Why Wix and Squarespace Are Not Right for Growing Businesses
A lot of the businesses we speak to in the North East already have a website, and a good number of them are running on Wix and Squarespace. That is usually because the adverts, the templates or a well-meaning friend with a laptop suggested it at the time.
What is covered
For a small operation that just needs to exist online, those platforms do the job. They look modern out of the box and you can have something live in an afternoon. The trouble is that they are also sold to serious businesses that need to be found in Google, turn visitors into customers and grow over the years. That is where the cracks start to show.
When Wix and Squarespace actually make sense
To be fair, a site builder has its place. If you need a one-page site that works as a digital business card, with opening hours, a phone number, a contact form and a few photos, it will do the job perfectly well.
Good examples include:
- A wedding venue with a single landing page
- A personal portfolio
- A one-off event site
- A side project that does not depend on organic search
In those cases you probably will not feel the limits. For anything more ambitious, know what you are signing up for.
Where site builders start to hold your business back
The longer you stay on a site builder, and the more you try to do with it, the more you run into the same handful of issues.
The editor controls what you can do
You can only do what the drag-and-drop interface allows. Want a contact form that pushes leads into the CRM you have chosen? A booking system that fits how your business actually works? A piece of code that runs only on certain pages? You are at the mercy of whatever the platform decided to support.
That is fine while your needs are simple. It stops being fine the moment you want something specific to your business, which for most businesses is the whole point of having a website.
The code is heavier than it needs to be
Drag-and-drop builders generate code on your behalf, and they generate a lot of it. Every section, animation and visual flourish gets wrapped in layers of generic HTML, CSS and JavaScript. That extra weight slows pages down, and slow pages cost you traffic, conversions and rankings.
In our experience, a typical Wix site struggles to break 60 on mobile in PageSpeed Insights. A well-built WordPress site routinely scores 90 or higher, and a custom coded site can sit at 100.
Your site is locked to the platform
Wix sites are locked to Wix. Squarespace sites are locked to Squarespace. If you decide to move later, whether for cost, performance or because you have outgrown them, you are starting from scratch. There is no proper export that brings your design and structure with it.
Years of content, page structures and search equity end up held hostage by the platform that built them. We have helped a number of businesses migrate off Wix and Squarespace, and it is rarely cheap or quick.
Integrations stop at the platform’s edge
Need to connect to a specific accountancy tool, a stock system, a niche scheduling app or a custom CRM? On WordPress there is almost certainly a plugin, or one can be built. On a site builder you may be told no, funnelled through a third-party connector that costs more each month than your hosting, or stuck with the platform’s own, usually weaker, version of the tool.
Key point: site builders are easy to start with, but every restriction becomes a future problem. The bigger your business gets, the more those restrictions cost you.
Why Wix and Squarespace can hurt your SEO
For most businesses, the website exists to be found in search. If you are competing for terms like “joiner in Newcastle” or “electrician in North Tyneside” through proper local SEO, you need every technical advantage you can get. Site builders give you fewer of them.
Page speed and Core Web Vitals
Google’s Core Web Vitals measure loading, responsiveness and visual stability, and they form part of how Google assesses page experience. Site builder sites tend to score badly on mobile because of the code bloat described above. You can sometimes optimise around it, but you are working around a problem the platform created.
On WordPress with decent hosting, or on a custom coded site, fast scores are the default rather than something you fight for.
Control of the technical layer
Custom robots.txt rules, canonical tags, hreflang for multi-region sites, proper schema markup and sensible redirect management are the levers that decide whether you rank for the searches that matter. A site builder gives you a watered-down version of each, if anything at all.
URL structure and location pages
If your business covers several towns, you need a clean set of location pages, sensible URLs, proper internal linking and local schema. On a site builder that work is slow and the platform fights you at every step. On WordPress with Rank Math, or on a custom coded site, the same job takes hours and is done properly.
For a service business trying to rank across North Shields, Tynemouth, Whitley Bay and beyond, this is not optional. You can see what it looks like in our Traditional Masonry case study, a North Shields business now ranking across the region.
Key point: SEO is not just about content. It is about whether the platform underneath gives you the technical control to compete.
Want a straight answer on your own site?
A free, no obligation look at what is holding it back, in plain English with the quick wins first.
What we recommend instead of Wix and Squarespace
For most of the businesses we work with, the right answer is either WordPress or a fully custom coded site. Both give you what a site builder cannot.
WordPress
WordPress runs roughly 40% of the web. Almost any feature you might need either exists as a plugin or can be built. Paired with a page builder like Elementor and a proper SEO plugin like Rank Math, you get full control of the technical side and a sensible editing experience for content.
On decent hosting it is fast and flexible, and you own what you have built. If you plan to publish blog posts or update pages yourself regularly, a properly built WordPress site is usually the right call.
A custom coded site
A custom coded site is hand built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with no CMS underneath. There is no database to query, no plugins to update and no security patches to install. Just clean, lean code written for your business, loading almost instantly and scoring near perfect on Core Web Vitals out of the box.
Hosting costs are minimal, the attack surface is tiny and the site will keep running quietly for years. For a service business that does not need to publish content every week, it is genuinely hard to beat.
How to choose between them
Both options give you full control of the technical layer, proper SEO foundations and a site you own rather than rent. The decision usually comes down to two questions:
- How often will you update the site yourself?
- How much do you value raw speed and simplicity over a content management interface?
Moving off a site builder: what to expect
If you decide to leave, a migration does not need to be painful when it is planned properly. A typical move looks like this:
- Audit the current site. List every page, its URL and how much traffic it gets, so nothing valuable is lost.
- Plan the new structure. Keep what works, merge thin pages and add the service and location pages you were missing.
- Rebuild and rewrite. Content is carried across and improved, not just copied.
- Set up redirects. Every old URL points to its new equivalent so you keep the search equity you have built.
- Launch and monitor. Check indexing and enquiries closely in the weeks after go-live.
Most of our brochure sites launch within a few weeks, with a written fixed-price proposal and two structured rounds of design revisions so you know exactly what you are getting.
Thinking about moving off Wix and Squarespace?
We build WordPress and custom coded websites for businesses across the North East, from single-page brochure sites to multi-location service businesses with proper local SEO foundations. Have a look at our recent work to see the difference.
If your site is on a builder platform and the enquiries are not coming, the platform itself may be part of the reason. Get in touch to book a free 30-minute discovery call and we will give you an honest view of your options.
Michael James
Michael heads up NE1 Web Design & SEO in North Shields and has been building websites for more than twenty years.