Wix vs Squarespace vs custom-built — which one for a Miami business?

I get asked this question every week. Usually it's a small-business owner who's been quoted $2,800 for a Wix site, $3,500 for a Squarespace site, and $4,500 for a custom build, and wants to know if the extra money is worth it.

Here's the honest comparison from a guy who has built on all three and migrated clients off all three.

Wix — the everything store of website builders

Wix is the McDonald's of website platforms. It's cheap. It's everywhere. It does everything in a "good enough" way. And nobody talks about it at parties.

What Wix is good at: Getting a site live in 48 hours when you absolutely have to. The drag-and-drop editor is genuinely beginner-friendly. The template gallery is enormous. Pricing is OK.

What Wix is bad at: Almost everything else. Site speed is universally poor — I've never audited a Wix site that scored above 60 on mobile PageSpeed. SEO is hampered by Wix's URL structure and the way it generates code. Customization beyond what the template allows quickly turns into a wrestling match with the editor. And you can't export your site — you're locked in for the lifetime of the business.

I migrated a Coral Gables medspa off Wix in 2026. Their old site was 4 years old, took 7.2 seconds to load on mobile, and had 12 plugins they no longer used because they didn't know how to remove them. We rebuilt it custom in 9 days; the new site loads in 1.1 seconds and converts 4x better.

Squarespace — beautiful, until you want to change something

Squarespace is what you pick when design matters but you don't have a designer. The templates are honestly gorgeous out of the box. The drag editor is more polished than Wix's. And if your business fits inside one of their template categories — restaurants, photographers, agencies, creators — you can get something legitimately nice up in a weekend.

What Squarespace is good at: Looking like a real designer touched it. The typography defaults are good. The image handling is decent. Their built-in scheduling and e-commerce work fine for very small operations. Mobile rendering is more reliable than Wix.

What Squarespace is bad at: Doing anything outside the lines. The moment you want a custom interaction, a non-template form, a unique navigation behavior, or any kind of custom integration — you're either paying a Squarespace developer real money or you're stuck. The CSS injection feature is a Band-Aid for problems that shouldn't exist. And every customization you make in Squarespace will break the next time they update the template engine, which they do silently.

Squarespace is rented furniture. It looks great in the photos. Try moving it to the other side of the room and you'll discover how much of it is bolted to the floor.

Custom-built — expensive on day one, free for the next 10 years

Custom-built means a developer writes the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that becomes your website. There's no monthly platform fee. No template lock-in. The site lives wherever you want it to live. You own everything.

What custom is good at: Speed. Every custom site I ship loads in under 1.5 seconds on mobile because there's no bloated template engine generating 3MB of CSS you don't use. SEO, because Google can parse a clean HTML structure better than any builder output. Design, because you're not stuck with a template — you get whatever your business actually needs. Cost over time, because hosting a static site is essentially free ($0–$5/mo on Vercel, Netlify, or Cloudflare), versus Squarespace's $204/year or Wix's $300+/year forever.

What custom is bad at: Self-service editing. You can't open a custom site and drag a button to a new spot. If you want to change the menu, you either need to know HTML or call your developer. For some business owners that's a dealbreaker. For most it's a non-issue — they change their site once a year anyway.

The cost over 5 years

This is the part nobody calculates. Let's compare a $2,800 Wix build vs a $3,500 Squarespace vs a $4,500 custom build.

• Wix: $2,800 build + $336/year × 5 = $4,480
• Squarespace: $3,500 build + $216/year × 5 = $4,580
• Custom: $4,500 build + $0–$60/year × 5 = $4,500–$4,800

The "expensive" option costs the same as the "cheap" one over five years — and you get a faster, more SEO-friendly, fully-owned site with no monthly bill.

So which one should you pick?

Here's my honest decision tree:

• Testing an idea / side hustle / under 3 months runway: Squarespace. Templates are good enough, $16/mo is the cheapest thing you'll buy this year.
• Established small business, traffic from Google matters: Custom. Always custom. SEO and speed are the entire game.
• Real e-commerce with 50+ SKUs: Shopify. (Not on this list because it's the obvious answer.)
• You're going to update the site weekly yourself: Squarespace, if the design fits. Custom + a CMS is more powerful but harder to learn.
• You picked Wix already and you're happy: Leave it alone. Wix sites convert when they're well-designed and the business is good. Don't fix what isn't broken.

For 80% of the Miami small businesses I talk to — trades, single-location service businesses, restaurants, professionals — custom-built is the right answer because traffic from Google is the entire game and Wix/Squarespace lose that game on day one.

If you want to see what a custom build actually looks like across different niches, the showroom has 38 live demos — every one is a real custom HTML/CSS/JS build with no platform underneath it.