You can get a website for nothing, £15 a month, or £499. The difference is not obvious from the outside, and a lot of the advice about it comes from people with something to sell — myself included, so let me be careful about that.

What the Builders Actually Cost

The advertised price is rarely the real one. Over three years, roughly:

  • Wix (Core plan): around £15-20/month. Three years: £540-720.
  • Squarespace (Business): around £17-25/month. Three years: £610-900.
  • GoDaddy Website Builder: around £10-17/month, and the cheaper tiers are quite limited. Three years: £360-610.
  • Custom £499 build: £499 once, plus £50-150/year hosting and domain. Three years: £650-950.

So over three years they land in much the same place. The "cheap" option is cheap in month one, not over the life of the site. What differs is what you get and what you own.

Where the Builders Genuinely Win

I would rather be straight about this than pretend otherwise:

  • Immediate start. You can be live this afternoon. A custom build takes two to three weeks.
  • No dependency on anyone. Change anything at midnight without emailing a designer.
  • Low upfront cost. If cash flow is genuinely tight, £15 a month is easier than £499.
  • Everything included. Hosting, SSL, updates, backups, all handled.
  • Fine for simple needs. If you want an online business card and your work comes from referrals, a builder does that job.

If you are testing an idea, or genuinely not trying to win search traffic, use a builder. That is the honest recommendation.

Where They Cost You

Speed

Builder platforms load a lot of generic code to make the drag-and-drop editor work. That shows up in Core Web Vitals, and it affects both ranking and how many mobile visitors stay. A well-built custom site is usually noticeably faster.

Technical SEO control

You can do the basics on any platform — titles, descriptions, headings. Where you hit limits is schema markup, redirect control, page structure and fixing whatever the platform decides to output. In a light-competition market that rarely matters. In a competitive one it does.

You cannot take it with you

This is the one that catches people. A Wix site cannot be exported and moved. Three years of content, structure and rankings live on their platform, and leaving means rebuilding from scratch. Squarespace exports partially. A custom site is yours — files, code and all.

Looking like everyone else

Templates are used by thousands of businesses. Customers may not consciously recognise the template, but "I've seen this before" is a real effect, and in a market where trust matters it works against you.

What £499 Actually Buys

Let me be specific, because vagueness here is how people get disappointed:

  • Five pages — typically home, about, services, one more, contact
  • Custom design built around your business, not a template with your logo dropped in
  • Mobile-first, built to load fast
  • Contact form, click-to-call, Google Maps
  • Basic SEO setup: titles, descriptions, headings, schema, sitemap, Search Console
  • You own the domain, the hosting and the code
  • Two to three weeks from start to live

What it is not: a twenty-page site, an online shop, a booking system, or ongoing SEO. Those are the £999 and £1,999 tiers, and I would rather quote them honestly than deliver a disappointing £499.

The decision, simplified

Do you want people who have never heard of you to find you on Google? If yes, a properly built site pays for itself and the ownership matters. If your work comes from referrals and you just need somewhere to point people, use a builder and spend the money elsewhere.

The Middle Option Nobody Mentions

If you already have a builder site that is doing an adequate job, you may not need a rebuild at all. Often the problem is not the platform — it is that nobody ever set up the Google Business Profile, wrote separate service pages, or compressed the images.

That is a much smaller job than a new website, and it is frequently what I recommend after an audit. Start with a free website audit and find out which situation you are actually in.

For the platform question specifically, see Squarespace vs WordPress. For pricing across the market, how much a website costs in the UK.

Common Questions

Is Wix or Squarespace bad for SEO?

Not inherently — both can rank perfectly well for a local business. The practical limits are page speed, which is generally worse than a well-built custom site, and less control over technical details like schema and redirects. For a competitive market that gap matters; for a small town it usually does not.

What does £499 actually buy?

A five-page custom site: home, about, services, one more page and contact. Mobile responsive, contact form, basic SEO setup, Google Maps, built to load fast. It is not a twenty-page site with a booking system, and I would rather say so than surprise you.

Can I move a Wix site to a custom one later?

The content, yes. The site itself, no — Wix sites cannot be exported and rebuilt elsewhere, so moving means a rebuild. Worth knowing before you invest years of content into one.

Are there hidden costs with a custom site?

Hosting and a domain, roughly £50-150 a year. That is it unless you choose a maintenance plan. There is no platform subscription and no transaction fee.