Your DIY website is costing you money!

THIS WEEK: Free website builders have made it genuinely possible to get something online without paying a developer. That is a real improvement. This week we look honestly at what the main free options actually give you, what they do not tell you about the trade-offs, and why in 2026, even with AI building websites in ten minutes, the case for hiring an expert has not gone away. It has arguably got stronger.

Let us start with an honest concession. Wix, Squarespace, and their competitors have genuinely improved over the past five years. The templates are better. The editors are more capable. The AI tools that generate a first version of your site from a text prompt are impressive for what they are. If you need something online quickly and have no budget whatsoever, these tools will get you there.

That is not the same as saying they will get you a good website.

The problem with building your own website is that you do not know what you do not know. A business owner who builds their own site in Wix or Squarespace gets something that looks like a website. It has pages, photos, text, a contact form. It might even look reasonably professional. What they cannot see, because they have no reason to know to look, is everything underneath: the page speed issues caused by bloated drag-and-drop code, the SEO structure that is invisible to them but visible to Google, the mobile rendering problems on specific devices, the conversion rate implications of navigation decisions they made instinctively, the fact that they cannot easily move their site to another platform if they ever want to.

You do not know what you are missing because the tool never shows you what a better version looks like. That is not a criticism of the tools. That is just how it works when you do not know what you are doing, which is a perfectly reasonable position for a business owner who is not a web developer.

TOOL 1: Wix

Wix is the most widely used free website builder in the world and the one most small business owners try first. The free plan gives you a Wix-branded subdomain (yoursite.wixsite.com/yourbusiness, not yoursite.co.uk), 500MB of storage, 1GB of bandwidth per month, Wix ads displayed on your site, access to over 2,000 templates, a drag-and-drop editor, and free hosting. You cannot connect a custom domain, you cannot remove the Wix branding, you cannot connect Google Analytics, and you cannot accept payments. There is no time limit on the free plan.

The paid plans start at $17 per month billed monthly, which removes ads and connects a custom domain. Most small business owners who build on Wix end up on a paid plan fairly quickly because the free version is too restricted to use as an actual business website.

What you are actually getting even on a paid Wix plan: a website built on a closed, proprietary platform where you do not own the underlying code, where switching to another platform means starting from scratch because your content is locked in Wix's format, where the drag-and-drop editor produces bloated code that affects page load speed compared to a properly built site, and where the template you chose at the start is effectively permanent because changing it requires rebuilding your pages manually. Wix has improved its SEO capabilities significantly and the Core Web Vitals performance on newer Wix sites is genuinely competitive with badly built WordPress sites. The comparison is not Wix versus a well-built custom site. It is Wix versus whatever you would have got with no budget and no expert involved. Link: https://wix.com

TOOL 2: Squarespace

Squarespace does not have a free plan. It has a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. After 14 days you need to pay or your site goes private. The cheapest paid plan is Basic at $16 per month billed annually. There is no free forever option.

This matters because Squarespace is regularly recommended as a free option and it is not one. It is a paid product with a free trial. The paid plans are reasonable for what they offer: genuinely excellent design templates, reliable hosting, clean mobile performance, and a polished editing experience. For a business that wants a good-looking website without a developer and is willing to pay around £15 to £20 per month, Squarespace is a sensible option. For a business looking for a free website builder, it is not one.

What you sacrifice on Squarespace compared to a properly built site: the same platform lock-in as Wix, limited ability to customise beyond what the templates allow, ecommerce transaction fees on the lower plans (2% on Basic), and an ecosystem that is more restrictive than WordPress when you need functionality that the platform does not natively support. Link: https://squarespace.com

What the Free Tools Do Not Tell You

They do not tell you about platform lock-in. When you build on Wix, your content, images, pages, and structure are in Wix's format. If you ever want to move to a different platform, a professionally built WordPress site, a custom site, anything else, you cannot export your Wix site and import it somewhere else. You start again. Any SEO equity you have built, any inbound links to your pages, the Google indexing history of your URL structure: you manage all of that manually through redirects, which most people do not know how to do. The same is true of Squarespace. You are renting your website from a platform that controls the infrastructure.

They do not tell you that the drag-and-drop editor produces less efficient code than a properly built site. Wix's visual flexibility comes from a code structure that prioritises ease of editing over efficiency. The result is that even well-designed Wix sites tend to have slower page load times than equivalent sites built properly on WordPress or a custom platform when properly optimised. Page speed is a Google ranking factor. This affects your SEO.

They do not tell you about conversion rate. A template that looks professional is not the same as a site designed to convert visitors into enquiries or customers. An expert does not just make a site look good. They make decisions about navigation, calls to action, page structure, and content hierarchy based on understanding how people use websites and what makes them take action. A business owner building their own site makes those decisions instinctively, based on what looks right to them. Those decisions are often wrong in ways that are invisible until you look at the data.

They do not tell you what you will want to do in two years. The site you build today for your business as it is now may not be the site your business needs in two years. Adding functionality to a website builder platform that was not designed for it is harder than building the right foundation from the start.

The AI Question

In 2026, both Wix and Squarespace have AI tools that generate a website from a text prompt. You describe your business, the AI produces a first version of your site with pages, content, and images in seconds. The results are genuinely impressive compared to a blank template.

They are also not a substitute for expertise.

The AI generates a website structure based on pattern matching across millions of existing sites. It does not know your business, your customers, your competitive landscape, or what specific combination of messaging and design will make your target customers pick up the phone. It cannot make judgements about your conversion funnel. It does not know that the way you have described your services is unclear to someone who has never heard of your business before. It cannot look at your competitors and identify where your positioning should differ.

An expert using AI tools builds faster and more efficiently than one who does not. That is also true. What an expert brings that the AI does not is judgement, context, and accountability. The AI builds you a website. The expert builds you a website for your specific business goals.

If you have a website built on a free or low-cost website builder, here is a useful exercise that takes fifteen minutes and might tell you something important.

Go to PageSpeed Insights at pagespeed.web.dev and run your homepage. Look at the mobile score. If it is below 50 it is in Google's Poor category and is likely affecting your rankings. Look at Largest Contentful Paint. If it is over 2.5 seconds your page is failing Google's Core Web Vitals threshold.

Then go to Google Search Console if you have it set up. Look at how many people are finding your site through discovery searches, people who found you by searching for a service rather than your name specifically. If the number is very low or zero, your site is not ranking for anything useful.

Then ask yourself how many enquiries or sales came through your website in the last month. If the answer is very few or none, the question is not whether your website looks nice. It is whether your website is actually working as a business tool.

NEED HELP? In over your head? Wearing too many hats already? No idea where to start? I can help you. Alternatively, feel free to WhatsApp me on 07800596333!

WordPress.org (wordpress.org) is worth understanding as the alternative to website builders. WordPress powers 43% of all websites globally and gives you full ownership of your site, complete control over your SEO, no platform lock-in, and the flexibility to add virtually any functionality through plugins. The trade-off is that it requires hosting (from around £5 per month), setup knowledge, and ongoing maintenance. It is not a free website builder in the way Wix is. It is the platform most professional web developers build on, which is precisely why it is worth knowing about.

Webflow (webflow.com) is worth mentioning for anyone who wants more design control than Wix or Squarespace offer without the maintenance requirements of WordPress. It is more complex to learn than either but produces cleaner code and gives you more control over the result. Paid plans start at $14 per month. It is a tool that professional designers use, which gives you a sense of who it is designed for.

Here is the honest version of this. Free website builders are useful tools for getting something online quickly with no budget. For a temporary landing page, a personal portfolio, or a business that genuinely cannot spend anything on a website right now, Wix's free plan serves a purpose.

For a business website that is supposed to generate enquiries, build credibility, rank in search results, and represent your brand professionally: you get what you pay for, and then some.

The problem is not that free website builders are bad. The problem is that you do not know what a better version looks like, so you cannot tell what you are missing. A business owner who builds their own site in Wix and gets no enquiries from it often concludes that their website just does not generate enquiries. It does not occur to them that the site structure, the page speed, the SEO, the messaging, or the calls to action might be the issue, because they have no frame of reference.

Seventeen years of doing this teaches you things that no website builder can replicate. Not because the tools are not capable, but because knowing how to use them properly, knowing what good looks like, knowing what your specific customers respond to, and knowing how to fix it when it is not working: that is expertise, not software.

In 2026, AI generates websites in ten minutes. It also generates mediocre websites in ten minutes that look fine until you realise they are not converting. An expert using the same AI tools produces a different result because they know what to ask for, what to change, and what the output is missing. That gap is not closing. If anything, as the tools get better and the baseline gets higher, the difference between knowing how to use them and not knowing becomes more significant, not less.

Got a tool you want me to review? Reply to this email. Need actual help with your business's systems or digital setup? I have been doing this for 17 years. Get in touch. Alternatively, feel free to WhatsApp me on 07800596333!