Websites8 min
Wix vs custom website (and WordPress): three-year cost, speed and who owns it
Wix vs custom website vs WordPress, costed over three years: speed, security, who holds the keys, and when each one is the right call.
Last December a customer in Lyon sent the owner of an olive oil mill near Aubagne a screenshot. She had tried to order from the mill's website on her phone and had been redirected to a casino site written in Russian, a week before Christmas. The owner spent part of that night reading about "wix vs custom website", with WordPress thrown in, and called me the next day to ask which of the three she should choose.
My answer depends on two practical questions: who is going to edit the content, and who is going to keep the site updated. Wix is a good choice if you are testing an idea and want to make changes yourself, as long as you accept that the site can only ever live on Wix. WordPress works if you publish often and you pay someone to do the updates every month. A custom site makes sense when the site changes a few times a year and you want to own it completely.
The mill's site was on WordPress, built in 2019 by a friend's son. When I checked it there were 34 plugins, 11 of them more than a year out of date, and a slider plugin on the home page that had been taken off the WordPress directory because of an unfixed security flaw. That was most likely how the redirect got in. Nobody had been paying for updates, the mill changes its site a few times a year and she wanted to own it, so we rebuilt it as a custom site in January.
Over three years, for a site of that size, Wix Core costs about $1,100 in fees. A WordPress site built by a freelancer and properly maintained costs between 5,300 and 11,400 €. The static sites I build cost about 2,000 to 2,650 € in total, because after launch there is very little left to pay for.
Wix vs custom website vs WordPress, over three years
I add these up to month 36, since the first invoice is the least interesting number of the lot. This is for a five-to-eight page site like the mill's, with public prices where they exist and my own quotes where they don't.
| Over 36 months | Wix (Core plan) | WordPress, built by a freelancer | Custom static site (my studio) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Building it | Your evenings | 2,500 to 5,000 € (quotes I've seen) | 1,900 € excl. VAT |
| Platform or hosting | $29.77 × 36, about $1,070 | Managed hosting at $28 a month, about $1,010 | $0 on Netlify's free plan, $720 on Pro |
| Upkeep | Included | 50 to 150 € a month in contracts I see: 1,800 to 5,400 € | Nothing to update |
| Domain | Free the first year, then renewal | Around 32 € a year | 11 €, then 31.98 € a year at Gandi |
| Roughly, all in | $1,100 plus your time | 5,300 to 11,400 € | 2,000 to 2,650 € |
Wix is the cheapest, at $17.77 a month for Light and $29.77 for Core on a yearly plan. The table leaves out your own time and any extra apps, which come with their own monthly fees.
Someone always tells me WordPress hosting can be had for six euros a month, and it can. You can skip maintenance too and halve the total, which is more or less what the mill did from 2019 until the casino page. Run properly, though, WordPress means managed hosting (WP Engine's Essential plan is $28 a month, billed yearly) and someone who is paid to do the updates every month.
The custom column is low because a static site has no database and no plugins, so there is nothing to update, though it costs you in a different way, which I get to further down. For the full range of website prices, see what a website costs in 2026.
Speed, measured
All the website builders say they are fast. The HTTP Archive measures speed with data from real Chrome users, and in its 2024 Web Almanac 40% of WordPress sites passed Google's Core Web Vitals on mobile, up from 28% the year before. Wix was at 57% and Squarespace at 60%. The median mobile Lighthouse score was 38 out of 100 for WordPress and 55 for Wix.
So on speed, in the website builder vs custom argument, Wix is not the one dragging its feet.
In my experience WordPress sites are slow because most of them use a bought theme with a page builder, a slider and a cookie banner added on top, often from different developers, and each one loads its own scripts on every page. A static site built by hand is faster mainly because it contains less. The mill's old home page made 87 requests before the first photo appeared. The new one makes 14. That isn't clever engineering. I just left things out.
What happened in December
The security side is where the three really part ways, and it's never on the quote.
Once it was over I went looking for that slider and ended up in Patchstack's yearly report (they track this for a living). They logged 11,334 new vulnerabilities around WordPress in 2025 and only six of them were in WordPress itself, while 91% were in plugins, and for 46% the developer still hadn't shipped a fix on the day the flaw went public, which is the day the bots start trying it. So WordPress itself wasn't really the mill's problem. The 34 add-ons were, written by 34 different people, and some of them had obviously moved on to other things years ago.
The owner paid a security firm 390 € to clean it up, and for about ten days Google put a warning next to the mill's name in the results. People still phoned in orders, but orders through the site dropped off in the month that pays for January to August.
You won't get that on Wix, because nothing you add there runs as a plugin on their servers, and keeping the platform patched is their job. The account itself can still be taken over if you reuse a password, so turn on two-step verification when you sign up.
A static site is the smallest target I know. It has no login page at all, which leaves two doors: the hosting account and the domain registrar. On the sites I hand over, both are in the client's name with two-factor authentication turned on.
Who holds the keys
This is the question I would ask first, but most people only ask it when something goes wrong.
Wix is clear about it. Its help center says that a Wix site "needs to be hosted and operated on Wix's servers" because "the SaaS architecture does not support external hosting." You own your text and photos, but you can't move the site itself. If you leave Wix, you rebuild it somewhere else.
In 2024 a physiotherapist in La Ciotat had this problem when her partner left the practice. The Wix account was in the partner's name, and the transfer took three months.
WordPress is open source, and W3Techs counts it on over 40% of all websites, so in theory you can move it to any host. In practice, whoever controls the hosting account controls the site. If your agency created the hosting account in its own name, you don't really own your WordPress site. I go through the contract clauses to check in my guide to choosing a web development agency.
With custom website design, the site is a set of files in a Git repository. On my projects the repository, the domain and the hosting account are opened in the client's name on the first day, and that's what "you keep the keys" on the studio page means. I work alone, in La Ciotat in the south of France, so it matters: if I got hit by a bus on the D559 tomorrow, another developer could pick the site up the next morning.
The catch with custom
A custom site has one real drawback. In March the mill owner wanted to raise the price of the three-liter can by two euros on a Sunday evening, and she couldn't do it herself. She emailed me and I made the change on Monday morning. She was annoyed about it, and on Wix it would have taken her a minute.
Most of my clients change their site four or five times a year, usually prices in the spring, opening hours for the summer and a few photos. An email to me is enough for that. If you publish every week, or several people need to edit pages, it isn't. Then WordPress with proper maintenance is a better fit, or a custom site with a simple editor, which adds a few days to the build.
So which one
When people ask me this, I end up recommending Wix more often than you'd expect from someone who builds custom sites. Last year it was three people out of the ten who asked. They had just started, they had less than 1,500 € to spend and they wanted to make the changes themselves, so a rebuild in two or three years was fine with them. A yoga studio that adds classes every week stayed on WordPress, and so did a shop that sells on WooCommerce, but both of them pay for maintenance now. The other five went custom.
If you are replacing an old site, read my post on when a redesign is worth the money before asking for quotes.
The mill has been on its static site since January. So far this year she has paid for one domain renewal.
If you can't decide, book a 15-minute call and we'll go through your quotes together.
FAQ
Is Wix good enough for a small business website?
In many cases, yes. For a site with five pages, opening hours and a map, a plan at $18 to $30 a month (billed yearly) is enough, and according to the HTTP Archive, Wix sites pass Core Web Vitals on mobile more often than WordPress sites. The problems usually come later, when you want to move the site or when you need several paid apps.
Is WordPress free?
The software is free. The rest isn't. You pay for hosting, usually a premium theme, and someone to keep plugins updated, which is where most of the 5,300 to 11,400 € over three years in my table comes from.
Why do web developers dislike Wix?
Mostly because Wix doesn't give developers access to the code, and because the Wix sites developers see are usually the ones that clients have outgrown. None of which makes it wrong for you, and a new business on a small budget is often better off starting there.