Custom website, WordPress or Wix?

Wix, Squarespace and the page builders

Right when: you need five pages this week, you will edit them yourself, and the site's job is to exist. Cost: a subscription and your evenings. Year three: it still works; it is slow on a phone, it can't do the thing you now need, and moving off it means starting again. If this is you, don't hire us yet. Use the builder and come back when it hurts.

WordPress

Right when: you publish a lot, your team knows it, and a good agency maintains it. Cost: build plus hosting plus the plugins plus someone to update them. Year three: twenty plugins, two of them abandoned, a theme nobody dares touch, and a security update every week. Fine with a steady hand; expensive without one. We work on WordPress for smaller fixes and say so when it can't do what you need.

Custom build

Right when: the website has a job beyond existing: bookings, a catalog, a portal, a store in three currencies, pages that must load in a second in seven languages. Cost: more upfront, agreed in writing, with a date. Year three: content in plain files your team edits, no plugins to break, speed that holds, and everything in your name. The code is portable and any developer can pick it up.

The number that decides

Count what a lost customer costs you. If it is a few hundred, a builder is fine. If it is a few thousand, the site that loads in a second and answers the question pays for itself on the first few it keeps.

What we'd tell a friend

Builder first. WordPress if you publish daily and have a good agency. Custom the moment the website has a job. And whichever you choose, own the domain, the hosting account and the content yourself.