Wix, Squarespace or bespoke?

Published on 12 September 2026 · 7 min read

Let us say it straight away: we sell hand-built sites. A comparison written by us is therefore not neutral. We are still going to try to be accurate, because there are genuine cases where an online builder is the better decision, and where you would be wasting your money with us.

What Wix does very well

• Starting today, without anyone. You can have a site online this afternoon, on your own, with no skills.
• Everything in one place. Domain, hosting, certificate, forms, shop, booking, newsletter: one invoice, one password.
• Editing it yourself, genuinely. The editor is very permissive: you move an element wherever you want.
• Trade features. Appointment booking, class timetables, reservations: available in a few clicks, whereas rebuilding them would cost thousands of francs.

What Squarespace does very well

• The visual result by default. The templates are more polished and harder to break. For a photographer, an architect, a restaurant, the result is good with no art direction.
• Consistency. The global style system avoids the site that goes off in twelve directions after six months.
• Selling small catalogues. Twenty or so products or a handful of services: it is clean and sufficient.

Where both struggle

Speed. These platforms load a lot of code in order to stay editable in the browser. On a phone on 4G, it shows. Speed is a Google ranking criterion, and above all a criterion for abandonment: the visitor closes the page before having seen your offer.

Leaving. This is the most serious point and the least discussed. You cannot take your site with you: you generally recover your copy, your images and your domain name, but not the layout. Changing platform means rebuilding. The subscription is therefore not only a rent, it is an exit cost that grows with time.

Fine-grained search optimisation. The essentials are accessible (titles, descriptions, page addresses). What is less so: precise control of the markup, advanced structured data, handling multiple languages. For a local site it will do. For an ambitious content strategy it holds you back.

Multiple languages. Possible, but often the most painful part — and in Switzerland it is rarely optional.

The price that climbs. The entry rate almost never includes what you need. The useful features (shop, booking, removing the advertising, email addresses) are on higher tiers, and the tiers go up over the years.

What bespoke does very well

• Speed. A well-built static site loads almost instantly and needs no technical upkeep.
• Belonging to you. The files are yours, with whichever host you want, and transferable elsewhere.
• Saying exactly what you want to say. No template to work around.
• The running cost. Often the price of the domain, and nothing else.

And its limits, which are real: you depend on someone for heavy changes, you need a brief at the start, and trade features (booking, calendars, shop) are a separate budget instead of being included.

The real cost over three years

As an order of magnitude, for a Swiss SME, at the prices observed in 2026 — platform rates change, check them:

• Online builder, on a plan that suits a business — around CHF 20 to 35 a month, that is CHF 720 to 1,260 over three years, plus your build time, plus the higher tiers if you add the shop or the email addresses.
• Hand-built package — CHF 290 to 690 once, plus around ten francs of domain a year, that is CHF 320 to 720 over three years.
• Bespoke agency work — CHF 5,000 and up, justified when the site is a main sales channel.

Over three years, the gap between a subscription and a package is therefore small; over six years, it reverses clearly. What settles it is not the price: it is ownership and speed.

How to choose, in three cases

Take an online builder if you need booking or a calendar right now, if you plan to change your site every week yourself, or if you are testing an activity you do not yet know will last.

Take a hand-built package if your site mainly has to convince and get the phone ringing, if you do not want a subscription, or if your local visibility matters more than the freedom to move everything around.

Take an agency if your site is the main sales channel and one point of conversion gained runs into tens of thousands of francs.

One thing to do in every case

Buy your domain name in your own name, on an account that belongs to you, whatever solution you go for. It is the only irreplaceable element: a site can be rebuilt, an address with ten years of history cannot. If your domain is currently in a supplier's name, here is how to get it back.

And if you want to know which case you fall into, describe your situation in three lines: we will tell you, including when the answer is “take a subscription, that will be enough for you”.