there is nothing underhand about it. It does mean the artist you are up against can buy the one you picked, and a bride comparing three makeup artists on her phone may see the same layout twice

A custom site is drawn around your work and written in your words. You can see what that looks like on the two sites I have launched, both for bridal makeup artists in East Tennessee

When a builder is the better choice

• Your budget is tiny. If $500 is out of reach this year, Wix Light at $204 for the year gets you online, and a custom site can come later
• You enjoy designing. If an evening spent arranging photos sounds like fun, a builder gives you that for the price of the plan
• You change things every week. A new flash sheet every Monday or a calendar of pop-ups is a site you should be editing yourself, and that is worth more than skipping a monthly fee

If none of those is you, and you would rather hand the whole thing to somebody and get back to your clients, that is the job I do

Questions people ask next