Building a Website with Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify is a Waste of Money
In today’s digital landscape, platforms like Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify are often promoted as simple solutions for creating websites. They’re marketed as beginner-friendly, requiring no coding skills. However, if you’re serious about growing your business and want a professional, scalable website, building a website with Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify may be a regrettable decision. In this article, we’ll examine why relying on these platforms can lead to more harm than good.
Limited Flexibility and Customization
A major selling point of Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify is their ease of use, with drag-and-drop interfaces and pre-built templates. However, this convenience comes at the cost of flexibility, which can significantly restrict your website’s potential.
Building a Website with Wix is appealing due to its simplicity, but its customization options are highly limited. Once you choose a template, making substantial changes to design or integrating complex functionalities is nearly impossible. Wix simply lacks the depth needed for businesses requiring advanced customization.
Squarespace, known for its sleek designs, also restricts users with a narrow range of customization options. While it’s great for visually-driven sites like portfolios, it quickly becomes a challenge for businesses requiring anything beyond basic features.
Shopify, while popular for e-commerce, often forces users into generic templates. To achieve even a modest level of customization, you’d need to hire costly developers to work around Shopify’s limitations. Even then, you’ll only scratch the surface of what’s possible with platforms like WordPress or custom-built solutions.
Poor SEO Capabilities
For any business website, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is vital for organic traffic. Unfortunately, building a website with Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify severely limits your SEO potential.
Wix, despite recent improvements, still struggles with SEO. Its rigid URL structure and limited ability to optimize metadata make it difficult for your pages to rank well. Additionally, Wix sites tend to load slower, negatively affecting SEO rankings.
Squarespace also falls short in terms of SEO. While it allows for some basic optimization, the platform’s closed nature doesn’t provide enough control over essential SEO aspects like meta descriptions and URL structure. This is a major disadvantage for businesses aiming for high search engine visibility.
Shopify, although it has basic SEO tools, is also riddled with issues. Its auto-generated subdirectories and bloated URLs can hurt your rankings, and it doesn’t provide the same level of content optimization that you’d get with more advanced platforms.
If SEO is a priority for your business, platforms like WordPress or custom CMS solutions give you the control needed to fully optimize your site for search engines, something Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify simply can’t match.
Hidden Long-Term Costs
At first glance, platforms like Wix, Squarespace, and Shopify seem cost-effective. Their subscription models appear affordable, but the hidden costs pile up quickly.
Building a Website with Wix starts cheap but becomes expensive once you need essential features like removing ads, adding custom domains, or increasing bandwidth. As your business grows, you’ll need to upgrade to more expensive plans, which might not even cover all your needs.
Squarespace, while offering all-in-one solutions, soon becomes inadequate as businesses grow. Advanced functionalities like integrating third-party apps or scaling your website come with hefty price increases. You might also need to hire developers, which can be both expensive and difficult on such a restricted platform.
Shopify is notorious for hidden costs. While the basic plan might look attractive, Shopify takes a percentage of every transaction, and additional fees apply if you use third-party payment gateways. Over time, these costs escalate, making a custom-built or WordPress-based e-commerce solution far more affordable in the long run.
Scalability Issues in building website with Wix
A website must scale alongside your growing business, but building a website with Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify will leave you stuck when it’s time to expand.
Wix works for simple, small websites, but as soon as your traffic or needs increase, the platform’s limitations become glaring. Whether it’s handling large volumes of traffic or integrating advanced tools, Wix isn’t designed for scalability.
Squarespace may work for small blogs or portfolios, but it’s a poor choice for growing businesses. Custom integrations, multilingual support, or more advanced databases are difficult, if not impossible, to implement. Eventually, migrating to WordPress or a custom CMS becomes inevitable.
Shopify is fine for small e-commerce businesses, but as your store grows, you’ll find it difficult to integrate more advanced systems or customize your checkout process. Its one-size-fits-all approach quickly becomes a major limitation.
In contrast, platforms like WordPress or custom CMS solutions are designed to handle growth, allowing you to scale your site seamlessly as your business expands.
Lack of Full Ownership and Control
When you build your site on Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify, you’re locked into their ecosystem. This means you never fully own or control your website or its data.
Wix doesn’t allow you to export your website in any meaningful way, meaning that if you outgrow the platform, you’ll need to start from scratch. This lock-in severely limits your ability to migrate to another platform.
Squarespace presents the same problem. Although it offers beautiful designs, you don’t have ownership over the underlying code, meaning that you can’t easily migrate or customize your site in ways that matter for a growing business.
Shopify, while great for small e-commerce sites, controls every aspect of your store, including payments. If you ever want to leave Shopify, migrating your data will be both time-consuming and costly.
With platforms like WordPress or custom-built solutions, you own your website entirely. You have the freedom to move your site, customize every detail, and control your data — all without being tied to a single provider.
Conclusion about building a website with Wix
Building a website with Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify might seem like an easy and affordable solution, but the long-term limitations are severe. Whether it’s the lack of customization, poor SEO performance, hidden costs, or issues with scalability and ownership, these platforms simply can’t meet the needs of growing businesses. If you’re serious about building a professional, scalable website, invest in WordPress or a custom CMS solution that offers the flexibility, control, and scalability you need for long-term success.
