Wix or a Custom Site for a Home Service Business?

Wix, Squarespace and GoDaddy will all put a real website online for around twenty dollars a month, and the results look far better than they did five years ago. Anybody who dismisses them outright is not being straight with you.

The comparison worth making is not which one produces a nicer looking site. It is what each one costs you in the parts you cannot see.

What the builders are genuinely good at

You get a working site for the price of a couple of coffees a month. Hosting, an SSL certificate, a template that works on a phone and a drag and drop editor you can actually use.

For a contractor who wants something real online this week without waiting on anybody, that is a good deal and it is not close.

The first real cost is your evenings

The subscription is cheap. Building the thing is not, because you are the one doing it.

Most contractors who go this route describe the same pattern. A weekend to get the basics up, then a slow trickle of evenings fiddling with a section that will not sit right. Then it stalls half finished, because a full week of work happened and the site is not what pays this month's bills.

Twenty dollars a month plus forty hours of your own time is not a cheap website. It is just a website you paid for in a currency you do not track.

The second cost is that it will not rank on its own

This is the one that actually matters and it gets missed, because the builders are not lying when they say they are good for SEO. The platform is fine. It emits reasonable markup and Google indexes it without complaint.

What the platform cannot do is decide what the pages should be about. Ranking for your trade in your city means knowing which terms people search, which ones you can realistically win, and what has to be on the page to answer them. That is research and writing, and no drag and drop editor does it for you.

So people build a Wix site, wait, see nothing happen, and conclude that SEO is a scam. The site was never the problem.

When a builder is the right answer

Take the builder if you want something online quickly, you enjoy tinkering, and getting found on Google is not what you are trying to solve right now. That is a perfectly sensible position and it is cheap.

When it is not

If the reason you want a website is that you want the phone to ring more, the builder is solving a different problem from the one you have. You will get a site. You will not get found, and the twenty dollars a month will feel like a bargain right up until you work out it has produced nothing in a year.

The way we do it, for comparison

The website is free and the local SEO is $297 a month, because the ranking work is the part that takes ongoing effort and it is the part that produces customers.

You do not build anything and you do not spend your evenings on it. Web design in Louisville, KY has the detail, and we will design you a free preview of your site before you pay anything, so you can put it next to whatever you would have built yourself.