If you are a one van trade deciding between forty quid a month for Wix and a few hundred pounds once for something built for you, the honest comparison is not the one either side usually gives you. Wix is not rubbish and custom is not automatically better. They are different trades, with different costs, and the right answer depends on how you value your own time.
Here is the comparison as we would give it to a friend, including the cases where we would tell you to use Wix and not pay us.
The money, over five years
The monthly price is what people compare, and it is the least useful number, because the two things are paid for differently. A builder is rent. A built site is a purchase.
| Year | Website builder, typical | Built by us, £650 build |
|---|---|---|
| Year one | Around £250 in subscription plus your domain | £650, split into three payments if it helps |
| Year three | Around £750 total, nothing owned | £650 total, site owned |
| Year five | Around £1,250 total, nothing owned | £650 total, site owned |
| Stop paying | Site goes off | Site is yours, files and all |
Builder pricing moves and the plan you need is rarely the cheapest advertised one, so treat those figures as the shape rather than the gospel. The shape is the point: rent never stops, and at the end of it you own nothing.
The thing nobody prices: your time
This is the real cost of a builder and it never appears in the comparison. Building your own site takes a weekend if you are quick and know what you want, and considerably longer if you do not. Then it takes an evening every time something changes.
For a tradesman whose day rate is a couple of hundred pounds, a weekend of fiddling with a template is not free, it is the most expensive part of the whole exercise. And the honest outcome for most people is a site that is eighty per cent finished, because the last twenty per cent is the boring part and there is always a job on.
The test we would actually apply. Do you enjoy this sort of thing? Some people genuinely do, and they build a perfectly good Wix site and are pleased with it. If the thought of an evening dragging boxes around makes you tired, you will not finish it, and an unfinished site is worse than none.
Speed, and why it matters more than it sounds
Builder sites are heavy. They load a large amount of code to make the editing experience work, and that code ships to your customer whether they need it or not. On a good phone on good signal you will not notice. On a phone with two bars, standing in a garden, which is where a lot of people search for a trade, you very much will.
People leave slow pages, and Google knows they leave and factors it in. We build static sites, which means the page is mostly finished before it is sent, and that is most of why ours load quickly. It is not cleverness, it is the absence of weight.
Ownership, which people only care about once
A builder site exists inside the builder. Stop paying and it goes off. Want to move it somewhere else and you cannot, because there is nothing to move: you can take your words and your domain and start again.
A built site is a folder of files. It can be hosted anywhere, handed to another developer, backed up, or left alone for three years and still work. If we vanished tomorrow you would still have your website, which is a sentence we can say and a builder cannot.
Where a builder genuinely wins
We are not going to pretend this is one sided.
- You want it today. A builder is live this afternoon. We take a few days.
- The budget is genuinely under a couple of hundred pounds. Then it is a builder or nothing, and a builder is better than nothing.
- You change things constantly and like doing it yourself. Some people want to move a photograph at eleven at night. A builder is built for that.
- You are testing whether the business works at all. Do not spend properly on a website for an idea you might abandon in June.
If two or more of those describe you, use Wix. We would rather tell you that than take money for something you did not need.
Where building wins
- Your time is worth more than the subscription. Which for most working trades it is, by a distance.
- You want to be found rather than just to exist. Speed, structure and real pages per service and area are where the search results are won, and that is fiddly work on a builder.
- You want to own it. Five years of rent for nothing is a bad deal that is easy to miss because it arrives thirty pounds at a time.
- You want it to be finished. Somebody else doing it means it gets done, rather than sitting at eighty per cent forever.
What we do, specifically
We build the site, set up the Google Business Profile alongside it, and hand you a thing you own. £395 for a focused single trade site, £650 for more depth, £1,200 for a bigger build with a shop or a booking system. A build can be split into three payments, same price, no interest and no fees, within twelve months.
Care plans are £45, £85 or £150 a month for hosting, changes and monitoring, with no minimum term. They are optional, and a lot of single van trades do not need one. We will tell you if you are one of them.
The bit that makes this easy to judge: we build the site first. Within 48 hours you get a link to the real thing built for your business, not a mock-up. You look at it, and if it is not right you say so and there is no cost and no chase. That is a harder offer to make than a free trial, and it is deliberately harder, because it puts the risk on us.
The short version
If you like tinkering, have more time than money, and need something today, use Wix and do it properly. If your time is worth money, you want to be found, and you would rather own the thing, have it built. Either way, having no website in 2026 is the only genuinely bad answer.
Common questions
Is Wix bad?
No. Wix is a competent product and for some businesses it is the right answer, particularly if you genuinely enjoy tinkering and your needs are simple. The problems are speed, the fact that the site only exists while you keep paying, and the amount of your time it quietly eats. Those matter more for some businesses than others.
Can I move my Wix site somewhere else later?
You can take your domain and your content. You cannot take the site. Wix sites are built inside Wix and do not export as a working website, so moving means rebuilding. That is worth knowing at the start rather than three years in.
Is a custom site harder to update?
It depends who built it. Ours are built so the things that change often, text, prices, photographs, opening hours, are changed by us on a care plan or by you where that makes more sense. What you do not get is a drag and drop canvas where you can accidentally break the layout on phones, which most business owners come to see as a feature.
What about Squarespace, GoDaddy or Wordpress?
Squarespace is the best looking of the builders and shares the same ownership and speed trade-offs. GoDaddy's builder is weaker than both. Wordpress is a different animal: genuinely yours, genuinely powerful, and genuinely demanding, because a neglected Wordpress site with fifteen plugins is a security incident waiting to happen. The comparison below applies broadly to all the builders.
Will a custom site definitely rank better?
Not automatically. A fast, well structured custom site with real content will beat a slow builder site with thin content, and that is the common case. But a beautifully coded site with nothing on it loses to a Wix site whose owner has written properly about what they do. The content still has to be there.
Compare them with the real thing in front of you
We build a working preview of your site in 48 hours, free. Put it next to a builder template and decide with both on screen. No card and no sales call.
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