I needed new seat covers for my car a few weeks ago, and an upholstery shop in Ottawa came up as a recommendation. Good reputation, exactly the kind of small trade business I like dealing with.
Their website was on a free Wix subdomain, and every page took so long to load that I gave up before I found the phone number. I never called them.
That is not a story about Wix being bad software. It is a story about a good business losing a customer who was already sold, for a reason nobody ever told them about.
The short version
| Wix | Hand-built | |
|---|---|---|
| Up front | $0 to a few hundred | $500 and up |
| Monthly | $17 to $50 | $0 to $25 for hosting |
| Who builds it | You | Someone else |
| Your time | 20 to 50 hours | About 2 hours |
| Speed | Heavier, slower | Fast |
| Can you move it | No | Yes, the files are yours |
| Good for | Simple sites, people who enjoy the tinkering | Businesses that want it done and looked after |
Where Wix genuinely wins
I am not going to pretend it is a bad product. It is not.
If you want to be online this weekend and you have nobody to call, Wix will get you there. If you like making the changes yourself and you actually will, the editor is good. If you are testing an idea and you might abandon it in three months, spending $500 on a proper site would be silly. And if your budget is truly zero, a free Wix site beats no site at all, which is the situation about three in ten businesses along this corridor are in.
That is a real list, and for a lot of people it is the right answer.
Where it costs you
The free plan is the trap. A free Wix site lives at a web address with wixsite.com in the middle of it, carries Wix’s own advertising, and runs on the slowest tier of their hosting. That was the upholstery shop’s situation. To a customer, that address says "this business has not really committed," and the ads say it twice. Moving to a paid plan with your own domain fixes both, and most people on the free plan do not know that is why their site feels cheap.
The speed problem. A builder site has to load the platform’s own code before it loads your content. I ran Google’s own speed test on both. This page scores 100 out of 100 on mobile, and its main content appears in 1.1 seconds. The upholstery shop’s page scores 73, and its main image takes 7.5 seconds to appear on a mid-range phone on a slow connection. That page also downloads about 150 KB of JavaScript it never uses.
On rural internet, seven and a half seconds is the gap between a customer waiting and a customer leaving.
Two things worth saying plainly. Their site scored 100 on SEO and 94 on accessibility, so this is a speed problem, not a bad website. And the page I tested was an interior page with a large photograph on it, not the home page.
Google PageSpeed Insights, mobile, 15 September 2026.
You cannot take it with you. This is the one people find out too late. A Wix site cannot be exported and moved to another host. If you want to leave, the site is rebuilt from scratch. Your domain is portable; the site is not.
Your time is the real price. The subscription is $17 to $50 a month, which sounds like nothing. The cost is the 20 to 50 hours you spend choosing a template, fighting the mobile layout, and writing the words. If your time is worth $40 an hour, 40 hours is $1,600 you have already spent, and you still have no support and no one to call.
The half-finished site. This is what I see most often. Not a bad Wix site: an unfinished one. Placeholder text still on the About page, hours from two years ago, a contact form nobody ever tested. The owner started with good intentions and ran out of evenings, which is exactly what you would expect from someone running a business.
What hand-built means here
I build sites as plain files, HTML and CSS, rather than on a builder or on WordPress. No platform in the middle, nothing to log into, nothing to patch.
That has three practical effects. The site loads fast, because there is nothing loading before your content. Hosting costs close to nothing, often free, which is what makes a $99 monthly plan possible. And there is almost nothing to maintain, because there are no plugins and no platform updates to break things.
The trade is that you do not edit it yourself. You send me a message and I make the change, which is what the care plan covers. Some people want the keys. Most small business owners I talk to want it handled.
How to choose, honestly
Go with Wix if you will genuinely do the work yourself, you enjoy it, your needs are simple, or you are testing something that might not last the year.
Get someone to build it if you have tried a builder and the site is still half finished, your business depends on people finding you on Google, you would rather spend those 40 hours on the business, or you want somebody to call when something breaks.
If you are already on Wix and it is working, leave it alone. Move to a paid plan so you get your own domain and lose the ads, check the site on your phone on a slow connection, and fix the hours and the prices. That is a free afternoon and it solves most of it.