Wix or a professional web designer?

The answer isn't "always hire a professional". Wix and Squarespace are good tools, and for some businesses they're the right call. For others they cost more than they save. This guide lays out what the builders are good at, where they trip you up, and how to tell which side of the line you're on.

The short answer

Use a DIY builder if you need something online this week, your budget is near zero, and the site is a placeholder rather than a serious sales tool. Hire a professional once the website has to bring in customers, when your time is worth more than the hours a build eats, or when you want a site that loads fast, ranks, and looks like nobody else's. Most local businesses cross that line sooner than they expect.

What Wix and Squarespace are good at

Credit where it's due. These tools have improved enormously, and for the right job they're excellent value. They're cheap to start, you can have a page live the same day, and you don't need to understand hosting or code. If you're testing an idea, running a side project, or just need a tidy single page with your details and a contact form, a builder does the job and there's no shame in it. Anyone who tells you a template site is always wrong is selling something.

Where the builders cost you

• Your time. "Free" and "easy" are the marketing, not the reality. Getting a template to stop looking like a template, writing your own copy, and making it behave on mobile takes most people 20 to 30 hours. That's the real price, and it's covered in more detail in our guide to how long a website takes.
• Sameness. Templates are popular by definition, so your site ends up looking like a hundred others in your trade. When a customer is choosing between you and a competitor, looking interchangeable isn't where you want to be.
• Speed and SEO. Builder sites carry a lot of extra code to make the drag-and-drop editor work, which slows pages down. Google cares about speed, especially on mobile, and a heavy site is a quiet handicap on how well you rank.
• The subscription that never ends. A builder is rent, not ownership. Stop paying and the site goes dark. Over three years a usable plan often costs more than a one-off professional build, a sum we break down in the website cost guide.
• Lock-in. You generally can't export a Wix or Squarespace site and move it elsewhere. If you outgrow the platform, you start again from scratch.

What a professional adds

Hiring someone isn't just paying for a nicer-looking page. You're paying for judgement: what to put first, what to leave out, how to guide a visitor towards getting in touch. A professional build is designed around your business rather than dropped into a template, coded to load quickly, set up so Google can find it, and built to be responsive on the phones where most of your local customers are. And when something needs changing later, there's a person who knows your site rather than a help centre and a queue.

There's an ownership difference too. A site built properly is yours: the code, the content, and the domain, so you're never held hostage by a platform's pricing or policies. That principle runs through everything we do, and it's why we spell it out on our web design page.

How to decide

Skip the theory and answer these honestly:

• Does the site need to win you customers, or just exist? If real buying decisions happen on it, that's a job for a professional. If it's a placeholder, a builder is fine.
• What is your time worth? Thirty hours fighting a template is thirty hours not spent running your business. Put a number on that before you call DIY the cheap option.
• Do you need to be found on Google? If customers search for what you do, speed and SEO matter, and that's where builders struggle most. We cover why in the website versus social media guide.
• Will you keep paying the subscription forever? If not, factor in what happens to the site when you stop.

Where we fit in

We build websites, so we're not neutral, and it's fair to say so. We build custom sites for a flat £495, and you own the result outright. That said, if you're pre-revenue and just need a page up this week, a builder is the sensible start. If you're already on Wix or Squarespace and it isn't bringing in enquiries, we can fix or redesign the site you have without moving platform.

The other half of the comparison is what happens after launch. A builder subscription keeps your site online and nothing more; the ongoing local SEO and review work is a separate job either way. We run that on a monthly plan from £295 a month, and you can add it later rather than deciding now.

Already on a builder? Run your site through our free AI search audit to see how Google and AI tools read it, with a score out of 100 and a list of fixes.