Wix or Squarespace,
or a built site?
If you are brand new, or the website is mainly somewhere to point people after a referral, stay on Wix or Squarespace. They are good products, they cost about as much as a phone plan, and nobody has ever lost a job because their site was built on one. The break point is structural, not aesthetic: when you need a real page for every service in every suburb you work, builders make that tedious enough that almost nobody finishes it — and that structure is most of what local search rewards. This page is about the platform. If your question is really whether to do it yourself or pay someone, that is DIY versus hiring someone; if you have already decided to commission a build, WordPress versus custom-built is the next choice.
Side by side
| Wix / Squarespace | Purpose-built | |
|---|---|---|
| What it costs | About $20–$70 a month all in, hosting and domain included. Cheap, and predictable. | $1,000–$20,000 once, then hosting. Dearer up front, nothing monthly to the platform. |
| Time to live | A weekend, genuinely. Pick a template, replace the words, publish. | Three to six weeks, most of which is deciding what the pages should say. |
| How it looks | Good. Templates are professionally designed and the gap here closed years ago. | Built around your business rather than adapted to a template. |
| Speed | Middling, and largely out of your hands. The builder ships its own editor runtime to every visitor. | Fast, because the page contains what you asked for and nothing else. |
| Pages per service and suburb | The real limit. Possible, but every page is hand-made and hand-linked, so ten becomes a fortnight of admin. | Generated from one data file. Adding a suburb is a row, and the sitemap, links and schema follow. |
| Structured data | Basic, and mostly automatic. Fine for a business card, thin for a service business. | Written per page — service, area, reviews, FAQs — which is what wins the answer boxes. |
| Editing it yourself | Excellent, and the genuine reason to stay. Drag, type, publish, no invoice. | Depends entirely on what was built. Ask before you commit, in writing. |
| Moving off it later | Hard. The design does not export, only the words and images do, so leaving is a rebuild. | You own the code. It moves to any host, any developer, any time. |
| Custom functionality | What the app market has, roughly. Anything else is a redesign around the limitation. | Whatever the job needs. A booking flow, a portal, a quote calculator. |
Stay on Wix or Squarespace when
- The business is new and you are still finding out whether it works.
- Nearly all your work arrives by referral and the site exists so you look real when they Google you.
- You want to change things at 9pm without ringing anybody — this is a real advantage and people undervalue it.
- You work one trade in one area, so there is no page-per-service-per-suburb structure to build.
- Cash is the binding constraint. Seventy dollars a month is not what is holding your marketing back.
Move to a built site when
- You want to rank for more than your own business name — multiple services across multiple suburbs.
- You have added pages on the builder until the navigation stopped making sense.
- Speed is costing you. Run it through the free website check and you will know within a minute.
- You need something the platform does not do, and you are designing around the gap rather than the customer.
- The site is producing enquiries and you want more of them, which is a structure problem rather than a design one.
Our honest take
Most Perth businesses on Wix or Squarespace should stay there, and we will say so on the phone. The platform is rarely the reason a site is not producing work — far more often it is that the site has one services page instead of six, no page for any suburb, and nothing on it that answers the question the searcher typed. You can fix a good deal of that on a builder, for nothing, and you should try that first. The honest case for moving is when you have done that work and the structure itself is the ceiling: thirty pages that all have to be made and linked by hand, each one a little different because you were tired by page nineteen. That is the point where generating pages from a data file stops being a technical nicety and starts being the difference between a plan you execute and a plan you abandon. Until then, the monthly fee is the cheapest thing in your marketing budget.
Common questions
Is Wix or Squarespace bad for SEO?
Will I lose my rankings if I move?
Can I export my Wix or Squarespace site?
Is a built site faster than Wix?
Who should I pay to do this — you or me?
Is there a cheaper option than either of these?
What would you do in my position?
Still not sure?
Tell us what you are trying to achieve and we will tell you which way we would go — including if that is not with us.
Prefer to talk? Call 08 6323 2970