Wix vs Squarespace vs Hand-Coded: What's Right for Your Denver Business?

Everyone has an opinion on how you should build your website. Wix people swear by Wix. WordPress developers will tell you nothing else exists. Here's a more honest take with what each option actually does well, where each one falls short, and how to figure out which one fits your situation.

Wix: Fast to Launch, Slow to Load

Wix is genuinely easy. Drag things around, pick a template, connect your domain, and you're live in an afternoon. For someone who needs a web presence today and has never touched a line of code, that's a real advantage.

The problems show up later. Wix generates bloated code that consistently scores poorly on Google's Core Web Vitals, the performance metrics Google uses as a ranking signal. And if you ever want to leave Wix, you can't take your site with you. There's no export. You rebuild from scratch on whatever you move to.

Squarespace: Better Looking, Same Core Problems

Squarespace templates are legitimately attractive. The editor is more opinionated than Wix. This actually works in your favor, because it's harder to accidentally make something that looks terrible. If design aesthetics matter and you want to manage your own content without a developer, Squarespace is a reasonable choice.

Performance is better than Wix but still behind a well-built custom site. Plans run $16 to $49 per month, and e-commerce requires the higher tiers. Same lock-in problem as Wix: your content lives on their platform, and getting it out is painful.

WordPress: Flexible, but You'll Pay for It in Time

WordPress runs roughly 40% of the entire internet, which gives it an air of being the obvious, safe choice. And it does have real advantages. It's flexible, there are thousands of plugins for almost anything, and practically every web developer knows how to work with it.

What most people underestimate is the ongoing maintenance. Every plugin needs regular updates. Every update is a potential breaking point. It's the most attacked CMS on the internet precisely because it's everywhere. Performance optimization requires real effort and often more plugins, which creates more things to maintain. The total cost of ownership consistently surprises people who were attracted to the low initial price.

Hand-Coded: The Best Performance, the Most Work to Build

A hand-coded site is written from scratch in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. No CMS, no plugins, no template underneath it. It takes more time to build than any of the other options, which is exactly why most developers don't do it.

But the tradeoff is significant. Hand-coded sites load faster than any CMS-based alternative. They have a smaller attack surface with no login panel, no plugin vulnerabilities, no CMS to exploit. A well-built hand-coded site from five years ago still works perfectly today, with very minimal maintenance.

For more on why hand-coded sites outperform WordPress specifically, I broke that down in detail here.

The Honest Comparison

Most comparison articles in this space are written by people trying to sell you one of these options. Here's the version without an agenda:

• • Wix and Squarespace are genuinely fine for simple use cases like personal sites, pre-revenue projects, or portfolios. If you're comfortable with the lock-in and the performance ceiling, they work.
• • WordPress is powerful but the maintenance burden is real and consistently underestimated. It makes sense for complex sites with someone actively managing them.
• • Hand-coded is the best option for performance, security, and long-term reliability, but it requires a developer. That's the only real barrier.

What This Means for Your Denver Business

If you want a Denver business website that loads fast, shows up in local search, and doesn't need ongoing babysitting, then a hand-coded site maintained by the developer who built it is the right call. The problem has always been finding that developer and affording the build.

Oh of One builds hand-coded websites for small businesses across the Denver metro, including Aurora, Centennial, Lakewood, and Denver — with two pricing options: $0 down and $200/month, or $4,000 upfront and $25/month. Same hand-coded quality either way, no maintenance headaches, no platform lock-in.

Ready to talk through what makes sense for your situation?