An honest look at all four options for a small business. Real costs, including what your time is worth. When DIY makes sense and when it does not. And where a fast, fixed-price build fits in.
This is the question most people ask when they decide they need a website: Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, or get someone to build it? You will hear strong opinions on every side. The honest answer is that each option has its place, and the right choice depends on your budget, how much time you have, your confidence with technology, and what you actually need the site to do.
Below is a plain walkthrough of each, including what people usually underestimate about cost and effort.
Wix is a drag-and-drop builder aimed at people who have never made a website. You sign up, pick a template, and drag things around until it looks like what you want. There is no hosting to set up. When you publish, it goes live automatically.
The free plan is not suitable for a real business. It gives you a Wix web address (yourbusiness.wixsite.com/something), puts a Wix banner at the top of your site, and generally signals that this is not a professional operation. You need a paid plan to connect your own domain and remove the Wix branding. Paid plans in 2026 start at around £11 a month and rise to around £25 a month for business features. You will also pay for your domain separately (roughly £10 to £15 a year).
Some features, such as appointment booking and email marketing, are add-ons that cost extra.
Where Wix falls short: page speed. Many Wix sites load slowly, especially on phones, because the platform adds a lot of code behind the scenes that you cannot remove. Google uses page speed as a ranking factor for local search, and a slow site loses visitors before they have seen anything you wrote. You also have no control over the underlying code, which limits what you can do as your business grows.
Squarespace is Wix's closest competitor. The templates tend to look more polished from the start, and the editor is slightly simpler to get to grips with. It is a particularly popular choice for photographers, makers, restaurants and anyone whose business is visually led, because images look good with little effort.
Pricing is similar to Wix, around £13 to £23 a month for a plan with meaningful business features (2026 prices). You pay separately for your domain.
Where Squarespace falls short: SEO flexibility and platform lock-in. Like Wix, you cannot change what the platform generates in terms of code structure, which limits how much you can optimise for search. Moving away from Squarespace to another platform later is more disruptive than it sounds. You are also at the mercy of Squarespace's pricing decisions.
This is where things get confusing, because WordPress means two quite different things depending on context.
WordPress.com is a hosted service, closer to Wix and Squarespace. You sign up and they run everything. The free plan is very limited. Paid plans start cheaply but you need a fairly expensive tier before you can install your own plugins or edit your theme properly. At that point the pricing is not far off a decent managed host running the other version.
WordPress.org is the open-source software itself, downloaded for free and installed on your own web hosting. This is what most web designers mean when they say they build WordPress sites. It powers a very large portion of the websites on the internet and for good reason: it is flexible, well-documented, and supports thousands of plugins covering almost any feature you could want.
The self-hosted version costs: web hosting (roughly £60 to £120 a year from reputable UK providers like SiteGround or Kinsta), a domain (around £10 to £15 a year), and any premium theme or plugin costs (often £50 to £200 as one-off or annual fees). That is the bill side. The harder side is maintenance.
WordPress requires regular updates to the core software, to every plugin, and to your theme. When updates clash with each other, things break. Security vulnerabilities in plugins are a real and regular problem for unmanaged WordPress sites. A site that was fine in January can be hacked by March if nobody is watching it. This is not an exaggeration and it catches a lot of small business owners out.
Where WordPress falls short: the ongoing cost and maintenance burden is higher than most people expect going in. And WordPress sites, especially freshly installed ones with a popular theme, tend not to be fast out of the box. Good WordPress performance requires real work on top of the platform.
A custom build means a designer or developer creates your site from a clean starting point rather than on top of a big platform. The result is typically faster, lighter, and free from the ongoing overhead of managing a platform's update cycles.
There is a wide range here. A one-person freelancer in the UK might charge anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand pounds. A studio doing this efficiently can deliver to fixed timelines at known prices. Our own fixed-price builds start at £1,499 for a standard five-page site, live in seven days. Express is £1,999 for up to seven pages in five days. Drop Everything is £2,999 for up to ten pages in 48 hours.
With a custom site, the domain is yours, the code is yours, and the site is not tied to any platform's monthly subscription or pricing changes. You also get a real person writing your copy and checking the result before it goes live, not a template you filled in.
Where a custom build is not the right answer: if your budget is very tight and Wix genuinely meets your needs, there is no obligation to spend more. A well-maintained Wix or Squarespace site is better than no site. And if you enjoy building websites and want full creative involvement, a DIY platform lets you do that in a way a custom build does not.
The monthly bill for Wix or Squarespace looks small. What people consistently underestimate is the hours spent building the thing, tweaking it, fixing it when something goes wrong, and keeping it reasonably current. Forty hours building a site is not unusual for someone doing it for the first time. A plumber spending forty hours on a Wix site has spent time that could have paid for something considerably better.
That is not an argument against doing it yourself if that is what suits you. It is an argument for being honest about the trade-off. The cheap monthly bill is only cheap if you value your own time at zero.
Elementor, Divi, Beaver Builder and similar tools sit on top of WordPress and give you a visual drag-and-drop experience not unlike Wix. They are popular and can produce good results in the right hands. They also add significant weight to a site, which tends to hurt speed, and they add another layer of things that need updating and that can break. If a web designer is quoting you a WordPress site built with one of these, ask what the performance target is and what the maintenance arrangement looks like.
| Option | Upfront cost | Ongoing cost | Your time | Speed | You own it? |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wix | Low | £11+ per month | High | Often slow | No |
| Squarespace | Low | £13+ per month | Medium | Medium | No |
| WordPress (self-hosted) | Low to medium | Hosting + maintenance | High (ongoing) | Variable | Yes |
| Custom build | Medium to high | Domain and optional hosting only | Low (after handover) | Fast | Yes |
Here is the honest shortcut.
Choose Wix or Squarespace if: your budget is very tight, you want full control of the building process, your site only needs to be a simple presence rather than a search tool, and you are genuinely prepared to spend the time.
Choose self-hosted WordPress if: you need a large blog, a shop with many products, or specific plugin-driven features; you have a developer you trust for ongoing maintenance; and you are comfortable with the higher ongoing overhead.
Choose a custom build if: you want something fast and properly built, you do not want ongoing platform management, and you are ready to invest a fixed amount upfront to get a site that performs and that you fully own.
We are a small studio near Faringdon in Oxfordshire. We build clean, fast custom sites for UK small businesses at fixed prices, with a real person writing the copy and checking every page before it goes live. We do not use Wix, Squarespace or page builders. The sites we build load quickly, are structured for local search, and come with no ongoing platform fee.
If you are not sure which route is right for you, you are welcome to ask us. We will give you an honest answer even if that answer is that a DIY platform is the right tool for your situation.
We will give you a straight answer. If a fixed-price custom site is the right fit, we can have it live in a week. Based near Faringdon, serving the whole UK.
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