Builders like Wix and Squarespace cost roughly £9 to £29 a month, and you do the work yourself within what the platform allows. A custom website costs more upfront, little or nothing to host, can do whatever your business needs, and is handled for you from start to finish.
This is the question I'm asked most, usually by someone paying for a drag-and-drop builder and wondering whether it's doing enough for them. I build custom sites for a living, so I'm not neutral, which is why the figures below come with sources you can check.
How they compare
| Drag-and-drop builder | Custom site | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | Wix £9 to £25 a month and Squarespace £12 to £29, billed yearly, plus your domain | Hosting is free on a basic plan, or around £7 a month if a site needs more, plus a domain at around £15 a year |
| Upfront cost | Your own time, or a designer to set it up | From £200 for a single-page site with me |
| Who does the work | You do, from choosing a template to the search settings | I do, from the design to the technical setup |
| Features | Whatever the platform and its app store offer, and many apps charge monthly on top | Built around what you need, from booking systems and shop sections to interactive sliders and mini games |
| Design | Starts from a template, and making it look polished takes more skill than the drag and drop suggests | Designed from scratch around your brand |
| Branding | Free plans show the platform's own name on your site | Only yours |
| Speed | Better than its reputation, with about 75% of Wix and 70% of Squarespace sites passing Google's page-experience checks | Depends on the build, and a light custom site should pass comfortably |
| Changes | You can edit anything yourself, any time | Send me what you'd like changed and I'll do it |
| Moving later | Hard to take your site to another platform | You own the files and can host them anywhere |
A builder can work if
- you enjoy doing it yourself and have the time to learn the tools
- you're testing an idea and have almost no budget yet
- you're selling hundreds of products, where a dedicated shop platform like Shopify is usually the better tool
A custom site makes more sense if
- you'd rather hand the whole thing over and get on with running your business
- you need something a template can't do well, like bookings, a shop section or something interactive
- you want to look different from the businesses around you
Most of the people who come to me have tried a builder already and found that the hard part was never the dragging and dropping, it was making the result look like a business they'd trust. If the thought of choosing templates and fiddling with settings makes your heart sink, that's what a designer is for.
Try the ten-second test
- Open your website on your phone, since that's how most people will see it first.
- Hand it to a friend who doesn't know your business well, give them ten seconds, then take the phone back.
- Ask them what you do, who it's for, and how they'd book or get in touch.
- Any answer they have to guess is the first thing to fix, whichever platform you're on, and it's usually the words at the top of your home page.
Sources
- Search Engine Journal, Core Web Vitals by platform (November 2025 data)
- ExpertSure, Wix UK pricing (checked July 2026)
- ExpertSure, Squarespace UK pricing (2026)
- Netlify pricing
Emma Winnard, founder of AEAN Studios
Designs websites and social media for small businesses, and book covers and YouTube thumbnails for creatives, from a small studio in Wigan.
