Wix, WordPress, or Custom Code? An Honest Pick for Small Business

I build custom sites for a living, and I still tell some people to go use Squarespace.

Not as a polite brush-off. Because for a lot of small businesses, the website is not the business. It's a business card that has to load fast, show hours, and take a phone call. Paying me to hand-build that is like hiring a tailor for a t-shirt.

The hard part is knowing which one you are. So here's how I actually sort it.

Builders win when the site is the smallest part of your week

Wix and Squarespace are genuinely good at one thing that nobody else is good at: getting a decent-looking, working site online without anyone learning anything.

No hosting decisions. No plugin updates. No "why is the contact form suddenly emailing nobody." The platform patches itself and you never hear about it.

That's worth real money if you're a plumber, a therapist, a bakery, a solo consultant. Your competitive edge is not your homepage animation. It's that you answer the phone.

The honest answer is that most one-location service businesses with five pages and a contact form should start here and stop thinking about it.

Check the price yourself, because these plans move constantly

Rough shape as of the current review roundups: Wix's tiers run from a light personal plan around $17/month, a Core plan near $29 for ecommerce and marketing tools, and a Business plan around $39, with a Business Elite tier up at $159/month for large operations. Squarespace is in similar territory — Basic, Core, Plus, and Advanced tiers running from roughly $19/month up to $99, and the number changes depending on whether you pay yearly.

Self-hosted WordPress flips the model: the software is free and everything around it isn't. Shared hosting suitable for a new site generally starts somewhere between $3 and $10/month, while managed WordPress hosting runs closer to $20–$50/month, plus a domain in the usual ten-to-twenty-dollars-a-year range.

Treat all of those as ranges, not quotes. Builder pricing gets restructured every year or two, and promo pricing on the first term hides the renewal. Pull up the pricing page before you decide anything. I keep a fuller breakdown of what the whole project costs in my small business website cost guide.

WordPress is the middle path, and the middle path has chores

WordPress powers something like 43% of all websites, more than every other CMS combined. That's not hype, it's inertia with a real benefit: whatever weird thing you need, someone built a plugin for it, and someone wrote a tutorial about it.

WordPress makes sense when you want more than a builder allows but don't want to pay for custom work. Big blog archives. Memberships. A store with odd requirements. Real control over URLs, redirects, and schema — the technical SEO details that closed platforms hand you a simplified version of.

Here's the part that gets skipped in the comparison posts: WordPress is a small ongoing job. Core updates, plugin updates, backups, a security layer, and the occasional morning where a plugin update breaks a page layout. It's not hard. It's just not zero. If nobody on your team owns that job, you don't own a WordPress site — you own a future problem.

The fix is paying for managed hosting or a maintenance retainer, which quietly puts WordPress in the same monthly range as a builder anyway. Worth knowing before you pick it "to save money." If the hosting tiers are fuzzy to you, I broke them down in my hosting explainer.

Custom code earns its price when the site does a job, not just describes one

I reach for custom — in my case Next.js and React — when the site has to do something specific: a booking flow with weird rules, a calculator, a pricing tool, an integration with software the business already runs on, content structured in a way no theme anticipated.

That's the line. Brochure site? Builder. Content site? WordPress. Something with logic in it? Custom starts making sense.

The other reason is performance and control. When I own every file, I can cut the exact 500ms that's hurting mobile, ship accessibility checks on every deploy, and never wonder what a plugin is loading behind my back.

And the trade-off, plainly: custom costs the most up front, takes the longest, and ties you to whoever built it unless the handoff is clean. If your developer disappears and you can't edit your own homepage, that's not a website, it's a hostage situation. Ask about the CMS, the docs, and who else could pick this up — before you sign.

Getting out is harder than getting in

This is the cost nobody quotes you.

Builders don't really export. Squarespace exports blog posts and basic pages as XML; product pages, galleries, event listings, custom CSS, and membership content don't transfer and have to be rebuilt by hand. Most builders don't provide a meaningful export at all — you treat leaving as a rebuild and save your assets before you cancel.

WordPress exports cleanly and moves between hosts. Custom code you own outright. That's a real advantage of both, but it only matters if you'll ever want to leave.

One thing you should always own regardless: your domain. Register it somewhere neutral — I use Namecheap — and point it at whatever platform you choose. That way switching platforms doesn't mean negotiating for your own name back.

Where I'm biased, and where I'd overrule myself

I sell custom sites. So take this seriously: I have a financial reason to tell you that you need one. Most of you don't.

The mistake I see more often than "they used a builder when they needed custom" is the reverse — somebody spends thousands on a bespoke site for a five-page business that changes its content twice a year, then can't update it without emailing a developer. That's a worse outcome than a $25/month Squarespace site they can edit at 9pm.

AI builders muddy this further, and I wrote a whole piece on where those tools win and where a human still beats them. Short version: they're good at the first draft of a simple site, weaker at everything after launch.

The one-paragraph version

If your site is a brochure and your time is worth more than your hosting bill, use Wix or Squarespace, pick the cheapest plan that includes a custom domain, and get back to work. If you're publishing regularly, selling something with rules, or you need real control over SEO and structure, use WordPress on managed hosting and budget for maintenance — it's a small job but it's a job. Go custom when the site has actual logic in it, when speed and accessibility are part of the product, or when you've outgrown a platform's limits and can prove it. And whichever you pick, register the domain in your own account, know what your export looks like, and never build so much on a platform that leaving would break your business.

Still unsure? Start on a builder. Outgrowing it is a good problem, and rebuilding a five-page site later is far cheaper than paying for flexibility you never use.