wix, squarespace and wordpress are not bad tools. they are well-made, and for the right person they are the right answer. but a website is not a one-off purchase with them, it is a relationship with terms, and most people sign up without reading what those terms cost over a few years. here is the honest comparison, including the part where a builder beats us.
rent vs own
this is the whole thing, so start here.
wix and squarespace: you rent. you pay a fee every month, indefinitely, and in exchange you get to use their software on their terms. you do not get the code. you cannot pick it up and host it somewhere cheaper, hand it to another developer, or take it with you when their pricing changes. wix in particular has no real export: leave, and you leave the site behind. stop paying, and it goes dark. you are not buying a website, you are renting a slot on a platform.
wordpress: you own a tangle. wordpress itself is free and open, which sounds like ownership, and at the core it is. but almost nobody runs bare wordpress. the real-world build is a premium theme, a page-builder licence (elementor, divi), managed hosting, and a stack of plugins that each renew yearly. you own that, and you also own its upkeep: the updates, the breakages, the security patching. it is the most freedom of the three and the most maintenance.
imelabs: you own clean code, outright. we build in next.js, hand it over, and it is yours: the code, the accounts, the domain. host it where you like. give it to another developer if you ever want to. there is no monthly platform fee, because there is no platform, just your site in your account. a static build costs £0 a month to run. the only bill is the domain.
the bill, over three years
upfront price is the number people compare. it is the wrong number. compare the three-year cost.
a builder subscription is tens of pounds a month, forever. a wordpress build adds managed hosting (£10 to £30 a month) plus theme, builder and plugin licences (£100 to £300 a year), forever. across three years that is hundreds to low-thousands in fees you keep paying just to keep the lights on.
a custom static build is a one-off, then £0 a month. it costs more on day one and less by month eighteen, and from there the gap only widens. you pay once to own, instead of forever to rent.
speed
builders are heavy. they ship a generic template loaded with everything the platform might need, plus the page builder's own markup, which is known for producing a tangle of nested divs and render-blocking script. the page works, but it is slow, especially on a phone.
a hand-built site ships only what your site uses. next.js renders static, fast pages with no platform weight behind them. that is not vanity: page speed feeds search ranking and conversion directly. a slow site loses customers before they have read a word, and on mobile the gap between a lean custom build and a builder template is the gap between a sale and a bounce.
security and maintenance
this is where wordpress earns its reputation. it is the most attacked cms on the web, and most of those breaks come through plugins, not the core. running a wordpress site safely means staying on top of updates indefinitely, or paying someone to. miss a patch and you are exposed.
a static site has almost nothing to attack. no database to inject, no admin login to brute force, no plugins to go stale. there is no patch treadmill, because there is little to patch. the result for you is plain: the site does not get defaced, does not leak a customer list, does not go down because a plugin you forgot about had a hole. (for the record, our builds score 110 out of 100 on the mdn observatory security scan. that is the evidence; the outcome is the point.)
the ceiling
builders have a ceiling. sooner or later you want something the platform does not do: a specific layout, a custom flow, an integration, an ai chatbot trained on your own content. on a builder the answer is "not on this plan", or a third-party plugin you have to trust, or a workaround that fights the tool. custom has no ceiling. if the business needs it, it gets built, including the ai work builders cannot touch natively.
when a builder is the right call
honest version, because it matters. a builder beats us when:
- you want to edit everything yourself, constantly, with no developer in the loop, ever.
- you need something live tonight, for nothing upfront, and it does not have to be fast or bespoke.
- it is a tiny or throwaway site where none of the above is worth paying for once.
if that is you, use squarespace and do not look back. we are not for everyone, and pretending otherwise would be the dishonest pitch.
the difference, in one line
you can leave us and keep everything: the code, the accounts, the site. you cannot leave them and keep anything. that is the whole of it.
planning a site and weighing a builder against a custom build? we will tell you honestly which one you actually need. more on the running-cost side in the £0 site myth. start here.