Wix, Squarespace, WordPress or a Custom Build: Which One Actually Suits Your Business?

If you’ve started looking into a new website, you’ve probably come across the same handful of names again and again: Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, and somewhere further down the list, custom built websites like the ones we make at William James Creative Digital.

Every platform has people who swear by it and people who’ve had a miserable time with it, and both are usually telling the truth. The real question isn’t which platform is “best”. It’s which one actually fits what your business needs, how it’s going to grow, and how much control you want over how it works.

Here’s an honest look at each, including where they fall short.

Wix

Wix is built for speed. You pick a template, drag a few things around, and you can have a website live within a day or two. For a very simple site with no real ambitions to grow, that’s appealing.

The trouble is what happens after that first day. Wix locks you into the structure of whatever template you started with. Once a site is built, moving elements around or changing the underlying layout is far harder than it looks in the demos, and we’ve seen clients spend hours trying to escape what’s often called “template hell”: stuck with a layout that no longer suits them, unable to make it do what they actually want.

Features that sound basic, like an accordion menu (the kind where a heading expands to reveal more content when you click it) are often missing or clunky to set up. The result tends to be websites that were quick to build but end up static and text heavy, with none of the interactivity that makes a site pleasant to use.

Good for: a very simple, short term site where speed to launch matters more than flexibility.

Watch out for: getting boxed in by your own template, with limited room to adapt the site as your business changes.

Squarespace

Squarespace has a reputation for looking good, and it’s earned. The templates are polished, the image handling is strong, and for portfolio style businesses (photographers, designers, small creative studios) it can do a good job straight out of the box.

The issue we see most often is speed. We worked with Ipswich Minster on their previous Squarespace site, and slow load times were a real problem, the kind that makes visitors give up and leave before the page has even finished appearing. Squarespace sites carry a lot of code and styling behind the scenes to achieve that polished look, and it isn’t always optimised for how quickly it actually needs to load, particularly for visitors on mobile data rather than fast broadband.

For a business where people are searching on the go, whether that’s someone looking for opening hours, a phone number or a service nearby, a few extra seconds of loading time can be the difference between a visit and a bounce.

Good for: image led businesses that want a polished look without much technical setup.

Watch out for: load times that can quietly cost you visitors, especially on mobile.

WordPress

WordPress runs a huge proportion of the web, and for good reason. It’s flexible, there’s a plugin for almost anything, and in the right hands it can be built into something close to bespoke.

But that flexibility comes with a catch. We regularly come across businesses with WordPress sites that have quietly fallen out of date, often running plugins that are no longer supported by their original developers. These plugins don’t always fail loudly. Sometimes they simply stop working in the background, breaking a contact form, a booking system or a payment page without anyone noticing until a customer mentions it, or worse, doesn’t bother mentioning it at all.

WordPress also needs regular attention. Updates, security patches and plugin compatibility all need managing on an ongoing basis, and a site that isn’t looked after becomes a bigger risk over time, both in terms of how it looks and how secure it is.

Good for: businesses that want room to grow and are prepared to keep on top of maintenance, or have someone doing it for them.

Watch out for: outdated plugins silently breaking parts of your site, and the ongoing upkeep that WordPress needs.

Custom built websites

This is where we work, so it’s worth being upfront: a custom built website isn’t automatically the right answer for every business. If you need a very simple one page site with no plans to grow, a platform builder might do the job perfectly well.

Where a custom build tends to make a real difference is for businesses that want a website built specifically around what they do, rather than adapted from a template built for everyone. Every part of a hand coded site is built for a purpose, so there’s no unused plugin code slowing things down, no template constraints to work around, and no guessing whether a feature is even possible.

It also means the site is built with your business in mind from the start, whether that’s a booking system that matches how you actually take bookings, content structured around the questions your customers actually ask, or features like an accordion menu that just work, because they were built to.

The trade off is cost and time. A custom build is a bigger investment upfront than signing up to a template platform, and it takes longer to launch. For a business that’s serious about its website doing real work for years to come, that investment tends to pay for itself in fewer headaches, better performance and a site that can actually grow with the business.

Good for: businesses that want a website built specifically for them, with no template constraints and no plugin guesswork.

Watch out for: a higher upfront cost and a longer build time than a template platform.

So which one is right for you?

There isn’t a single correct answer. A platform builder can be the sensible choice for a very small, simple site. But if your website needs to bring in enquiries, represent your business properly and grow alongside it, it’s worth asking whether a template was ever going to be enough.

If you’re weighing this up, we’re happy to talk it through, including telling you if a simpler option would suit you better than a custom build. We’d rather you had the right website than the most expensive one.

Thinking about your options? Let’s have a conversation.

If local search is part of your thinking too, our post on SEO and GEO covers how your website needs to be built to be found by both traditional search engines and newer AI search tools.