A pure brochure site with zero growth ambition. A small local business — a single-location bakery, a retiring tradesperson, a community group — that wants a digital business card and has no interest in ranking competitively, running campaigns, or integrating systems. If the site exists so people can confirm you're real and find your phone number, a builder does that job completely.

In all three cases, paying a developer for custom work would be over-engineering. We'd tell a client this directly if they asked.

Where the Ceiling Shows Up

The problems with website builders aren't visible on day one. They show up 12–24 months in, exactly when a growing business needs its website to do more.

SEO ceiling. Wix and Squarespace have improved their technical SEO significantly over the past few years — they're no longer the disaster they were in 2015. But you still don't control the underlying HTML output, can't easily implement custom schema markup beyond what the platform exposes, and have limited control over render performance, which Google's Core Web Vitals weighs directly in rankings. For a business in a competitive local market — real estate, healthcare, legal, anything with paid competitors fighting for the same keywords — this ceiling matters.

Page speed limits. Builder platforms load substantial JavaScript and CSS frameworks regardless of what your specific page needs, because they're built to support every possible template and widget combination. A custom-built site loads only what your page actually uses. The difference shows up directly in Largest Contentful Paint and mobile load times, both ranking factors.

No real CMS ownership. Your content, your design, and your data live entirely inside Wix's or Squarespace's infrastructure. You can export some content, but you can't export the site — the templates, the custom logic, the integrations you've built up over years. If the platform changes its pricing, deprecates a feature you depend on, or you simply want to leave, you are starting over, not migrating. We've written a full breakdown of what vendor lock-in actually costs if you want the mechanics.

Integration limits. Connecting a real CRM, a booking system with custom logic, or a multi-step lead qualification flow is possible on these platforms via their app marketplaces, but you're working within someone else's API constraints, paying recurring app fees, and accepting their performance and support trade-offs.

Side-by-Side Comparison

Neither column is "wrong." They're optimized for different jobs.

What Switching Later Actually Costs

This is the part most businesses don't calculate until it's too late. Moving off Wix or Squarespace after two or three years isn't a settings change — it's a full rebuild. You lose your URL structure unless someone manually maps every redirect, which means losing accumulated SEO authority if it's done sloppily. You lose your content unless it's manually re-entered into the new system. You lose any custom design work entirely, because it doesn't exist outside the platform's editor.

The businesses that get hurt worst by this are the ones who picked a builder for a "starter site" and then grew faster than expected — they end up paying for a full rebuild at the exact moment they have the least time to manage one. We go into the specific cost mechanics of this in our piece on vendor lock-in.

How to Decide

Skip the marketing copy from either side and ask three questions honestly:

1. Will this site need to integrate with other business systems within two years — a CRM, a booking engine, a custom lead flow? If yes, a builder will eventually become a bottleneck.
2. Is organic search a real part of your growth strategy, or is the website mainly a digital business card for people who already know you? If SEO is core to how you get customers, the ceiling matters more.
3. Do you expect to outgrow the current version of this site in under two years? If you're not sure, that uncertainty itself is useful information — it usually means yes.

If you already have a Wix or Squarespace site and you're trying to figure out whether you've hit the ceiling, the fastest way to find out is to look at the data rather than guess. Our free Website Health Check gives you a clear read on your current site's performance, SEO gaps, and technical issues — no sales pitch, just a diagnostic you can act on either way. You can also see exactly what a custom build is built on at /stack.