Picture two restaurants on the same street in Madeira. Same food, same atmosphere, same prices. One has a Wix site. The other has a site built by someone who knows what they are doing. A tourist opens Google on their phone, searches "restaurant near me," and waits.
The Wix site loads in 4.2 seconds. The other one loads in 1.1 seconds. The tourist saw neither. They closed the tab at second 3 and opened TripAdvisor.
This is not a hypothetical. This is what the data shows every day. And it always starts with the same innocent decision: "Wix is cheaper and I can do it myself."
The real cost of "affordable"
Wix is not cheap. The Core plan, the minimum for a real business without Wix ads on the site, is around €16 a month. The Business plan, with e-commerce and no storage limits, is €25 a month. Squarespace starts at €16 a month and climbs to €33 on the advanced plan.
Do the maths over 3 years:
- Wix Core: €576
- Wix Business: €900
- Squarespace Basic: €576
- Squarespace Advanced: €1,188
At the end of 3 years, you have nothing. Stop paying and the site disappears. You do not have the code. You do not have the files. You have nothing to hand to anyone else to continue. You paid to rent, not to own.
A professional site with WebMar Studio starts at €300, paid once, and the code is yours forever.
Speed: the problem you cannot see
Wix and Squarespace sites are slow. Not because the companies are bad, but because their model requires loading a visual editor, dozens of scripts shared across all platform customers, and generic CSS not written for your specific business.
Google PageSpeed Insights scores sites from 0 to 100. The average Wix site on mobile sits between 50 and 65. A custom-built, optimised site reaches 90 or above. That is not a 30-point difference. It is the difference between appearing on the first page of Google and appearing on the third.
Google has used loading speed as a ranking factor since 2018. Since 2021 it uses Core Web Vitals: LCP (how long the main content takes to load), FID (how quickly it responds to the first click), and CLS (whether the layout jumps while loading). Wix sites typically fail two or three of these.
For the customer the maths is simple: 53% of mobile users abandon pages that take more than 3 seconds to load. If your site takes 4 seconds on a mobile network, half the customers who arrived never saw your phone number.
Platform lock-in: you are a hostage
Wix and Squarespace are closed platforms. In practice that means:
- If the platform raises prices, you pay or you lose the site. Squarespace raised prices 30% in 2023.
- If the platform shuts down or changes its terms, you have no copy of your site to take elsewhere.
- If you want to add a feature the platform does not have, you cannot. There is no code access.
- If you want to integrate a specific booking system, a restaurant POS, a stock management app, you depend on the platform having that integration. Often it does not.
A professional site is yours. Host it anywhere. Give the code to any developer. You are not locked in to anyone.
ChatGPT cannot read you
We have already covered GEO and how ChatGPT chooses the businesses it recommends. The short version: AI cites sites with clear structure. Schema.org, JSON-LD, direct answers to specific questions, an llms.txt file.
Wix sites rarely have any of this. Wix lets you add some basic schema, but it is limited, hard to customise per business type, and the resulting code is heavier than necessary. Squarespace supports a few schema types but falls far short of the full control a custom-built site offers.
The result: when someone asks ChatGPT for "best Portuguese restaurant near Funchal," your Wix site does not appear in the answer. The restaurant with a custom site, proper Restaurant schema, structured hours, a readable menu format, and a citable FAQ section, that one shows up.
What actually happens when you migrate
Our most recent client came from Wix with a restaurant in Sesimbra. The site took 5 seconds to load on mobile. No schema. No llms.txt. Google Maps embedded as a heavy iframe.
We built the site from scratch: PageSpeed 91 on mobile, Restaurant schema with menu and hours, a FAQ section with 8 questions, llms.txt, lightweight Google Maps integration. Within 6 weeks, organic traffic was up 40%. They started appearing in Perplexity results for restaurant searches in the area.
The cost: €800 (Tier 2). Return on investment reached in 3 months of Wix monthly fees they stopped paying.
When Wix actually makes sense
Be honest: Wix and Squarespace do make sense in very specific situations.
- You have a temporary project under 6 months and you do not want to invest in anything.
- You need something online this week and design does not matter at all.
- You are testing a concept before taking it seriously.
For a real business that wants real customers, that wants to appear on Google, that wants ChatGPT to recommend it, that wants to control its own site: Wix is not the answer.
How to start
You do not have to change everything at once. Start by auditing your current site. Google PageSpeed Insights is free. Paste your URL, check the mobile score. If it is below 70, you have a problem.
If you want a second opinion, we audit your site in 15 minutes. We show you what is costing you customers, what it would cost to fix, and whether migrating makes sense. If it does not, we say so.