Wix, Squarespace or a proper site: what should a trade use?

If you’ve ever typed “best website builder for tradesmen” into Google, you’ll have found plenty of reviews written by people who’ve never had to win a job off the back of a website. Most of them compare features you’ll never use: online shops, blogs, members’ areas.

A trade website has one job. Someone finds you, decides in a few seconds whether you look like the right firm, and rings or sends a message. Wix and Squarespace can both do that. So can a site built for you. Here’s the honest comparison, with UK prices from each company’s own pages.

What they cost in the UK

Squarespace

Squarespace UK plan	Billed yearly	Billed monthly
Basic	£12 a month	£16 a month
Core	£17 a month	£24 a month
Plus	£29 a month	£36 a month
Advanced	£79 a month	£89 a month

Squarespace’s pricing page, checked 2 October 2026. Yearly plans included one year of free domain registration on available domains.

For a trade website, the cheapest plan covers what you need. The higher plans mostly add selling features (lower fees on online sales, more shop tools) that a plumber or a tree surgeon won’t use.

Wix

Wix shows its prices by location. When we checked its plans page on 2 October 2026, it showed prices in US dollars “for reference only”, with a note that “Prices and currency vary by location”, so we can’t give you a reliable UK figure. Open wix.com/plans from the UK and it should show you the price in pounds.

Two things worth knowing from Wix’s own help pages, checked the same day:

• The free plan shows Wix’s advert. Wix says: “Your free site includes a Wix banner ad at the top”. To remove it, “you need to upgrade to a Premium plan”.
• Your own domain needs a paid plan. Wix says “you need to upgrade to a Premium plan to connect a custom domain to your Wix site”.

So for a business, the free plan isn’t really an option. Budget for a paid plan and a domain name either way.

Wix: what it’s good at, and where trades go wrong

Good at: freedom. You can drag almost anything anywhere. If you’ve got a clear picture of what you want and you enjoy fiddling, you can get a long way.

Where it goes wrong: that freedom cuts both ways. Wix’s help pages say that when you build with the Wix Editor, “a mobile version (or mobile friendly view) is automatically created”, and you use a separate mobile editor to adjust it. Plenty of trade sites we look at were laid out lovingly on a computer and never checked properly on a phone, which is where most customers will see them. Text overlapping photos, buttons pushed off the side, the phone number buried at the bottom.

If you use Wix: do every bit of checking on your own phone, not the computer. Open the site, put your thumb where a customer’s would go, and see how long it takes to ring you.

Squarespace: what it’s good at, and where trades go wrong

Good at: looking tidy without much effort. The templates are well designed and harder to break, so a Squarespace site rarely looks a mess.

Where it goes wrong: many templates are built for photographers, restaurants and shops, and lead with one big picture and a short slogan. That looks smart and tells a customer almost nothing. A trade site needs to say what you do and where you do it on the first screen, and a template won’t write that for you.

If you use Squarespace: replace the template’s slogan with plain words: “Tree surgeon in Hungerford. Felling, crown reductions and stump grinding.” Then add your number as a button, high up.

Wix, Squarespace or built for you

	Wix	Squarespace	Built for you
Who does the work	You	You	Them
Who writes the words	You	You	Ask before you pay
Layout freedom	High	Medium	Whatever you agree
Own domain	Paid plans only	Paid plans	Should be in your name
Your time	Evenings and weekends	Evenings and weekends	A few conversations
If you stop paying	Site goes offline	Site goes offline	Depends on the contract: check it

The last row matters with all three. With a builder, if you stop paying, the site stops. With a designer or agency, read the contract: some plans mean you never own the site at all. We cover the questions to ask in how much does a website cost.

Speed on a phone: the bit most DIY sites get wrong

Most people find a trade on their phone, often on a poor signal in the middle of a job going wrong. If your site takes ages to show anything, they press back and ring the next firm on the list.

Google’s web.dev site measures this with Largest Contentful Paint, which it describes as the render time of “the largest image, text block, or video visible” on the screen. Its guide says a good score is “2.5 seconds or less”, and anything over 4 seconds is poor.

What we have seen

Benny’s Barbershop in Swindon had about 260 clicks a month from his Google listing to his website in the six months to September 2026. On a throttled phone test on 28 September 2026, his old website took 8.9 seconds to show its main content. The new site we built, on the same test, shows it in 3.5 seconds. Read the case study.

Every one of those people had already chosen to click. A slow site is how you lose them after the listing has done the hard work.

The usual causes on a DIY site, whichever builder you use:

1. Huge photos. A photo straight off your phone can be several megabytes. Shrink them before you upload.
2. Background videos on the first screen. They look great on office wifi and crawl on a phone.
3. Too many add-ons: chat pop-ups, review widgets, social feeds, cookie banners, all loading at once.
4. A slideshow where one strong photo would do.

To check yours, put your web address into Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool (pagespeed.web.dev) and look at the mobile result, not desktop.

What no builder will do for you

Wix and Squarespace give you the tools. They don’t tell you what a customer needs to see before they ring. That’s where most DIY trade sites fall down, and it’s the same list whichever builder you choose:

1. Your trade and your town on the first screen, in plain words.
2. Your phone number as a button a thumb can press, at the top and again further down.
3. Real photos of your work. Not stock photos of a smiling man in a clean hard hat.
4. Your reviews, ideally your Google reviews, word for word.
5. A page for each main service and each main town, named the way people search.
6. A short form that actually reaches you. Test it.

We’ve gone through the first screen in detail, with real examples, in what should be on a trade website’s first screen. And if people are already visiting but not ringing, read why your website gets visits but no calls.

When to move to a properly built site

A DIY site is a perfectly good place to start. It’s time to move on when:

• Your jobs are big. If one extra extension, one big tree job or one commercial contract a year covers the cost of a proper site several times over, the sums are simple.
• You want work in more towns. That means a page for each town and each service, written properly. On a builder, that’s a lot of evenings.
• You’re not getting enquiries from it. If Google is sending people and nobody rings, the site is costing you work.
• You’ve stopped updating it. Old prices, a phone number you no longer use, photos from five years ago. Customers notice.
• You’d rather be on the tools. Your time has a value. An evening a week on your website is an evening not earning.

What we have seen

For A.P. Berrystone (a family firm: Adrian Berrystone is Tyler’s dad), a Swindon builder since 1989, 17 of his last 24 enquiries before 11 September 2026 came through the website forms on the site we built him from scratch in July 2026. Read his case study.

Building work is bought slowly: people read before they ring. For a firm like that, the website ends up carrying most of the enquiries, and a site that looks like the work you do is worth paying for.

How we do it, and why it works

We don’t sell websites on their own. When we take on a trade, the website is one part of getting them work:

• Found: your Google listing set up and worked every week, a review asked for after every job, and a website built to be called, with your real work, your reviews and a page for every service and town you want.
• Answered: calls ring you as they always have. A missed call from a mobile gets a text back in your name, every form and message gets a reply in your name, and every quote is chased to a yes or a no.
• Counted: after each enquiry, a text asks whether you won it and for how much. Once a month, one page: what came in, what you won, what it was worth.

It works because a fast, plain, honest site turns the people your Google listing sends into phone calls, and the replies and chasing turn more of those calls into jobs. You pay nothing until you’ve won £500 of work through us, and the website and domain are yours once you’ve been with us 90 days or paid a first invoice. The free check shows who Google lists for your trade in your town and where you sit today.