Wix, Squarespace or your own website for business

A website builder is a perfectly sensible way to start. It gives you a working page in an evening, needs no contractor and costs so little you stop thinking about it. The question comes later, when the business has grown and the page has stayed exactly the same.

A builder is not worse than your own website. It solves a different problem, and its limit sits where working with data and integrations begins. When a business reaches that limit, it is time to move.

What a builder gives you straight away

Builders have real strengths.

• A fast start. The page is online the same day, with no approvals and no specification.
• No contractor needed. Changing text, swapping a photo or adding a block is something you do yourself, without waiting in anybody’s queue.
• Hosting and certificate included. No separate worry about a server, updates or certificate renewal.
• Responsive layouts out of the box. The templates are already adapted for phones, and at the start that saves a noticeable share of the budget.
• Predictable costs. One subscription instead of several invoices from different suppliers.

For an event page, a test of a new service or a one-person studio this really is enough. In the first year of a business, a builder is often a smarter choice than a custom site. While the business is still finding its shape, the page has to be reworked every month, and doing that yourself is cheaper and faster than going through a contractor.

Google Sites is a special case. It is the simplest and the most limited of the three. Its place is internal pages for a team, reference material and temporary projects, not a commercial site that has to bring in customers.

If you are still weighing up how many pages you need, the comparison in our article on a landing page or a multi-page website will help you decide before you pick a platform.

Where the limits begin

Speed and technical SEO

A builder serves the page with whatever set of scripts is built into the platform. You cannot remove the surplus, because you have no access to how the page is assembled. On a simple brochure page nobody notices. On a page with a gallery, a video and three widgets the load time grows, and there is almost nothing you can do about it.

Control over the technical details is a separate matter. Response headers, indexing rules for individual pages, structured data for your specific type of business, manageable sitemaps. Some of this exists in builders in simplified form, some does not exist at all. Why it affects rankings and money is covered in our article on why a website loads slowly.

One more thing gets noticed late. The platform decides for itself when to update its engine, and after such an update your page may start looking or behaving differently. You are not warned and you cannot influence it. On your own site updates happen too, but you choose the moment and check the result before customers see it.

URL structure and language versions

Page addresses in builders are formed by their own rules, and the URL pattern usually cannot be changed wholesale. While there are ten pages this does not get in the way. When there are sixty and they split into sections, the lack of control over structure starts costing traffic.

A second language adds another layer. Full language versions are not available in every builder or on every plan. Wix links the versions for you, while elsewhere the second language often lives as a separate branch of pages that has to be linked by hand. A missing link means the search engine shows a person a page in a language they were not searching in.

Along with languages comes the question of what happens to an old address when a page is renamed. On your own site this is handled by a redirect rule. Squarespace does not redirect a renamed page on its own, so every changed address needs a manual redirect. On a custom domain Wix creates one automatically for regular pages, but blog posts still need one added by hand. A missed redirect means every link collected over the years leads nowhere.

Custom forms and integrations

Builders can pass an inquiry on, but each does it differently. Wix keeps inquiries in its own CRM and sends them to other services through a webhook or Zapier, though its form does not collect UTM tags by itself. Squarespace can send form submissions to Google Sheets, Mailchimp or Zapier. That covers simple cases, but beyond them come questions a builder has no answer to.

• How it connects to your accounting system. Prices, stock levels and statuses need to come from the system you actually work in.
• Who is responsible for the data. Customer personal data sits in somebody else’s service, and the storage terms are dictated by them.

When a builder starts getting in the way

Signs that the platform has become the bottleneck rather than the helper.

• A task runs into “you cannot do that”. You understand what needs doing, the platform cannot do it, and there is no way around it.
• Inquiries are moved by hand. Somebody copies contacts from email into a sheet or a CRM every morning.
• There are a lot of pages now. Sections keep growing and there is nothing to manage structure and internal linking with.
• Advertising runs but cannot be measured. Traffic sources do not reach the inquiries, and a campaign can only be judged by eye.
• The subscription has grown. With add-ons, the monthly bill has crept up toward the cost of running your own site.

When three or more of these add up, moving stops being a matter of taste. It is then worth looking at what pages a working company site actually consists of, which is mapped out in our article on corporate website structure, and the move itself forms a separate stage of work within corporate websites.

How long the move takes

The timeline depends not on the platform you are leaving but on how much has piled up.

• A page with ten sections. Two to three weeks including design and content transfer.
• A company site of fifty pages. From a month, and most of that time goes on reconciling content rather than on development.
• A site with a blog and a second language. One and a half to two months, because every article has to move, either keeping its address or getting a redirect.

The longest part is not the technical work but the approvals. While it is being decided which sections to keep and which to drop, development stands still. So it is worth drawing up the list of pages before the start, not during.

What happens to your content

The question that worries people most is whether everything will have to be redone. The answer depends on which part you mean.

What can be carried over and what has to be redone

Text, photographs, blog articles and the list of services move without loss. That is the main value accumulated over the years, and none of it disappears.

Design cannot be carried over. Wix stores the page in its own format and gives you no code; Squarespace exports your pages and posts as a WordPress file, but the layout, fonts and styles stay behind and have to be built again. In practice this is not a loss. A layout built inside a platform template was usually a compromise anyway.

The search visibility you have built up is a separate matter. If addresses change, every old one has to point to the new one. Missed redirects are the most common reason traffic falls after a move, and fixing them after the fact is harder than planning them in.

Typical mistakes when moving

The mistakes repeat from project to project, and all of them are predictable.

• The list of old addresses was never captured. After the subscription is switched off the pages disappear along with their addresses, and there is nothing left to build a redirect map from.
• Mail on the domain was forgotten. The domain moves, records change, and emails to the company address stop arriving for a few days.
• The old page was switched off immediately. A week of parallel running costs an extra month’s subscription and lets you catch problems while the old page is still up.
• Text was transferred without checking. Formatting shifts, tables fall apart, some images go missing, and customers are the ones who notice.
• Analytics was not carried over. A new property is set up from scratch, and the history of previous years stays in the old account.

Sometimes access to the builder belongs only to a former contractor or an employee who has left. That has to be sorted out before work starts, and it is an organizational question rather than a technical one.

What the move costs

The cost of moving has three parts, and only one of them is ongoing.

• Building the new site. The main sum. For a company site on a ready-made template with your own text and setup it runs from $1,000 to $2,000, while custom design and integrations sit in the higher tiers. What each tier includes is set out on our corporate websites page.
• Transferring content. Depends on volume. Twenty pages move in a day, two hundred need separate planning.
• Ongoing costs after launch. Hosting, domain, updates, small fixes. Instead of one subscription there are several invoices, and together they may come out cheaper or more expensive, depending on how many extras you have bought inside the builder.

The last point is worth calculating before deciding. Sometimes a subscription with all its add-ons costs more than running your own site, and then over time the savings pay for the development. Sometimes it is the other way round, and there is no need to hurry.

When staying on a builder is the right call

There are situations in which moving will give you nothing.

• The page does one job. Contacts and a description of services, visited mainly from advertising.
• There are no growth plans. The range and the list of services do not change from year to year.
• There is nobody to run the site. Your own site needs updates and attention, and without them it ages faster than a builder.
• The business is seasonal. The page is needed for three months a year and idles the rest of the time.
• Sales do not come from the site. Customers arrive by referral or from a marketplace, and the page exists only to confirm the company is real.

In all these cases a platform subscription is cheaper and less hassle than your own website. Moving for the sake of moving gives you nothing but an invoice.

There is also a rarely mentioned middle path. Part of the job can be taken outside the builder without moving wholesale: connect an external form that can pass an inquiry into a CRM, or build a separate advertising page on your own domain. That does not solve structure and speed, but it removes the sharpest pain and buys time to plan a proper move calmly. Whichever way it goes, three things are worth doing beforehand. Make sure the domain is registered in your own name rather than inside the platform, gather the original photographs and text, and check that the analytics property is registered to your own account.

Conclusions

Wix and Squarespace solve a different problem than your own website does. While a business needs a page with a description and contacts, a builder wins on speed and price. Once data, integrations, a second language and advertising that has to be measured come into it, the builder starts running into limits, and even a higher subscription does not remove some of them.

The main material accumulated over the years moves with you. Text, photographs and articles do not disappear. Design and forms are rebuilt, and old addresses are redirected to new ones so that rankings are not lost.

If you are not sure it is time yet, do not order development straight away. Send us the address of your page on the builder and describe exactly what you are running into: a block you cannot build, inquiries that never reach the CRM, a second language that has drifted out of sync with the first. We will look at whether it can be solved within the platform. If it can, you save the development budget. If it cannot, we will show how many pages and how much work would need moving and what that comes to, broken down line by line.