For most new UK small businesses, Wix or Squarespace is the cheaper and sensible start: about £9 to £29 a month on an annual plan for the tiers a small business site needs (shop-focused plans and monthly billing cost more), so roughly £300 to £1,050 over three years plus your own evenings. A custom website costs £1,500 to £8,000 to build and £500 to £2,000 a year to run. It becomes the better buy when speed, search rankings or a feature the builder cannot do starts costing you customers, and when you want to own the thing you paid for.
We build custom sites, so read the next section with that in mind. We also tell plenty of people to stay on their builder.
What each option costs over three years
| Option | Upfront | Three years, roughly |
|---|---|---|
| Wix, Core plan, done yourself | £0 | £576 plus your time |
| Squarespace, Core plan, done yourself | £0 | £612 plus your time |
| Custom one-page site | £1,500 – £3,500 | £3,000 – £5,000 |
| Custom business site, 5–10 pages | £3,500 – £8,000 | £5,000 – £9,500 |
The builder figures use annual-billing prices from ExpertSure's Wix pricing guide and its Squarespace equivalent: Wix runs from £9 (Light) through £16 (Core) to £25 (Business), Squarespace from £12 (Basic) through £17 (Core) to £29 (Plus), with monthly billing noticeably dearer. The table uses the two Core plans, which is where most small business sites end up. The custom figures come from our guide to what a website costs in the UK, with the low end of the running costs added for three years.
On paper the builder wins by thousands. Two costs do not show up in that table. One is your time: a decent Wix site takes a non-designer somewhere between a long weekend and a month of evenings. The other arrives on the day you decide to leave.
What you own when you leave
A Wix site cannot move anywhere else. Wix says so plainly in its own help centre: the site must run on Wix's servers, because it is built on their proprietary technology. You can take your domain, your text and your images. The design, the layout and the structure stay behind.
Squarespace lets you export, but only partly. Its export guide lists what comes out as a WordPress-style XML file: basic pages, one blog, text and image blocks. Store pages, product blocks, video blocks, style settings and custom CSS do not.
That matters on the day you outgrow the builder. Moving off it means rebuilding from scratch, so the money you put into the builder site carries nothing across. A custom site is files you own. Any developer can pick it up, move it to another host or change it without asking anyone's permission. Get that ownership in writing, because a custom site on someone else's account is no better than a Wix one.
Speed and search
Builders have improved a lot, and a lean Squarespace site with few sections can score respectably. The trouble starts as the site grows: every app, animation and embed you add ships its own scripts, and you have no control over the code underneath. Google's Core Web Vitals want the main content on screen within 2.5 seconds for three in four visits. A builder page carrying a booking widget, a chat bubble and an Instagram feed often misses that on a mid-range phone.
A custom static site has no editor, no app store and nothing loading that you did not ask for. When we rebuilt the Barsion site, first contentful paint went from 7.7 seconds to under half a second and network requests from 90 to 12. The case study has the details. Speed will not rank a page by itself, though it decides how many of the people who do find it stay long enough to get in touch.
When the builder is the right answer
- You are testing an idea and might not be trading in a year.
- The site is a few pages that change rarely, and nobody finds you through Google anyway, because work comes by referral.
- You enjoy editing it yourself and have the time.
- Your budget for the whole year is under £1,500. A cut-price custom site at that level usually skips the speed, SEO and migration work, so the money does more in the business itself.
When a custom site pays back
- Search brings you customers, or should, and the builder site loads slowly on phones.
- You need something the builder does badly: bookings tied to your own system, a quote calculator, several languages, a customer area.
- You keep paying for apps and add-ons to patch gaps, and the monthly total has crept towards a care plan anyway.
- You are about to spend serious money on content or SEO and want it to live on something you can take with you.
If two or more of those fit, the three-year gap in the table above is smaller than it looks, because the builder is already costing you in lost enquiries. If none fit, stay where you are.
Moving off Wix or Squarespace without losing rankings
The domain moves with you, and the pages can keep ranking if their addresses and their words come across. That means a list of every old URL mapped to its new one with a permanent redirect, and the page text migrated rather than rewritten. Our guide to website redesign costs covers that work and what it adds to a quote, and the website redesign page shows how we run it.