A Wix alternative, and when to stay on Wix
The alternative to Wix is a site you pay for once, but on cost alone Wix often wins: at about $39 a month, a $3,000 build takes over six years to pay back. The reasons to move are speed, structured data, and owning what you built - not the monthly fee. If a brochure site is all you need, staying on Wix is a sound decision.
What Wix costs
$17 to $159 a month
per site, per month, cheaper when billed annually
Business plans sit around $39 a month billed annually, or about $46 monthly. Ecommerce features, third-party apps and removing platform limits push it higher.
Checked 2026-10-31 against Wix. Pricing changes, so confirm the current figure with them before deciding anything on it.
The differences that are actually structural
Not a feature checklist. These are the things that follow from how each arrangement is built, and they do not change with a product update.
| Wix | Paid once | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost, honestly | About $39 a month, which is $2,340 over five years. | $3,000 once. On cost alone, Wix is cheaper for the first six years. |
| Speed | A page assembled at request time, carrying the builder runtime. Core Web Vitals are a known weak point. | Finished files on a CDN. No builder runtime to download, and nothing assembled at request time. |
| Structured data | Basic markup, with more available through apps and manual code injection. | A linked JSON-LD graph per page, validated before launch, covering your services, hours, FAQs and reviews. |
| Moving somewhere else later | There is no meaningful export. Whatever you build on Wix stays on Wix. | Honestly, much the same: we host and run what we build, so moving elsewhere means a rebuild either way. The difference is the bill, not the portability. |
| Changing things yourself | Excellent. Drag, drop, publish, no developer needed. | Content yes, structure no. A new kind of page is development work. |
The honest arithmetic first
Most “Wix alternative” pages open by telling you Wix is bad. It is not. At around $39 a month on an annual plan it is $2,340 over five years, against $3,000 for a custom build, which means on cost alone Wix is cheaper for about the first six years. If someone is pitching you a custom site primarily as a way to save money on your Wix subscription, the numbers do not support it.
Put your own figures into the calculator on our pricing page and you will see the same thing.
So why move at all
Two reasons, neither of which is the monthly fee.
Speed. A builder assembles your page when it is requested and ships a runtime to do it. A custom site is finished files on a CDN, with no builder runtime to download and nothing assembled when the request arrives. That gap is structural rather than a matter of optimisation effort, and Core Web Vitals is a ranking input.
Structured data. This is the one that actually moves results. Every page we build ships a linked JSON-LD graph describing your business, services, hours, FAQs and reviews in the form search engines and AI assistants consume. On a builder you get the basics, with more available through apps and manual code injection if you know to do it.
The decision, plainly
If you need a presentable site, cheaply, this week, and search is not a channel you compete in - stay on Wix. We will tell you that on the call rather than after you have paid us.
If you are competing for search traffic against people doing this properly, speed and structured data are where that is won, and a custom build does both far better than a template.
Read this part
When Wix is the better choice.
If one of these describes you, buy theirs. We would rather lose the enquiry than sell you the wrong shape of thing and have you find out in month four.
- Your budget is under a thousand dollars. This is the honest answer and it is not a close call - a builder subscription is the right tool at that budget, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling.
- You need to be live tomorrow. A custom build takes about a week at the very fastest; Wix takes an afternoon.
- You want to redesign it yourself on a whim. Drag-and-drop editing is a real feature and a custom site does not give you it.
- The site is temporary or seasonal. Paying once for something you will replace in a year makes no sense.
Work out your own number.
Not ours - yours. Put in what you pay every month today, and this shows you when a one-off build has paid for itself and what you keep after that.
| You pay now | Paid for itself in | You keep over 5 years |
|---|---|---|
| $60/mo | 50 months | $600 |
| $150/mo | 20 months | $6,000 |
| $299/mo | 11 months | $14,940 |
Excludes your domain, about a dollar a month, which you pay your registrar either way. Card processing on orders is unchanged - the saving is the platform cut, not the card fee.
Questions we get asked
Is Wix actually bad for SEO?
No, and the claim that it is has been out of date for years. Wix sites rank perfectly well for most local businesses. The real limitation is narrower: you have less control over page speed and over the structured data you emit, and both of those matter more in competitive search results than they do in easy ones.
When is it worth moving off Wix?
When search is a real channel for you and you are up against competitors doing it properly, when speed is costing you conversions on mobile, or when the site has become central enough to your business that renting it feels like the wrong arrangement. Not simply because the monthly fee annoys you - on cost alone it takes over six years to come out ahead.
Can you move my existing Wix content over?
Yes. Wix has no clean export, so in practice the text and images are moved across by hand and the structure gets rebuilt properly on the way. That is usually an improvement rather than a cost, because the page structure is the thing most worth redoing.
Tell us what you need built.
A short call, a straight answer on scope and cost, and a fixed quote. No retainer, no monthly fee, no commission on your orders.