Should I just build my own website on Wix? An honest answer from someone who builds them for a living

I get this question every week, in some form. “What’s wrong with just building it myself on Wix?” Or Squarespace, or Webflow, or Shopify, or whichever DIY builder caught their eye.

I’m a developer. I build websites for small businesses for a living. You’d reasonably expect me to say “don’t, hire me”. But the honest answer has to be honest, so here it is.

The cases where Wix is genuinely fine

There are real situations where Wix is the right call:

• You’re testing whether the business itself works. A side project where you don’t even know yet if there’s a market. £14 a month for a website you might abandon in six weeks is fine. Wix.
• You only need a single page of text. Your business is “person with phone number” and the site exists purely so people can google your name and find that phone number. Wix is overkill but fine.
• You actively want to fiddle with it. You enjoy spending Saturday afternoons rearranging the navigation. Wix’s editor is built for you. Have at it.
• Speed, SEO and design quality don’t really matter for your business. If 80% of your customers come from word-of-mouth and the website is a “we exist” placeholder, the standard isn’t that high. Wix clears it.

In any of those situations, I’m not the right answer for you, and neither is any other “proper” web developer. Spending more would be wasting your money.

The cases where Wix is quietly costing you customers

Here’s where it gets uncomfortable. Most small businesses I talk to aren’t in the categories above. They’re real, established trades, clinics, restaurants and salons that depend on Google sending them new customers — and for those, Wix has three structural problems that no amount of fiddling fixes:

1. It’s slow. A typical Wix site loads in 4–8 seconds on a mobile 4G connection. A hand-coded site loads in 0.5–1.2 seconds. Google’s own research says every extra second from 1 to 6 seconds increases the probability of someone leaving by 106%. If half your new customers are coming from Google, that’s half-of-half — a quarter of your top-of-funnel — leaving before the page has rendered. A plumber doing 200 mobile visits a month from Google search is losing roughly 50 calls a month to load speed alone, before any other factor.

I’m not making the load-time number up to be polemical. Run your Wix site through our free site check. The number it gives you is the same number Google uses.

2. It looks like a Wix site. The 100 most-used Wix templates have collectively built tens of millions of websites. After looking at five, your subconscious starts pattern-matching: rectangular hero image, big rounded button, three-column “About / Services / Contact” block. Your customers don’t articulate it, but they recognise it. And what they pattern-match it to is not “premium, trusted business” — it’s “person who picked a free template ten minutes ago”. For a plumber doing £80 call-outs that doesn’t matter; for a clinic taking £2,000 dental work it absolutely does.

3. You don’t actually own it. Move away from Wix and you lose the site entirely. The export feature, where it exists at all, ships you HTML that’s tied to Wix’s CSS framework and doesn’t work anywhere else. You’re renting, not buying. If Wix raises prices, discontinues a feature you depend on, or simply makes the editor slower (they do, every couple of years) — you have no exit but a full rebuild.

The honest test

Ask yourself three questions:

1. Does most of your work come from Google search or local maps?
2. If a customer is choosing between you and a competitor, would the website be one of the things they consider?
3. Do you want to spend zero hours per month on your website itself — opening accounts, fiddling with templates, watching tutorials?

If you answered no, no, yes — Wix is fine. Stay there.

If you answered yes, yes, yes — you’re paying for Wix in lost calls, and the price is way more than £14 a month. The reason most small businesses still build on Wix isn’t because it’s the right tool. It’s because £14/month sounds cheap until you compare it to £45/month for a site that doesn’t bleed customers.

What I do instead, briefly

Hand-coded HTML/CSS/JavaScript. No templates, no plugins, no editor to outgrow. Loads in under a second. Looks the part of the kind of business you actually are. Hosted on Cloudflare’s UK edge for free SSL and security. £45 a month, all-in, with the first month free — and on cancel, the actual site files come to you, so nothing’s locked in. I built this site on the same stack you’d be getting; if it loads fast and feels right, that’s what yours would feel like too.

The honest summary: Wix is fine if you’re not really in the game. If you are in the game — if your website is genuinely competing for customers — Wix isn’t the right tool, and the maths of the alternatives are friendlier than people assume.

If you want to see where your current site stands, run the free audit. If you want the bigger picture on what a proper small-business website actually costs over three years, read this next.