Most website advice is a sales pitch wearing a lab coat. The honest version is blunter: Wix is the right answer for a great many small businesses, WordPress is right for a different group, and custom software is right for a small minority. The skill is knowing which group you are in, and the way to find out is to price the next three years, not the next three weeks. Here is the framework I use when a client asks me which route they should take.
The short version
Wix means you rent a shop that is already fitted out. WordPress means you own a shell and fit it out yourself. Custom means you build the building. Each one makes sense at a different point, and those points are further apart than the marketing suggests.
The three year bill
Nobody buys a website for a month, so the number that matters is what each route costs across three years, build included. The prices below are mid 2026 figures from vendor pricing pages and UK market guides, not agency brochures.
| Route | Upfront | Monthly | Three year total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Wix Core, billed annually | £0 to build | About £24 | About £865 |
| Wix Business, billed annually | £0 to build | About £30 plus card fees | About £1,100 plus fees |
| WordPress, DIY with budget hosting | £100 to £300 setup | £10 to £60 | £460 to £2,460 |
| WordPress, built by a freelancer | £500 to £5,000 | £10 to £60 | £860 to £7,160 |
| WordPress with a maintenance plan | £500 to £5,000 | £100 to £300 | £4,100 to £15,800 |
| Agency build | £2,000 to £10,000+ | £0 to £100 | £2,000 to £13,600 |
Wix quotes in dollars; at mid 2026 rates the Core plan is roughly £24 a month on annual billing and the Business plan about £30. The free plan is not a business plan: it carries a Wix banner, gives you a wixsite.com address and no analytics. Sell online and you also pay card processing fees on top, about 2.9% plus 30 cents a transaction.
The cost the table cannot show
The WordPress rows hide your own time. Updates, backups and plugin conflicts are someone’s job, and if that someone is you, the monthly cost is whatever an evening of your life is worth. Market data from 2026 puts a professionally maintained small business WordPress site at roughly $100 to $300 a month, and an online shop at $300 to $1,000 plus. Budget hosting keeps the bill down only until the day your contact form breaks and nobody notices for a fortnight.
The lock-in question nobody asks
Before you choose anything, ask what it costs to leave. Wix does not hand over your site files, so moving away means rebuilding from scratch. That is fine while you are happy with the platform, and it gets expensive the day you are not. WordPress runs on open source software and ordinary hosting, so any developer can take it over, which is why agencies are comfortable building on it. Custom code is fully yours, but only if the contract says so, which is why the ownership clause matters as much as the price.
Who genuinely needs custom
A rule of thumb: if you can describe what you want as pages about what we do, you do not need custom software. Custom earns its keep when the site is actually a tool. The cases I see: a job system that quotes, schedules and invoices in one pass; a member portal with rules no off-the-shelf product matches; a way to retire a spreadsheet workflow the whole team hates. When that is the job, a five figure build can pay for itself in a year. When the job is a brochure, the same money buys nothing.
Who should stop reading
Most tradespeople, clinics and salons should stop at the top of this page. A one van operation needs a site that states the services, shows the areas and puts the phone number under the thumb. Wix does that for about £24 a month, and a fixed price build does it for a few hundred pounds once. Either beats a £3,000 agency site that took eight weeks and says the same thing.
The platform decision is a five year decision, not a build decision. Ask what it costs to leave before you ask what it costs to join.
The middle path most guides skip
Between the £24 a month builder and the £10,000 agency sits the productised build: a fixed scope, fixed price package, typically £395 to £750, with hosting, a care period and a written list of what you get. It suits the business that has outgrown DIY but does not want to commission a project. The trade-off is a standard design rather than a bespoke one. For a plumber, a clinic or a consultancy, standard is usually the right call: customers judge whether you answer the phone, not whether your hero image is original.
The rule I actually use
A solo operator who books by phone gets a builder or a simple fixed price build, and I say so to their face. A team that takes bookings, orders or payments gets WordPress with a care plan, or a fixed price build with booking included. A business whose problem is process, not pages, gets the custom conversation. Three questions decide it: does the site take money, does it replace a system, and does anyone else need to edit it.
Agencies earn their keep at the far end of that scale: a multi depot firm with a marketing manager, a brand system and a content operation genuinely needs the meetings and the £10,000 invoice. That is not a luxury, it is the price of coordination. It is also a position very few small businesses are in.
What to do now
Write down three things the site must do, not look like. Price the three year total for the two routes that fit. Then ask the builder or the platform the one question that matters: what does it cost to leave. If nobody can answer it, the answer is already too expensive. If you want a second opinion, we build small business sites and will give you the straight version of this same answer; but the framework above is the whole method, and it works without us.