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Wix and Squarespace for a trade business

Compared 7 min read

What Wix and Squarespace do well for a plumber, salon or roofer, where they fight a trade, and the four things to test before you commit.

Somebody in the trade told you to just use Wix. Somebody else said Squarespace looks better. Both are real platforms used by working businesses, and neither is a mistake. They are built around a different job from yours.

What both of them are genuinely good at

They hold the hosting, the certificate and usually the domain in one account with one login. There is nothing to patch, and no plugins to update at eleven at night because a security notice arrived. If the platform itself breaks, it is their problem, and they fix it for everybody at once.

They give you a form, a gallery and a contact page without you wiring anything up. They are built to look right on a phone from the start. And they let you change your own hours, prices and photographs at nine in the evening without waiting on anybody.

Where a template made for a portfolio fights a trade

The templates are the weak point, and not because they are ugly. They are designed around a mood: a wide photograph, a short phrase, plenty of white space, and the real information some distance down the page.

That works for a photographer. It works against an emergency plumber. A stranger with water coming through a ceiling wants three things in the first screen of their phone: what you do, whether you come to their town, and a number that dials when tapped. Most templates put a large picture there instead.

Squarespace tends to hold its shape because it builds in fixed sections, so it is hard to make it look bad and hard to make it do something unusual. Wix lets you drag anything anywhere, which is more freedom and more rope, and it keeps a separate mobile layout you have to look at yourself. Both mean the useful edit is the same one: move the phone number, the towns you cover and the plain description of the work up above everything decorative.

The inquiry form is the part to test first

Every builder ships a working form. What no builder can promise is that the message reaches a human being.

The notification goes to whatever address was in the account when it was set up, which is often an address created that afternoon and never opened since. Sometimes it lands in spam, because an automated message from a platform, on your behalf, to your own inbox, is exactly the shape of thing filters distrust. Sometimes it sits in a dashboard you have to log in to see.

So send yourself a test inquiry from your own phone, off wi-fi, using a real message. Then find where it arrived, check the junk folder, and reply to it. Do that again a month later, because forms fail silently and the only symptom is a quiet two weeks you put down to the weather.

Speed, and why a trade site gets judged on it

Template sites carry a lot of machinery: fonts, scripts, animations, the tracking that came switched on with the template. All of it is fine on the wi-fi where you built it. Your customer is in a parking lot with one bar, or standing in a wet kitchen. Test your own site on mobile data with wi-fi off. If you can count to five before the number appears, the page is doing too much for the moment it is used in.

Cutting the biggest photograph in half and turning off an animation usually helps more than anything clever. Do not take anybody's promise about speed, a platform's included. Measure your own page on your own phone.

What happens the month you stop paying

You are renting. The subscription pays for the hosting, the certificate and the software your pages are made of. What happens when the card fails is different on each platform.

On Squarespace a failed renewal leaves the site visible to visitors and search engines for 15 days while the charge is retried. If it is still unpaid after that, the site is marked expired and stops being visible. On Wix the pages do not come down at all: the site stays online at a free address ending in wixsite.com, Wix advertising appears on it, and your own domain is disconnected from it.

Neither is a trick. They are different problems, though, and the Wix one catches people out, because the site you thought you had quietly taken down is still there with somebody else's advertising on it and your domain no longer pointing at it.

It matters most for the domain. If the platform registered your address for you, check the registration is in your own name and that you can move it away. A domain you control is what makes every other decision reversible.

Taking your work with you if you leave

Ask this before you type a single word into either platform: if I want to leave in two years, what comes with me?

The design does not. Neither platform hands you a copy of your site that another host could simply switch on. What you can generally recover is the content: Squarespace offers an export of some of it, and with Wix the practical answer is copying your own text and downloading your own photographs. Check the current position yourself before you rely on any of it.

Keep your words in a document and your photographs in a folder on your own machine. Then leaving is a weekend of retyping rather than a loss.

When one of these is the right answer for you

Sometimes the honest advice is that you should not pay anybody. If you have one service, one town, a phone number and an appetite for an evening's fiddling, a builder is a good answer and you should go and use one.

If your business is mostly pictures, a salon or a barber or a bakery, the gallery-first design works with you rather than against you. And if you will be changing the site constantly, holding the editor yourself is worth real money.

It stops being the cheap option when there are several services you want found separately, or the words will not come, or the tab has been open four months with nothing live. A different template does not fix that. Paying once is then the shorter road: a build here is $1,450 and it is yours outright, with Website Care at $149 a month if you would rather not watch the hosting and the form yourself.

A short checklist before you commit to a builder

Questions people ask

Is Wix or Squarespace better for a small trade business

Squarespace is harder to make look bad; Wix gives more control and more ways to break a layout. For a trade, the decider is usually which editor you will actually open again in six months.

Can I use my own domain name with Wix or Squarespace

Yes, on a paid plan, and you should. Keep the registration in your own name with a contact email that does not end in that domain.

What happens to my website if I cancel my Squarespace or Wix plan

It depends which one you are on. On Squarespace the site goes when the plan does, and a failed renewal buys 15 days of it staying visible while the charge is retried, after which it is marked expired and drops out of view. On Wix the pages stay online: the site reverts to the free Wix address, Wix ads appear on it, and your custom domain is disconnected. Your text and photographs are yours either way.

Can I move my Wix or Squarespace site to another host later

Not as a working site. You can take your content across, sometimes through an export and otherwise by copying it, and the design gets rebuilt.

Are these builders bad for Google

No. A tidy, fast page on either can be found perfectly well. What holds most trade sites back is missing town names and thin service pages, not the platform.

Why is my website builder form not sending emails

Usually the notification address is one nobody opens, or the message is being filtered as spam. Test it from your own phone and check junk before assuming it is broken.

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