Wix, Squarespace, or Google Sites? An Honest Look at the DIY Builders

If you've decided to build your own website, you've almost certainly landed on three names: Squarespace, Wix, and Google Sites. People will tell you one is "the best." None of them is. Each is genuinely great at something and quietly hopeless at something else, and the right pick is just whichever one matches what you need.

So here's the honest version — what each is actually good at, where it runs out of road, roughly what it costs, and how you'll know when you've outgrown it. And the headline first: for a lot of service businesses, one of these three is genuinely the right call. You don't need more.

Squarespace — the polished one

Squarespace makes it hard to build an ugly site. The templates are designed by people with taste, and they gently steer you toward something that looks professional even if you have no eye for it. You pick a layout, drop in your words and photos, and it comes out looking like you hired someone.

That polish is the whole point — and the catch. Squarespace is opinionated. It wants your site to work its way. That's a gift when you have no strong opinions of your own, and a small frustration when you do and the tool won't budge. For a clean, handsome site that says what you do and lets people get in touch or book — an accountant, a consultant, an independent practice — it's hard to beat. You'll hit the ceiling only if you need something genuinely unusual.

Cost: roughly a modest monthly subscription, a bit more if you want online booking or a store.

Wix — the flexible one

Wix gives you more freedom and a lot more buttons. You can drag anything anywhere, and there's an add-on for nearly everything — booking, a store, a members area, forms, chat. If your business has a specific need, there's probably a Wix app for it.

The same freedom is the trap. With nothing stopping you, it's easy to end up with a cluttered, slightly busy site — the digital equivalent of a desk with too much on it. Wix rewards a bit of restraint. Used with discipline it's excellent and will stretch further than Squarespace for an odd requirement; used without, it sprawls. Pick it when you have a real feature you need and you're willing to keep yourself tidy.

Cost: similar ballpark to Squarespace; the apps can add up if you're not watching.

Google Sites — the free, dead-simple one

Google Sites is free, it's about as easy as making a slide deck, and it does almost nothing fancy — which, for some businesses, is exactly right. If you mainly need a single honest page on the internet that says who you are, what you do, and how to reach you, Google Sites will do that this afternoon at no cost.

Be clear-eyed about the ceiling, though: it's low. The designs are plain, the options are few, it doesn't really do online booking or selling, and it won't grow with you. This is a starting flag, not a finish line. But "a basic page that exists and is correct" beats "a beautiful site I keep meaning to build," every time. If you're very early, don't be shy about starting here.

Cost: free.

So which one?

Roughly, and without knowing your business:

• Want it to look great with the least effort, and you don't have fussy requirements? Squarespace.
• Have a specific feature you need and you'll keep it tidy? Wix.
• Just need an honest page to exist, today, for nothing? Google Sites.

There's no wrong answer among them for most service businesses — and the bigger point from the buyer's guide still holds: the site is the easy, cheap part. Whichever builder you choose, the money and effort that actually win customers go into being found and into the system behind the site, not into the site itself. One small thing does matter, though: pick the one you'll actually keep current. A site is a signal, and a handsome one frozen mid-2023 — old prices, a dead news page — signals worse than a plain page that's plainly tended. The best builder for you is partly just the one you'll still be updating a year from now.

How you'll know you've outgrown a DIY builder

This is the part worth keeping. You haven't outgrown a builder because someone told you to "go custom." You've outgrown it when one of these is true and the tool is genuinely in your way:

• You need something the builder simply can't do — a real booking-and-payments flow, a customer login, an integration with the software you actually run your business on — and you've hit a hard wall, not just a fiddly afternoon.
• You're spending more time fighting the editor than you'd spend paying someone to handle it.
• The site has become genuinely high-stakes — it's where most of your customers decide — and "good enough" no longer is.

Until one of those is plainly true, a DIY builder is doing its job, and "upgrading" is mostly spending money to feel busy. Adding website effort because it feels productive — rather than because something is actually broken — is its own quiet trap; there's a whole piece on why more activity isn't the same as more results.

And if you're not sure whether the builder is really the thing holding you back, don't guess — the honest way to tell is to look at what's actually happening with your customers, which is its own subject.

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If you want a second pair of eyes before you pick — or a plain read on whether the builder you're on is genuinely the thing in your way — that's exactly the kind of thing I like looking at. Fifteen minutes, no pitch: you tell me how your business works, I tell you what I see. Have a look here.