Wix, Squarespace or a Professional Website? An Honest Guide for Irish Businesses
By Diaz Xavier, Founder, Sevenoways
Quick answer: DIY builders like Wix and Squarespace genuinely suffice for hobby projects, very early-stage ideas, and businesses that get all their work from word of mouth. For a business that needs Google to bring it customers, a professionally built site usually wins on the maths: builders cost €200–€400/year forever, rank worse in local search, and cap what you can do — while a professional build (from €999 with us) is a one-off cost that performs for years.
The real cost comparison (3 years)
| DIY builder | Professional build | |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront | €0 + your evenings | from €999 |
| Subscription | €17–€36/month = €600–€1,300 over 3 yrs | €0 (hosting ~€0–€10/mo) |
| Your time | 20–60 hours to build, ongoing to maintain | A few hours of input |
| 3-year total | €600–€1,300 + your time | €999–€1,500 all-in |
The "free" option and the professional option cost surprisingly similar money over three years. The differences are elsewhere.
Where builders quietly cost you
- Local search performance. Builder sites can rank, but they're consistently heavier and slower than well-built custom sites, and speed is a ranking and conversion factor. In a competitive local market, that margin decides who gets the call.
- Sameness. Templates look like templates. When three businesses in your town use the same Squarespace theme, none of them looks like the professional choice.
- The ceiling. Booking flows, structured data, page speed tuning, proper local landing pages — the things that win local SEO are exactly the things builders make hard or impossible.
- Your evenings. The 40 hours you spend fighting a template editor is 40 hours not spent on the business. Price your own time honestly and DIY is rarely cheap.
Where builders genuinely make sense
- Testing an idea before committing money to it
- A hobby, club or community page
- A one-page holding site while you get established
- E-commerce on Shopify specifically — for online shops, Shopify is a legitimate professional-grade choice (our e-commerce cost guide covers this)
No shame in any of those — we'll tell you if you're in one of these categories rather than sell you a site you don't need yet.
What "professional" should mean (hold any agency to this)
A professional build isn't just prettier: it should load in under two seconds on a phone, include structured data and SEO fundamentals from day one, be built around the enquiry/booking action your business lives on — and be owned entirely by you. If an agency's "professional" site is a slow WordPress template with a logo swapped in, the builder might honestly serve you better.
Weighing it up for your business? Request a free quote — we'll give you the honest comparison for your specific situation, including "stick with Wix for now" when that's the truth.