Squarespace, Wix, Or Someone Like Me: An Honest Comparison

I build websites for a living, so you should read this knowing I have an interest in the conclusion. I'm going to try to be straight anyway, including about the cases where you should skip me entirely and go build it yourself in a weekend.

Those cases are real and there are more of them than people in my position usually admit.

Build it yourself when these are true

You can write. Not professionally — you just need to be someone who can explain your own business in plain sentences without hating the process. The writing is the actual work. If that part doesn't frighten you, the rest of a builder is drag and drop.

You have a weekend, and then a few evenings. The first day gets you something. The evenings after are the ones nobody warns you about: fixing how it looks on a phone, working out why the form doesn't send, replacing the template photos. Budget more than you think.

What you need is small. A few pages, your services, some photos, a contact form, a map. This is squarely what builders are for and they do it well.

Nobody needs to log in and no money changes hands on the site. The moment either of those is true, the calculation changes.

You'd rather spend time than money. Legitimate position, especially starting out. Just be honest that it is a trade and not a saving.

If those are all true, go and do it. Genuinely. You'll get something decent, you'll understand your own business better for having written it out, and you can always hand it to someone later.

Don't build it yourself when these are true

Your time is worth more than the fee. If you bill three hundred dollars for an afternoon's work, a weekend and six evenings is thousands of dollars of your own time. People forget to count this because it doesn't leave the bank account.

Money has to move on the site. Taking a card means refunds, failed charges, receipts, disputes and what happens when the processor has a bad morning. Builders will sell you a payments feature. What they don't sell is the thinking about what happens when it goes wrong, which is the part that matters.

People have to log in. Accounts mean passwords, resets, permissions, and somebody's personal details now being your legal responsibility. This is the biggest single jump in difficulty there is.

You'd be doing it instead of the actual job. The classic failure isn't a bad site. It's a half-finished site that stays half-finished for two years because every time you sit down to work on it, something more urgent happens. A site that's eighty percent done is worse than no site, because it's live.

You've already tried and stopped. If there's a draft sitting in an account you haven't opened since spring, that's information. It isn't a character flaw; it's just evidence about how this goes.

What the monthly fee actually buys

Worth being precise, because it's often misunderstood in both directions.

You're paying for hosting, which is close to free at this scale and not really the point. You're paying for the editor, which is the actual product and is genuinely good. You're paying for templates, for a domain sometimes, and for support.

What you should know is that the advertised price is rarely the one you end up on. The cheap tier usually can't take payments, or puts limits on what you can do, and the plan with the things you'll actually want is a tier or two up. Check that before you start, not after you've built it.

And the site lives inside their system. That's not a scandal — it's the deal — but it means moving later is a rebuild rather than a transfer. Worth knowing going in.

What hiring me actually buys

Being equally precise about my side.

You're buying the writing, which is most of it. You're buying the decisions — what pages exist, what's on the homepage, what gets cut. You're buying the setup nobody enjoys: the domain in your name, business email, the Google listing done properly. And you're buying someone who'll still make a change in eighteen months.

You're not buying better hosting. You're not buying a technical advantage that a builder can't match for a five-page brochure site — anyone who tells you otherwise about a small site is overselling. For a straightforward site the difference is the thinking and the writing, not the technology.

Where the technology genuinely does diverge is further up: bookings with deposits and reminders wired together, customer accounts, payments with a real database behind them. That's a different category of work and builders aren't trying to compete there.

The middle option nobody mentions

You can build it yourself and hire someone for the parts you can't do.

Put up the builder site this weekend. Then pay someone to write the words, or to set the Google listing up properly, or to wire in booking and payment. You get moving immediately and you spend money only where you're actually stuck.

I'd rather do that job for you than have you not have a website at all, and it's a perfectly sensible way to start. The one thing I'd insist on either way: register the domain in your own name, whoever builds it.

How I'd actually decide

Two questions.

Does money or a login have to happen on this site? If yes, hire someone. Not necessarily me — but someone.

Will you actually finish it? Be honest. Look at what else you've started. If the answer is no, the builder isn't cheaper, because an unfinished site costs the same as an expensive one and does less.

If it's no to the first and yes to the second, build it yourself and don't let anyone make you feel bad about it. Spend the money you saved on getting your Google listing right instead, which for a local business will do more than either option here.

And if you've read this and you're somewhere in the middle, tell me what you're trying to do. If the answer is that you should go and use a builder, I'll say so. It costs me nothing to tell you that, and it saves us both the alternative.