Wix, Squarespace, Shopify or custom: which should a small business pick?
Every platform is right for someone. An honest guide to who each one suits, the moment each one stops fitting, and the one question that settles the choice.
We build custom sites, so you would expect us to say custom. We are not going to, because it is not true for everyone, and a guide that ends 'hire us' is not a guide. Every one of these platforms is the right choice for some businesses. The trick is knowing which one you are — and, just as important, recognising the moment you have outgrown the choice you made.
Wix and Squarespace: the brochure
Right for: a business whose website mainly needs to say who you are, what you do, where you are and how to get in touch. A consultant, a clinic, a trades business, a restaurant that takes bookings by phone. If the site changes a few times a year and nobody buys anything on it, these are good, cheap and you can run them yourself.
Where it stops fitting: the day you need the site to do something specific. A menu with modifiers, a quote form with logic, a product catalogue with filters, anything connected to another system. You will find an app in their marketplace that almost does it, for another monthly fee, and then a second app to patch the first. Also: you do not own the site. It cannot be moved. Leave and you start from zero.
Shopify: the store
Right for: selling physical products online to consumers, with shipping. If that is your business — you have SKUs, inventory and parcels — Shopify is excellent and you should probably use it. The checkout, payments, shipping and tax are solved problems there, and solving them yourself is expensive.
Where it stops fitting: when your business is not really a consumer store. Wholesale with negotiated prices, quote requests instead of a cart, restaurant ordering with pickup times, services rather than products. Shopify can be bent to these with apps, and the bending costs money every month. Also watch the fees: the plan, plus apps, plus payment processing on every order, plus a premium theme, adds up to a real number by year two.
Restaurant and ordering platforms: the rented counter
Right for: a single-location takeout spot that needs online ordering this month and has no one to manage anything. For $49 to $80 a month you get a menu and ordering with no build cost, and that is a fair trade at the start.
Where it stops fitting: when it works. Several of these platforms take a percentage of every online order — commonly 5% to 10% — or add a fee to your customer's bill. At $10,000 a month in online orders, 10% is $12,000 a year, paid to keep a site you do not own on a domain you cannot take with you. The better your year, the worse the deal.
Custom: the owned system
Right for: a business where the website has a job — taking orders, generating quotes, running a catalogue for buyers, being found for specific things — and that is going to be trading in three years. Also for anyone who has hit the ceiling of one of the platforms above and is now paying monthly to work around it.
Where it stops fitting: honestly, when the site does not need to do anything and the budget is tight. A custom build for a five-page brochure site is money you could spend on photography. And custom means someone has to host and maintain it — either you pay a small monthly plan or you own that responsibility.
The one question that settles it
What does the website have to do — and what does it cost you every month if it does that through someone else's platform?
If the answer to the first half is 'exist and look credible', pick a platform and move on with your life. If the answer involves orders, quotes, catalogues or being the thing customers find, add up the second half over three years. That number, next to a custom quote, is the decision. It is rarely close in either direction — and it is almost never the number people were arguing about, which is the build price.