Wix vs WordPress vs custom — which is best?

What's the real difference?

These three options are fundamentally different tools. Choosing between them isn't about which is "better" — it's about what matters to your business.

• Wix is a drag-and-drop website builder. You pay monthly, pick a template, and edit it in a visual editor. No coding needed.
• WordPress is open-source software you install on a web server. You choose a theme, add plugins for extra features, and manage updates yourself (or pay someone to).
• Custom-coded means a developer writes the site from scratch in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No template, no plugins, no bloat.

Which is best for a restaurant or cafe?

If you run a restaurant or cafe, your website has one job: get people through the door. That means it needs to load fast on a phone, show your menu clearly, and appear when someone searches "restaurants near me".

Wix can do this, but the page speed is poor. A potential customer standing on the street won't wait 4 seconds for your menu to load. They'll tap the next result instead.

WordPress works, but it's overkill. You don't need a content management system to display a menu and an address.

A custom site loads in under a second, looks exactly how you want, and gives Google everything it needs to rank you locally. For food and hospitality, custom is the clear winner.

Which is best for solicitors and accountants?

Professional services need credibility. Your website is often the first impression a potential client gets. A generic Wix template with stock photos says "I don't take this seriously". A well-designed custom site says "I'm established and professional".

WordPress is a reasonable middle ground here. Many accounting and law firms use it. But the plugin dependency creates security risks — and if you're handling client data or linking to portals, security matters.

Custom-coded sites have a smaller attack surface. No plugins to exploit, no database to hack. For professional services, that's a genuine advantage.

Which is best for retail and e-commerce?

This is where it gets nuanced. If you're selling more than 50 products online and need stock management, payment processing, and shipping calculations, WordPress with WooCommerce or Shopify is usually the right call. Building all of that from scratch would be expensive and unnecessary.

But if you're a small retailer — a boutique, a florist, a gift shop — with a handful of products or a "click and collect" model, a custom site with a simple payment integration is faster, cheaper, and performs better.

Wix has e-commerce features, but the transaction fees and limited flexibility make it expensive at scale.

How do they compare on speed?

Page speed directly affects your Google ranking and your conversion rate. Here's what we typically see:

• Wix: 3–6 seconds on mobile. Heavy scripts, render-blocking resources, and large page sizes are built into the platform. You can't fix this.
• WordPress: 2–5 seconds on mobile. Depends heavily on the theme and number of plugins. A well-optimised WordPress site can be fast, but most aren't.
• Custom: Under 1 second on mobile. No unnecessary code, optimised images, minimal JavaScript. This is what Google wants to see.

What about cost?

First-year costs for a typical small business site:

• Wix: £150–£350/year (plan + domain). You build it yourself. Your time isn't free.
• WordPress: £500–£2,000 (hosting + theme + developer setup). Ongoing maintenance costs add £200–£500/year.
• Custom: £500–£2,000 (one-off build) + £100–£200/year hosting. No plugin updates, no theme renewals, no surprise costs.

Custom often works out cheaper over 3 years because there's less ongoing maintenance.

The honest answer

We build custom sites, so we're biased. We're upfront about that. But here's the truth: we chose to specialise in custom builds because we tested all three and custom sites consistently outperformed the others on speed, SEO, and reliability.

If you want to build it yourself and SEO isn't a priority, use Wix. If you need a complex site with hundreds of pages or a large shop, use WordPress. If you want a fast, professional site that ranks well and costs less to maintain, go custom.