Build your website with Wix or hire someone?

The four options you have

• A website builder (Wix, Squarespace, WordPress.com, or Shopify for a shop): you pick a template, fill it in yourself and pay a monthly or yearly subscription.
• WordPress on your own hosting: more freedom, and more technical things to learn and keep an eye on.
• A freelance designer or an agency, who builds it to measure with meetings and a quote.
• A fixed-price service like ours: you start from a proven layout, send us photos and prices, and within a few days it's live.

What Wix and the others do well

Builders have improved a lot. Templates look good, they work on a phone, and hosting, security and updates are included in the fee. You don't have to think about servers.

You can start this evening without talking to anyone, and change a price or a photo whenever you like. Bookings, forms and a shop come ready to use. And they handle basic SEO well: nobody drops off Google for using Wix.

The small print of the «free website»

Almost all of them have a free plan. For trying things out, fine. For a business, the seams show quickly:

• Your address ends up as «yourbusiness.wixsite.com» or similar. Put that on an awning or a card and see how many people remember it.
• The platform shows its own ad or notice on your site.
• There are limits on storage or features, and taking payments online or removing the ads usually needs a paid plan.
• As soon as you want your own domain and no ads, you're paying every month.
• The free terms change when the platform decides, not when you do.

What you pay over three years, roughly

Comparing the first month's price is misleading. Look at the total over three years, about how long a site lasts before you want to refresh it. These are approximate ranges, because platforms and professionals change their rates:

• Builder with your own domain and no ads: depending on the plan, roughly 15 to 40 euros a month for a business site, and more for an online shop. Over three years, several hundred euros, and on shop plans it's easy to pass a thousand. And the fee carries on for as long as the site exists.
• Freelancer or agency: from a few hundred to several thousand euros for the work, depending on what you ask for, plus domain and hosting every year and often a maintenance fee.
• Fixed-price service: a one-off payment for the site, with domain and hosting paid separately once a year. A .es or .com domain runs from a few euros to a few tens a year; simple hosting for a small site, about the same or a bit more.

With a builder you rent. With the other two you usually buy and then pay little to keep it going. In the first year renting is cheaper; over three to five years, the fee has usually cost more than having it built. It depends on the plan, so do the sum with your own numbers.

The hours it will ask of you

Picture a neighbourhood florist. The owner opens Wix on a Monday night, picks a template in ten minutes and then gets stuck: what do I write, which photos, how do I lay out the prices, why does it break on the phone. Three weeks later the site has the template, half a price list and demo photos. It happens all the time.

It isn't hard. It just takes more hours than it seems, and those hours come out of late closing or Sunday. If you hire someone, your part is sending photos and prices and answering a few questions.

How it turns out, and whether it shows on Google

With a builder, the result depends on whoever builds it. The tool doesn't tell you what order to put things in or which photo should go. That's why so many builder sites are a pretty shop window with no prices and no clear button to get in touch.

Google is the same. Wix, Squarespace or Shopify can rank a small site well. What decides it is the content: a title that says what you do and in which city, a section per service, your Google Business Profile linked. A person writes that, whether it's you or whoever you hire.

Who owns the site and whether you can take it with you

Almost nobody asks at the start, and it's what matters most two years in. On most builders, the design only works inside that platform. You can take the domain with you, and some content can be exported with more or less effort, but the site as you see it usually can't. If you stop paying, it stops being online.

If you hire someone, ask before paying whether the domain is in your name and whether you get the files. A very common mistake: the designer registered the domain in their own name, no longer answers, and the business can't touch its own address. With us the site is yours, with its files, and the domain is in your name.

Maintenance

• With a builder, security and updates are the platform's job; content changes are yours.
• With WordPress on your own hosting, updates and backups fall to you or whoever you hire. It's the first thing people stop doing, and it shows when something breaks.

When Wix is the right call

There are cases where we'd tell you to use a builder, even if you don't work with us:

• You enjoy building it yourself and have time to do it calmly.
• You're testing an idea and don't know if it will still be going in six months. A fee you can cancel makes sense.
• You'll change the content almost daily, like a gig calendar or a blog, and want to do it all yourself.
• You need a shop with hundreds of products, stock and shipping. There, Shopify or another e-commerce platform is a better starting point than a hand-built site.

When it's better to hire someone

• You'd rather spend those hours serving customers than wrestling with an editor.
• You want clear prices and a visible WhatsApp or booking button from day one, not in three months.
• You don't want a monthly fee forever, or to depend on a platform to be able to change provider.