The hidden cost of free website builders
Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress sell themselves as “free” or “£10/mo.” Add in your time, the SEO ceiling, and the scale wall — and they’re usually the most expensive option on the table.
Every SME owner has, at some point, looked at a Wix ad and thought “surely this is enough.” Sometimes it is. More often, the hidden costs don’t show up until you’re 18 months in and ranking nowhere.
Cost #1: your time
The realistic time budget for a small business owner building their own Wix or Squarespace site, from sign-up to “done enough,” is 40–80 hours. That’s two full working weeks you could have spent selling. At a conservative £40/hr opportunity cost, your “free” site just cost you £1,600–3,200.
Cost #2: the SEO ceiling
Page-builders ship extra DOM, un-optimised images by default, and render patterns that drag Core Web Vitals. In a non-competitive niche, that might not matter. In any local-service category where you’re fighting for the top three Maps pack results, you’ll lose to a competitor whose site loads a second faster. Lighthouse scores on out-of-the-box Wix templates typically land in the 40s–60s; a custom-built site in the 90s+.
Cost #3: the scale wall
Your first 10 service pages on Squarespace are fine. Your 30th service page is a Frankenstein of duplicated blocks and slightly inconsistent layouts. Page-builders make adding pages easy; they make adding structured pages nearly impossible. Every SME that outgrows a builder describes the same “we can’t find anything” phase.
Cost #4: lock-in
- You can’t export a Wix site in any useful form.
- Squarespace exports are partial, and the markup is unrecognisable as modern code.
- WordPress is technically portable, but ‘moving a WordPress site’ is a small consulting project in itself.
“Free builders are priced in your time, your rankings, and your option to leave. None of those show up on the invoice.”
When a builder is the right call
If you’re pre-revenue and testing a concept, spin up Wix. If you’re a personal brand with one page that won’t change for two years, Squarespace is fine. If your site is a tool you’ll use to sell, update, publish, and measure — the maths stops working almost immediately.
The upgrade path we run
We migrate a lot of Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress sites. Our process for the move is: export your content, rebuild the structure on a custom stack (Next.js, Tailwind, Postgres), redirect every old URL so your rankings don’t drop, and hand you a faster, cleaner, owned version of the same site — typically in 7 days. No data loss, no ranking loss.
From £89/mo on our Starter tier. Cancel anytime; after three months on any monthly plan you take the code with you if you ever want to leave. That’s the opposite of the lock-in problem this post is about.