The question almost every first conversation starts with: "Can we just use a website builder?" You can. Sometimes it is even the right answer, and we say so out loud, although selling you development would pay us better. The problem is not the builders — the problem is that the choice gets made on the first month's price and paid for two years later. Let us lay out when Wix, Squarespace or Webflow are a sensible decision, when they turn into a trap, and what each route actually costs over three years.
The short answer
A builder works if the site is a shop window of a few pages, you need it fast, you are happy to pay every month indefinitely, and you have no non-standard logic. Custom development is needed once the site earns money: it takes orders, calculates things, talks to your accounting system, handles load and has to keep growing. The middle route is WordPress: cheaper than custom, more flexible than a builder, with its own price tag in maintenance.
The one thing to understand before choosing: a builder is a rental, not a purchase. You are paying for the right to display your site. Stop paying and the site is gone.
When a builder is the right choice
- Testing an idea. You do not yet know whether the direction works. Spending a week and a few dollars to find out whether there is demand is smarter than commissioning development for a hypothesis.
- One person, one service. A tradesperson, a tutor, a photographer, a consultant. A page with a description, prices, examples of work and a form — a builder covers that completely.
- A one-off event. A conference, a festival, a course intake. You need the site for three months and then not at all.
- A budget under $200. Being honest: there is no adequate development below that, and a builder beats a cheap site from someone who will disappear.
- Nobody to look after it. A builder needs no updates, no plugin breaks on you — the service keeps everything running.
If you recognise yourself in that list, close this article and take the builder. In that situation we recommend exactly the same thing.
When a builder becomes a trap
The signs that you have outgrown it:
- You need logic the template does not have. Price calculation from parameters, a customer account area, different prices for wholesale buyers, booking with an availability calendar. In a builder this is either impossible or bolted on through third-party widgets that break with every platform update.
- The site has to talk to your back office. Stock levels, prices, order statuses, feeds to marketplaces. While that is moved by hand you do not have a website, you have one more workstation.
- The catalogue has grown. A builder handles a dozen items comfortably. Several hundred with filters, attributes and search — no longer: pages get heavy, filters get slow, and the catalogue structure becomes something a search engine gets lost in.
- Speed. A builder loads its own engine on every page whether you need it or not. A 700 KB page is routine. On mobile data that is a noticeable delay, and some people leave before it finishes.
- An address on someone else's domain. If the site still lives at
something.wixsite.com, that shows in search results, you cannot put it on a business card, and it directly costs you trust.
What "your own site" actually means
The difference is not looks — a builder site can look just as good. It is four things people only think about once something has become inconvenient:
- The domain. Registered to you, not to the contractor. Around $14 a year depending on the zone.
- The code. You get the source files. You can hand them to another team and they can carry on.
- The access. Hosting, database, mail, analytics, domain — all on your accounts. The contractor has access because you granted it, not because they own it.
- The data. Your customer and order records sit in your database and can be exported as a single file.
On a builder, points 2 and 4 are either unavailable or available in a cut-down form. Export usually gives you text and images — not the site itself. Moving it "as is" to your own hosting is not possible.
The three-year arithmetic
This is where the choice stops being emotional. Take a simple 5–7 page shop window.
Builder: a subscription every month for as long as the site exists, plus the domain, plus paid widgets for whatever is not in the box (forms, booking, newsletters). The subscription is rent: after three years you hold nothing but your own text.
Custom development: a one-off sum plus hosting and domain. With us a landing page starts at $190, a corporate website at $690, an online store at $1,350. Hosting for an ordinary site runs from about $4 a month and a .com domain from about $14 a year — the whole annual figure is broken down in what it costs to keep a website running for a year. The full price list is on the pricing page.
We deliberately do not quote builder tariffs here: they change several times a year, and a number in an article goes stale faster than you can read it. Take the current plan, multiply by 36 months, add the paid widgets — and compare with the one-off figures above. For a simple shop window the builder usually wins. For a store or a site with logic in it, it loses in year two.
WordPress — the middle route
It goes in when content is the point: a blog, news, many pages the client edits themselves. The upsides are real — cheaper than custom development, an enormous ecosystem, and any contractor can pick it up.
The price of that choice is maintenance. WordPress has to be updated: the core, the theme, the plugins. An unmaintained WordPress site turns into a security hole within a year or two — it is the single most common reason people ask us to "have a look at why the site was hacked". If nobody is going to do that work, put maintenance in the budget at the start, from $80 a month, rather than later.
Custom development earns its place where the logic is non-standard: calculations, account areas, integrations with CRM and accounting, high load. In other words, where any off-the-shelf platform would make you reshape the business to fit it.
Can a site be moved off a builder?
It can, though "moved" is the wrong word. In practice it means taking the text and photographs, building the site again properly, keeping the page addresses and setting up redirects from the old ones to the new. The design transfers as a reference, not as files. Budget from $460 and 14–25 days — see also how long building a website takes.
What matters is not losing the URL structure, the search rankings, the analytics tags and the verification in webmaster tools. Done carefully, the dip in positions lasts weeks rather than months. Done carelessly, the site starts its search life from zero.
Frequently asked questions
Will a site built on a builder rank worse in Google?
Not in itself. Google does not demote a site for being on Wix or Squarespace. But the platform's technical limits hit you indirectly: heavy pages, identical templated headings, limited control over markup and URLs. On simple queries that does not get in the way; on competitive ones it does, noticeably. More on what actually moves rankings is on our SEO page.
How much does it cost to move from a builder to your own site?
About the same as building a new site of that type, sometimes a little less: the text and photos already exist, so there is no content to assemble from scratch. Moving the URLs and configuring redirects is counted separately — a few hours of work, but without it the move costs you rankings.
What if I have already paid for a year of subscription?
That is no reason to rush. The sensible sequence: run out the period you paid for, build the new site in the final month, then switch the domain. That way you never pay twice and you are never without a site mid-transition.
What separates a $190 site from a $960 one if they look the same?
The amount of work, not the looks. At $190 you get a one-page landing on a ready structure, your copy, basic configuration. At $960 you get a structure built around your services, copywriting, integrations, analytics, mobile adaptation and testing. The difference can be invisible on screen and very visible in the number of enquiries.
What should I choose if the business is six months old and the budget is tight?
Honestly: a builder or a simple landing page. Spending $1,500 on a website before you know whether the model works is not an investment, it is a bet. Better to do it cheaply, look at the real enquiries, and decide what to build next with that data in hand.
In short
A builder rents you a shop window; custom development gives you a property with logic inside it. The first wins over a short distance and on simple tasks, the second once the site has to do something rather than just display something.
If you are not sure which category your project falls into, write to us. The first conversation is free, and if a builder covers your case we will say so: there is nothing in it for us in a project that will not pay for itself. Our terms and prices are on the pricing page, and you can reach us through contacts.