When Squarespace is the right answer and when it isn’t
Website builders are not the enemy. I want to say that plainly before anything else, because almost everything written on this subject is written by people selling the alternative, and I sell the alternative.
So here is the honest version.
Squarespace and Wix are very good at one particular job. If you need something live by Friday, if the budget is genuinely nothing, if the business is still a maybe and you want to find out whether anyone bites, a builder is the right call. Not the compromise you settle for. The right call. I would tell someone to go and use one, and mean it.
A builder wins when:
- You need a site this week and nothing else matters.
- There is no budget, and waiting until there is would cost you more than the site would.
- The site is one page, it says who you are and how to reach you, and it is not going to change.
- You want to run the whole thing yourself and never ring anyone about it.
That last one is not a small thing. Being able to fix your own opening hours at nine at night is worth something real, and it keeps people on a builder long after it has stopped serving them.
It is also the easiest of the four to solve. Every site I build comes with a way in, so you log in and change the hours yourself, the same as you would anywhere else. If someone quotes you a build and cannot tell you how you will edit it afterwards, ask. The answer tells you a lot.
Before the costs, let me knock over the argument my side of the fence usually leads with. You will read everywhere that builders are slow, and that slow means invisible. Be careful with that one.
They are certainly heavy. A Wix page loads a median of around 1.6 MB of JavaScript on a phone, roughly two and a half times what a median WordPress page loads. Your five-line contact page is carrying the machinery that runs a forty-page shop.
It also mostly does not show. On Google’s own field data for 2025, 74 per cent of Wix visits met the Core Web Vitals thresholds on mobile. WordPress managed 45. The builders spend a fortune making heavy things feel fast, and right now they are winning that fight. Anyone telling you a builder is automatically slow has not looked in a while.
So speed is not the argument. What you actually give up is the decision. On a site of your own, the page weighs what the page needs, and when something gets slow you can find out why and fix it. On a builder you get whatever the platform ships this year, and if next year’s release is heavier, it is heavier for you too.
As for getting found, speed is a tiebreaker rather than a lever. Google is fairly plain about it. Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems, and relevance still comes first, with page experience mattering most when there is a lot of equally helpful content to choose between. Fast will not rank you for something you have not earned. It decides between you and the person who is just as good.
What a builder is not good at is the part that comes after. Not the launch. The two years following it.
The first cost is that you are renting. The fee is monthly, it does not end, and the day you stop paying it the site stops existing. That is not a scandal. It is just worth naming, because people tend to hold a one-off build price up against a monthly one and quietly forget to multiply.
The second cost is that leaving is harder than arriving. Wix is upfront about this in its own help centre: your site has to run on Wix servers, because the platform is built on proprietary technology other hosts cannot run. The content belongs to you. The site is not portable. Squarespace is better and still not what most people assume. You can export your pages and blog posts into a WordPress file, but style settings and custom CSS do not come with it, and neither do most page types, including portfolio pages and store pages. So you can take the words with you. You cannot take the site.
The third cost is the quiet one, and it is the one I actually care about. A template is a stack of decisions somebody else made for a business that was not yours. Where the eye lands first. What gets a whole section and what gets a line. Which thing you are asked to do before you are trusted. Those decisions were made well, by good designers, for an imagined business. Yours has a particular thing it does better than anyone nearby, and the template has no idea what that is.
None of that matters at the start. All of it matters later.
Custom is not about being fancy. Most of the sites I build look calmer than the template versions they replace. It is about a site that can follow the business. When you add a service, there is somewhere for it to go. When you finally work out what people actually ring you about, the page gets rebuilt around it instead of squeezed in beside it. You hold the files. You can change hosts on a Tuesday afternoon and nothing breaks.
So the question is not which one is better. It is how long you need the answer to last.
If the answer is a season, use a builder and use it properly. If the answer is the next five years, it is worth owning. Your site is the thing standing in for you while you are asleep. It should be yours.
More from the notebook soon. x