The choice, and the question behind it
On one screen there is a website builder advert: free templates, drag and drop, a price that starts near nothing. On the other is a quote from a person, and it can read like a ransom for something the advert insists you can do yourself over a weekend. Most business owners sit between the two for weeks, and the comparison usually gets settled on price alone, because price is the only thing both screens put in writing.
The comparison is fairer, and more useful, when it starts one question earlier: what does the site actually have to do, and who owns the result when it is finished? A site that works as a noticeboard for people who already know you and a site that has to win work from strangers who search are different jobs, and the cheap route and the expensive route are each right for one of them.
What follows works through what each route genuinely costs, then the test the price comparison keeps missing, which is what leaving costs, and finishes with the honest case for each side and the middle path between them. The right answer depends on the business rather than the tool.
What building it yourself actually costs
The advertised prices are real. Doman Digital's June 2026 comparison of builders, freelancers and agencies compiles the UK plans: Wix runs £9 to £119 a month on annual billing, Squarespace £12 to £79, Shopify £25 to £344, GoDaddy £6.99 to £13.99 and WordPress.com roughly £5 to £63. Wix's own pricing page currently shows its four premium plans, Light, Core, Business and Business Elite, in dollars, $17.77 to $159.77 a month billed yearly in full, alongside the page's own note that "prices and currency vary by location", so the sterling figures above are the ones to plan around.
The free plan is free in a specific way. Building on Wix costs nothing, and the same page is clear about what a premium plan is for: it is what connects a custom domain and removes the Wix branding. Until then the site lives on a Wix subdomain and carries Wix's branding, which reads oddly on a business card.
Then there is what the plan does not include. Business email is the one that catches people: Wix's premium plans do not include it, and it is sold separately through Google Workspace, so the address on the van needs its own subscription before it matches the website.
The last cost never reaches a bill: the evenings. No source I could verify publishes a reliable figure for how long a DIY build takes, so it is fairer as an argument than as a number. The building itself is only part of it. The words have to be written, the photographs chosen, the pages ordered and reordered after the day job is done. The plan price is what the site costs. The evenings are what it costs you.
What hiring someone actually costs
The human route is a wider market, and the spread is wider too. The same Doman Digital roundup, drawing on Bark's benchmarks, puts a basic site at £300 to £1,000, a medium small business site at £1,000 to £3,000, and the full freelancer range at £300 to £5,000. Small agency projects start around £1,000 and reach £5,000, strategic or mid size builds run £5,000 to £10,000, complex work starts from £10,000, and agency retainers sit at £200 to £1,500 a month.
A one-off price is not the only shape either. Some designers, this studio included, charge monthly instead, which trades the lump sum for a predictable bill. Whether either route genuinely costs less over three years is arithmetic rather than opinion, and how much a website really costs does that arithmetic in full: the running costs that sit on top of any build, and the questions that stop you paying for the same site twice.
What a quote rarely itemises is what the money is actually buying: who writes the words, who owns what gets made, and who is still answering the phone a year later. Those are exactly the things the test below is about, and they are worth settling before the price, because a cheap quote that fails them is the expensive option in disguise.
The test the price comparison misses: what leaving costs
Over a few years the cash difference between the two routes narrows. A builder's monthly fee keeps arriving, a one-off build gets spread across the life of the site, and the gap between them closes. The difference that never closes is what happens when you want to leave. No advert puts that on the comparison table, and it is the single most consequential difference between the two routes.
Start with what Wix says itself. Its help centre article on moving a site away states that "since Wix is a SaaS solution, your site must run on Wix's servers", and that the architecture "does not support external hosting since it uses Wix's proprietary technology". The same article adds that "the content you build on Wix belongs to you", and that is true and worth having. But the content is not the site. A Wix site cannot be picked up and hosted anywhere else, at any price, because the thing you built only exists inside Wix.
So what does a move actually salvage? WordPress.com's Wix importer brings across static pages, images, the site title and the menus. It cannot bring the blog: as that page puts it, "it is not possible to export blog posts from Wix to other platforms". The workaround, Wix's own blog feed, carries only the 20 most recent posts, as short excerpts. Templates and site styles do not carry over either. In plain terms: your words, your images and your domain travel, and the design, the structure and the blog posts do not. The parts that do not travel are the parts a designer was paid for, which is why the exit is where the two routes really separate.
The one part of a builder build that leaves cleanly is the domain, and only when it is in your name. A domain registered to you can be repointed at whatever you build next, which makes it worth checking whose name yours is actually in. Who owns your domain name is the full walk through that check, including why a WHOIS search cannot settle it for a .co.uk domain and what to do if the answer is not you.
The risks on the other side
Fairness cuts both ways, so the other side of the comparison gets the same treatment. Hiring is not automatically the safe option. The cheapest human quote carries its own failure mode: the designer who stops replying, the domain quietly registered in the designer's name, the hosting account nobody else can see, the handover that was always going to happen next month and never did. A builder cannot disappear, which is a real point in its column.
The defence is four cheap checks, worth running long before anything is wrong: whose name the domain's registrant record carries, whose name the hosting account is in, who administers the email that can reset everything else, and when the last backup ran and where the copy lives. All four can be settled in a morning, and web designer not responding? What to do takes each one in turn, along with what a rescue can and cannot save if the answers come back wrong.
It is also fair to say the risk shrinks with the distance between you. A designer down the road has a reputation that lives in the same county as your site, and more to lose from going quiet. The web design in Lincolnshire hub on this site is that argument written out for one county: what paying someone local should buy, and the arrangement worth expecting afterwards.
When building it yourself is the right answer
None of the above makes the builder the wrong answer in every case, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. There is a camp where DIY wins outright: the business whose customers already know it and whose site is a noticeboard, the idea being tested before real money goes in, the budget that is genuinely zero this month. If nobody has to find you by searching, the parts of a builder site that cannot travel are parts you did not need anyway, and the evenings are a price you can choose to pay.
The signs that DIY has started costing work are just as plain: strangers find the site and it does you no credit, the evenings keep going in while the site stays nearly finished, and the business now needs to win people who search instead of people who were told. When those turn up, the builder has stopped being the cheap option, because the job has changed underneath it.
Whichever way that judgement falls, the site itself owes visitors the same few answers. What a business website homepage should include is the ten-second test both routes have to pass: what you do, where you cover, whether you can be trusted, roughly what things cost, and how to get hold of you.
The middle path
Between the two camps sits a path the builder adverts never mention: pay monthly, with the ownership written in from the start. It has the builder's cash flow, a predictable bill instead of a lump sum, and the designer's exit, because the ownership is settled on day one rather than argued about at parting.
This studio sells exactly that, so here is what it costs, as a comparison point rather than a pitch. The website plan is £49 a month including VAT, or £490 a year with two months free, and covers up to five pages written and built for you, hosting with daily backups and SSL, the domain and business email with renewal included, and your email set up so it is hard to fake. £79 a month adds an SEO campaign, blog posts, Google Business Profile work and review requests sent after each job. Anything bigger is quoted per project.
The terms are the part that matters to this post. There is no minimum term, the domain, the content and the accounts stay in the client's name throughout, and copyright in the design and the code transfers at launch. On those terms, leaving costs nothing, which is the whole test this piece has been running. The pricing page lists the plans and the terms in full.
The questions that come up
Is it cheaper to build your own website or hire a web designer? At launch, almost always the builder: the plan price is smaller than any human quote. Over the years the gap narrows, because the builder's fee keeps arriving and a one-off build does not. The difference that never narrows is what leaving costs, which is the test this piece is built around.
Is Wix really free? Building is free. Publishing is not quite: a premium plan is what connects a custom domain and removes the Wix branding, and business email is a separate subscription on top. The free tier is for trying the tool, and running a business site on it needs the paid plan.
Do I own my website if I build it on Wix? Wix's own help centre says that "the content you build on Wix belongs to you", and that is true: your words and your images are yours. What you cannot do is take the site itself anywhere else, because it only runs on Wix's servers. You own the contents and not the container, and the container stays on Wix's servers.
Can I move my Wix site to WordPress or another host? Partly. The usual route, WordPress.com's importer, brings static pages, images, the site title and the menus, and it cannot bring blog posts at all: the page states that "it is not possible to export blog posts from Wix to other platforms". Templates and styles do not carry over either, so what arrives is the material, and the rebuild is the work.
How much does a web designer cost in the UK? The 2026 UK ranges put a basic site at £300 to £1,000, a medium small business site at £1,000 to £3,000 and the full freelancer spread at £300 to £5,000, with small agency projects from £1,000 and retainers at £200 to £1,500 a month. How much a website really costs carries the full breakdown and the five questions worth asking before you sign.
What happens to my website if my web designer disappears? Nothing at first, which is what makes it easy to miss. How exposed you are is decided by four things: whose name the domain registrant record carries, who holds the hosting account, who administers the email that can reset everything else, and where the backups live. Web designer not responding? What to do walks through the four checks and the recovery order if the answers come back wrong.
Is a Wix website bad for SEO? Nothing about the platform bars a page from search results, and whether a small site ranks is rarely decided by the platform anyway. What does the deciding is the same on any platform: pages that say plainly what the business does and where, a structure that makes sense, and a page that loads on a phone. A builder makes some of that work more fiddly than a hand-built site does, which is a workflow complaint rather than a disqualification.
Should I start on Wix and move to a proper website later? You can, and plenty do, as long as you walk in knowing the exit price: the words, images and domain come with you, and the design, structure and blog posts stay behind. If the site only has to be a noticeboard in the meantime, that trade can be worth making. If it has to win search work, you would be building the thing you will later pay to replace.
What to do next
If the leaving test settles it and the middle path fits, the pricing page has the plans and the terms side by side, and the first conversation is about what the site needs to do before it gets to what it should cost. If there is already a designer's quote on the other screen, the five questions in the cost post are worth asking before anything is signed.
And if the honest camp is where you land, spend what you saved on the parts a builder cannot supply: the words and the photographs. Those are yours whoever built the site, and they travel with you wherever it ends up.
If the test says hire, the monthly plans here are that middle path written down: the domain, the content and the accounts stay in your name throughout, and copyright in the design and the code transfers at launch.