Custom Website vs Wix or Squarespace — When Does It Make Sense to Hire a Developer?

You've decided your business needs a website. You open Google, and immediately you're hit with two very different paths: drag-and-drop builders like Wix and Squarespace, or hiring a developer to build something custom.

Both are valid options. But they solve different problems, and picking the wrong one can cost you more in the long run than you'd save upfront.

Here's how to think about it.

What Website Builders Are Actually Good At

Let's give credit where it's due. Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify are genuinely good for certain situations:

• You need something live this week. If speed is everything and you just need a basic online presence, builders are hard to beat.
• Your needs are simple. A landing page, a portfolio with a few images, a basic online store with 10 products — builders handle these well.
• You want to manage content yourself and don't mind working within templates.
• Your budget is under $500. At this price point, custom development doesn't make economic sense.

If that describes your situation, honestly — go with a builder. No developer worth hiring would tell you otherwise.

Where Builders Start to Break Down

The problems show up as your business grows. Here's what I see over and over when business owners come to me after starting with a builder:

The "Template Ceiling"

Every builder has constraints. You can customize colors and fonts, but the underlying structure is fixed. When you need your site to do something the template wasn't designed for — a custom booking flow, a client portal, dynamic pricing based on user input — you're stuck. You end up adding plugins on top of plugins, and the site gets slow and brittle.

Performance Problems

Builder sites load a lot of code you don't need. A typical Wix site loads 3-5MB of JavaScript before your visitor sees anything. A well-built custom site? Under 200KB. That difference directly affects your Google ranking and your conversion rate. Every extra second of load time costs you roughly 7% in conversions.

SEO Limitations

Builders have gotten better at SEO, but they still limit your control over things like page structure, schema markup, URL patterns, and server-side rendering. If organic search is important to your business, these limitations add up.

You Don't Actually Own It

With most builders, you're renting. If Wix changes their pricing, removes a feature, or goes down — your business is affected and you have no recourse. With a custom site, you own the code. You can host it anywhere, modify anything, and you're not locked into a single platform.

When Hiring a Developer Makes Sense

Consider going custom when:

• Your website IS your product. If the site itself is the thing that makes you money (SaaS, marketplace, booking platform), it needs to be custom.
• You need integrations. Connecting to your CRM, payment processor, inventory system, or other business tools properly requires custom work.
• SEO is a primary growth channel. Custom sites give you full control over performance, structured data, and content architecture.
• You've outgrown your template. If you're fighting your builder to do basic things, the time you spend working around limitations is costing you more than a custom build would.
• You want to stand out. Template sites look like template sites. Your competitors are using the same ones. A custom site communicates that your business is established and serious.
• You're thinking long-term. A custom site is an asset you own. It can evolve with your business instead of constraining it.

The Real Cost Comparison

People focus on the upfront price, but the total cost of ownership tells a different story:

Website builder (Year 1): $200-500 for the plan, plus 40-80 hours of your time wrestling with templates, plugins, and workarounds. What's your hourly rate? Multiply that out.

Custom website (Year 1): $2,000-10,000 depending on complexity. But it's built right the first time, it performs better, it converts better, and you spend your time running your business instead of fighting your website.

By year 2-3, the custom site often ends up cheaper — and it's generating more revenue because it actually works well.

The Bottom Line

There's no universal right answer. It depends on where your business is right now and where it's going.

If you're validating an idea or just need a simple presence, start with a builder. But if your website is a core part of how your business operates, earns revenue, or acquires customers — that's when a custom build pays for itself.

The worst outcome is spending months on a builder, hitting the ceiling, and then paying for a custom site anyway. If you already know your needs are complex, skip the detour.