Every week an owner asks us the same fair question: why should I pay for a custom site when Wix costs twenty euros a month? The honest answer is that for some businesses, Wix is enough. If you need a page that says who you are, where you are and when you open, a builder will do the job — and it would be daft of us to sell you something dearer.
The comparison changes the moment your website has a job to do. A restaurant that fills tables from Google. A clinic where patients decide whether to call based on how the site feels. An e-shop where every extra second of loading costs orders. Builders are built for everyone, which means they are optimised for no one.
What you actually get
| Builder (Wix, Squarespace) | WordPress + template | Custom build | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | €0 – 800 | €800 – 1,800 | €2,000 – 6,000 |
| Running cost | €15 – 40 / month | Hosting + maintenance | Hosting, minimal maintenance |
| Speed on a cheap Android | Middling | Depends on plugins | Controlled |
| Bilingual structure | Limited | Via plugin | Full |
| Ownership | Rented | Yours | Yours |
| Moving elsewhere | Effectively a rebuild | Possible | Possible |
What you actually pay for
A custom site buys you three things builders struggle with: speed on cheap Android phones, proper bilingual SEO structure, and a layout designed around your customer instead of a template. It also buys ownership — the domain, the code and the content are registered to you, not rented from a platform.
Speed is not a matter of taste. Google measures LCP, INP and CLS at the 75th percentile of real visits — that is, on your audience's slowest phones, not on your MacBook. A platform that loads dozens of scripts for features you never use starts that measurement at a disadvantage.
Where the hidden cost appears
The real cost of a builder shows up in year two or three:
- The site cannot rank for the searches that matter, and there is no deep fix available
- The design cannot grow with the business — each new need becomes one more plugin
- Moving away means starting over, often losing the URLs that had begun to rank
- Plugin subscriptions add up quietly
We have rebuilt enough Wix sites to say this with confidence — and we have also told clients to stay exactly where they were, when that was the right answer.
The decision rule
Our advice is simple: if the website is a formality, use a builder and spend nothing more. If it is how customers find and judge you, treat it like the storefront it is.
If you are not sure which category you are in, work out what one new customer is worth to you — we go through the maths in what a website costs.
