Is Wix or Squarespace Good Enough for a Contractor Website?

Short answer: it will hold a website. That is not the same thing as getting you work.

I had this conversation last week with a guy who runs a commercial electrical shop. Eleven guys, mostly tenant improvement work for general contractors. I am going to call him Geoff. He got two quotes from agencies. One was $8,400. The other one would not give him a number until he sat through a "discovery call," which is a great way to make a contractor hate you before you have done anything.

Then his daughter built a photography site on Squarespace over a weekend. Looks better than his. Twenty-three bucks a month.

So he pushed back on me for about an hour. Some of his points were good. Here is the whole thing, in his words and mine.

"Wix says SEO is built in"

"It's the same internet, right? Same Google. Why would I pay an agency five figures when Wix says right on their homepage they've got SEO tools built in? What is it you'd actually be doing that the software isn't already doing for me?"

The tools are real. You can write your own title tags and meta descriptions. It builds a sitemap. That part is not a lie.

What the software will not do is tell you what to put in the boxes. It will let you title your homepage "Home." It will let you write a meta description that reads like a fortune cookie. It will let you build ten pages about topics nobody in your county has ever typed into a search bar.

The tools are a wrench. Owning a wrench does not make you a plumber. You already know this, because somebody shows up at your shop every year with a YouTube video and a scorched panel.

The walled garden, which is the weakest reason to leave Wix

Every agency guy leads with this one. You are in a walled garden. You cannot get out. You are stuck there. They raise the price and you either pay it or start over.

All true. Your site is not portable. There is no clean export. If you leave, you rebuild.

Geoff did not buy it, and he was right not to.

"Wix has been around, what, twenty years? They're a public company. They're not going anywhere. And if they bump me from twenty-three bucks to thirty-five, who cares. That's a rounding error next to eighty-four hundred."

Correct. Lock-in only matters if you have a reason to want out. So let me give you the reason.

Your site has been sitting still since 2017 and it has been very consistent about it

Most contractors think about a website like the sign on the building. You put it up, it stays up, it works. Nobody expects the sign to need a monthly meeting.

Websites do not work like that. Google is running a comparison, all day, between you and every other shop bidding the same jobs. Part of that comparison is whether anybody is home. If your site says exactly what it said last year, and the shop across town added six pages, updated their service areas, and picked up fourteen reviews, you did not get punished. You got passed.

Geoff got quiet on this one.

"Nobody's touched my site since 2017 and my rankings have been sliding the whole time. I assumed that was competitors outspending me."

Sometimes it is. Usually it is this. Nothing broke. The site just sat there. I wrote a whole piece on how fast that costs you, called aging like milk.

That is the real case against a DIY builder. Not the walled garden. It is that the platform is built to be finished. You are supposed to launch it and walk away. Walking away is the whole problem.

"But my site loads fine"

"My site loads. It looks fine on my phone. What's the actual difference a customer would ever notice?"

On your phone it does. You have looked at your own site a hundred times, so your browser stopped pulling it from the server a long time ago. It is loading a saved copy off your device. You are the one person on earth who cannot judge your own site speed.

Run it through a real page speed test, my free analyzer or Google PageSpeed Insights, and look at the mobile number. Both Wix and Squarespace ship a pile of code you are not using. That is the price of an editor that has to work for a photographer, a dog groomer, and you. Somebody carries that weight, and it is the guy in a truck on one bar trying to load your contact page.

I am not going to tell you two seconds costs you a $60,000 job. It does not. It is one more small thing working against you, and small things stack up.

"My office manager can write the blog posts"

"I can post a blog on Wix too. My office manager Diane could do it Friday afternoons. Same freshness, no monthly retainer. That doesn't sound like it requires a developer. That sounds like it requires discipline."

That is the best point he made all day, and he is mostly right.

Two problems with it.

First, what does she write about? Not what would be nice to write about. What people actually search for when they are about to hire. There is a real gap between a page built around commercial electrical work in your service area and a page called "5 Electrical Safety Tips." One of those gets read by a project manager holding a bid package. The other one has not been searched since 2011.

Second, February. You are bidding three jobs, a crew is short, and the blog post is the thing that does not happen. Then March does not happen either. That is not a knock on you, that is every owner I have worked with, me included. Geoff said it himself: it requires discipline. The retainer is not buying the ability to publish. You already have that. It buys that it happens in February.

"I will just use ChatGPT myself"

"What if I just tell ChatGPT here are the five things right now, and it writes it from my own thoughts?"

Then you get a decent article. I am not going to insult you and pretend otherwise.

The difference is not the typing. AI does most of the typing on my side too, and anybody who tells you different is selling something. The difference is three things.

One, I know which topic to pick, because I have looked at what your competitors rank for and what people around here actually type.

Two, I get the knowledge out of you. Twenty minutes on the phone where you complain about inspectors beats an hour of you staring at a blank page. You will never do the blank page. You will absolutely complain about inspectors.

Three, the blog is one line item. The rest is your metadata, your service pages, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your map pack position, and watching what the other shops in town are changing. No chatbot is doing that for you. It does not know who your competitors are and it has never looked.

The only two numbers worth watching

This is where my industry earned its reputation.

"I spent four grand with a guy who showed me a graph of impressions going up and my phone rang exactly the same amount."

I have cleaned up after that guy more than once.

Traffic is not the product. Calls are. Seven hundred visitors and ten calls is a bad month in a nice outfit. Fifty visitors and twenty five calls is a business.

So watch two things. How many people tapped your phone number. How many filled out a form. Everything else is decoration.

Ask whoever is pitching you what those two numbers are today and what they should be in six months. If they start talking about impressions, you have your answer.

So should you use Wix?

If you are a one man operation and the site is basically a business card, go build it on Wix. Spend the $23. It is a fine business card and I am not going to take your money for something you do not need.

If you have a crew, a payroll, and three other shops bidding the same work, the platform is not really your problem. The problem is that nobody owns the thing. It is out there being consistent, and consistency is not what you are paying it for.

If you want to know where your site actually stands, I will go through it and send you what I find. Speed, what you rank for, what your competitors are doing that you are not. No charge, and no discovery call, because I know how you feel about those.