Plenty of good businesses run on Squarespace and Wix and do very well on them.
The ceilings are real, and worth knowing before you pick, because switching later means rebuilding rather than moving.
Squarespace
The best-looking templates of the three by a comfortable margin, and hard to make ugly. Billed in US dollars: $16 to $39 a month on a yearly plan for the tiers most sites need, or $25 to $56 month to month.
Good at: portfolios, restaurants, studios, anything where the look carries the business. Blogging is well handled. The editor is the most pleasant to use.
The ceiling: you work within the template's structure. Wanting something the template doesn't do usually means changing template. Custom functionality is limited to what the platform and its integrations allow, and page speed on image-heavy sites can be middling.
Wix
The most flexible of the builders and the largest feature set. Also billed in US dollars: $17 to $39 a month on a yearly plan, or $24 to $46 month to month.
Good at: situations where you need booking, memberships, or a specific app and want it working this afternoon. The app market is large. Drag-and-drop means you can put things exactly where you want.
The ceiling: the same freedom makes it easy to build something that behaves badly on a phone, because desktop and mobile layouts are managed separately. Sites accumulate weight quickly and performance suffers. The interface is busier than Squarespace's.
Shopify
Worth naming because it gets lumped in and it shouldn't be. If selling products online is the main event, Shopify is built for that and the builders aren't. From $29 a month on a yearly plan and $39 month to month, plus 2.9% and 30 cents on every online sale.
If selling is incidental to your business, it's the wrong tool and an expensive one.
A custom build
$2,000 to $10,000 once for most business sites, then hosting from nothing to about $50 a month.
Good at: speed, doing exactly what your business needs rather than what a template anticipated, and having no platform ceiling to hit later. Nobody changes the terms or the pricing underneath you. You own it and can take it anywhere.
The trade: more upfront money, and you need someone to build it. If you want to redesign the whole thing yourself on a Sunday afternoon, a builder is better for that.
Three years, priced out
A builder costs the subscription for as long as the site is up. A custom build costs the invoice once, plus hosting.
- A builder at roughly $30/mo: about $1,080 over three years, plus your time building and maintaining it.
- Custom at $3,000 plus $15/mo hosting: about $3,540 over three years.
So the builders are cheaper in cash over three years. What the difference buys is a site written and built around your business rather than around a template, and the ability to change anything later without changing platform. Whether that's worth roughly $2,500 depends on what the site is expected to bring in over the same three years.
Can a builder rank on Google?
Yes. The claim that Squarespace or Wix sites can't rank is out of date and was overstated when it was current. Both produce crawlable, indexable sites and let you set titles, descriptions, and redirects.
Where a custom build has an edge is speed, which is a ranking factor and much easier to control when you own the output. But a fast Squarespace site with good content beats a slow custom one with thin content every time. Content and reviews determine local ranking far more than platform does.
Which one suits you
Pick a builder if you're testing whether the business works, cash is tight, you enjoy tinkering and will keep it current, or the site is a brochure that won't change much.
Pick a custom build if the site is a main source of customers, you need something the platform doesn't do, speed matters because you're competing on search, or you want to own it outright.
Pick Shopify if selling products online is the business. Budget for theme work on top of the subscription, because the design is the part Shopify leaves to you. If you need the store to do something Shopify doesn't, have an online store built into your own site instead.
Whichever you choose, register the domain yourself. That part is the same on every route, and it's the piece people lose.