Wix, Squarespace, WordPress or custom: an honest comparison

Every comparison of website platforms is written by someone with a preferred answer, and this one is no exception — we build custom sites. So the case against custom is included below, stated as strongly as we can make it, because a comparison that only criticises the other options is an advertisement.

The four options at a glance

Wix and Squarespace

All-in-one platforms: hosting, editor, templates and support in one subscription. Genuinely good products, and for a certain kind of business they are the correct answer.

Where they win

• Nothing to maintain. No updates, no plugin conflicts, no security patching. For a business with nobody to look after a site, this is worth a great deal.
• Genuinely easy editing. Drag and drop, and it works.
• Predictable cost. One monthly bill.
• Fast to launch. A simple site can be live in a weekend.

Where they cost you

• You cannot take the site with you. Content exports; the site does not. Moving means rebuilding, which is a lock-in whether or not it is intended as one.
• Performance ceiling. Both platforms ship a lot of JavaScript regardless of what your page contains. You can improve their scores; you cannot make them fast in the way a lean site is fast.
• Limits appear at the edges. Custom structured data, unusual URL structures and specific redirect behaviour all get harder than they should be.
• The price goes up. Introductory rates, then renewals, then per-feature add-ons.

Choose it if

You want to build it yourself this month, you have nobody to maintain anything, and your site is a brochure rather than a lead-generation asset you plan to optimise for years.

WordPress

The most widely used CMS on the web, powering a very large share of all sites. Self-hosted, open source, endlessly extensible.

Where it wins

• Complete control. Any structure, any feature, any integration.
• Best-in-class SEO tooling. The plugin ecosystem here is genuinely excellent.
• Portable. Your files and database are yours; any host will take them.
• Enormous talent pool. Almost any developer can work on it, which protects you if your supplier disappears.
• Excellent for publishing. If you produce content regularly, the editorial workflow is mature.

Where it costs you

• Maintenance is not optional. Core, theme and plugin updates, indefinitely. Skipped updates are the leading cause of hacked small business sites.
• Plugin sprawl. Fifteen plugins is fifteen codebases you did not write, any of which can break, be abandoned, or move to a paid tier.
• Speed takes work. A page-builder theme plus a dozen plugins is slow by default and requires deliberate effort to fix.
• Security surface. A public login page on the most-targeted platform on the web.

Choose it if

You publish frequently, you have several people who need to manage content, or you need a specific integration that exists as a mature plugin — and you are budgeting for maintenance rather than hoping to avoid it.

Shopify

If you sell products online as your primary business, this is usually the answer and the comparison stops here. Payments, inventory, tax, shipping and fraud handling are solved problems on Shopify and expensive problems everywhere else.

It is a poor fit for a service business that sells nothing online — you would be paying for a commerce engine to publish five pages of text.

Custom builds

A site built with a modern framework, generating pre-rendered pages, deployed to fast hosting. This is what we build, so read the next section with that in mind.

Where it wins

• Speed. Pre-rendered HTML with no plugin overhead is a different class of fast, and it stays fast because nothing accumulates.
• Nothing to exploit. No database and no login page means most common attacks have nothing to attack.
• Complete technical control. Exact structured data, exact URLs, exact metadata.
• No plugin decay. Nothing to break when a third-party author abandons their project.
• Cheap to host. Often free or near-free, because serving static files is trivial.

The honest case against it

• You cannot redesign a page yourself. Layout changes need whoever maintains it. If you want to move a section on a Sunday afternoon, this is the wrong choice.
• Smaller talent pool. More developers can work on WordPress than on any given framework. This is a real continuity risk and worth asking about.
• Content editing needs building. Unless an editing layer is wired up, updates go through your supplier — which is fine if changes are rare and frustrating if they are not.
• More dependent on the relationship. A good arrangement is excellent; a bad one is harder to leave than a WordPress site you can hand to any developer.

Choose it if

Speed, search performance and low maintenance matter more to you than editing layouts yourself, and you are comfortable with an ongoing relationship with whoever maintains it.

How to actually decide

1. 01Count last year's changesHow many times did you genuinely need to change something? Under five a year points away from a full CMS; weekly publishing points firmly toward one.
2. 02Decide who maintains itIf nobody will, choose a platform with no maintenance — a builder, or a static custom site with a care plan. WordPress without an owner degrades into a liability.
3. 03Decide how much the site mattersA brochure that satisfies procurement has different requirements from a site that is your main source of customers. The second justifies caring about speed and structured data; the first may not.
4. 04Ask what leaving looks likeWhatever you choose, know the exit. Which parts are portable, which are not, and what you would take with you.