Website builder or custom website: which suits a NZ small business?

What you are actually choosing between

A website builder is a subscription. You pick a template, drag your text and photos in, and the company hosts it. Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy's builder work this way, and Shopify does the same for online shops. You pay every month or every year for as long as the site is up. Stop paying and the site goes offline.

A custom website is a set of files built for your business and handed to you. It runs on hosting you choose, often for a few dollars a month for a static site like the ones we build. There is no platform fee to us after handover. The trade is that someone has to build it, and changes later need either a person who can edit the files or a simple editing setup agreed at the start.

Neither option is a ranking trick. Google does not reward or punish a site for being built on Wix. It looks at whether the page answers the search, loads properly on a phone, and comes from a business it can trust. Both routes can do that. They fail in different ways.

Cost over three years, not month one

Builder plans for a business site are often somewhere around $20 to $60 a month, depending on the plan and whether you pay yearly. Check the current price page before you decide, because these plans change. On top of the plan, people commonly add a paid form or booking app, a premium template, and a logo made separately.

Run the numbers over three years, because that is roughly how long a small business site lasts before a refresh. A $35-a-month plan is about $1,260 over 36 months before any add-ons. Our Starter package is $599 once, with a logo mark, one page, and a tested quote form. Hosting a static site in your own name is a small separate cost. Growth is $1,499 for up to five pages and Google Business Profile setup.

The number that usually decides it is your time. A builder is only cheap if the hours you spend fighting the template are hours you'd otherwise waste. If you bill $80 an hour as a sparky, ten evenings on a theme is a real cost. If you enjoy it and you have the photos and words ready, a builder can be the right call, and we'd rather you knew that before you paid us.

Ownership and moving later

This is the part most people only learn when they try to leave. Builders let you export some content — blog posts, product lists, images — but not a working copy of the design you can run elsewhere. Moving off a builder usually means rebuilding the pages. Check the export options for your platform before you start, not when you're unhappy.

The domain is separate from the site, and it should be in your name from day one. Buy it yourself from a registrar, or make sure whoever buys it lists you as the registrant. A .co.nz domain bought by a designer under their account is the most common way small businesses lose control of their own address.

Email is the trap in any move. If your email runs on the same domain, the mail settings (MX records) have to come with you when you point the domain at a new site. Get them wrong and your inbox goes quiet for a day. We check the mail records before switching anything, and so should anyone you hire.

Speed and mobile

Builders have improved, and a simple Squarespace or Wix page can load well. The usual slowdowns are large hero videos, image galleries uploaded at full camera size, and several apps each loading their own scripts. A custom static site starts lighter because nothing loads that the page doesn't use.

Test whatever you have, not the platform's marketing. Open your site on your own phone over mobile data, away from Wi-Fi. If the first screen takes long enough for you to notice, a customer standing at a van or in a café queue will notice too. Google's PageSpeed Insights gives a free score, but the phone test is the one your customers run.

When a builder is the right choice

Choose a builder if you want to make frequent changes yourself, you have the time and an eye for layout, and you are testing an idea that might not be around in a year. A pop-up, a market stall, or a side project that needs a page this weekend are good fits.

Choose Shopify or a similar commerce platform if the business is mainly an online shop with many products, stock levels, and payments. A shop is a different job from a brochure site, and a fixed small-business package should not pretend otherwise. We quote that work as Custom, and sometimes the honest advice is that Shopify on its own is enough.

When a custom site is the right choice

Choose a custom site if you want it to look like your business rather than a template, you'd rather hand over the job than learn a tool, and you want to stop paying a platform. Tradies, cafés, salons, and service businesses whose pages rarely change are the usual fit. The site needs to be clear, quick on a phone, and take enquiries. It does not need a weekly editor.

It also suits businesses that have been burned before: a site held by a designer who stopped replying, or a builder account under an old staff member's email. Owning the files and the domain means the next move is your decision. The package guide lists what Starter and Growth include line by line.

Moving from a builder to a custom site

Start with a list of every page on the current site and the address of each one. Pages that already get visits from Google should keep a matching page on the new site, and the old address should redirect to the new one. That redirect (a 301) tells Google the page moved rather than vanished. Skipping it is how a redesign loses the search traffic the old site had earned.

Then collect what you own: logo files, photos, and the text you wrote. Copy the text out of the builder before you cancel. Confirm the domain is unlocked and in your name, and note the email settings. Only cancel the builder plan once the new site is live and the domain points at it. We do this mapping as part of a redesign so a page that ranks isn't thrown away.

Expect a short wobble in search after any move, even a careful one. Google has to recrawl the new pages. Submitting the sitemap in Google Search Console after launch speeds that up. If your search visits haven't recovered after a few weeks, something was missed in the redirects, and it's usually fixable.

Questions to ask before you pick either

Ask four questions of any option, including ours. What do I pay each month after launch, and to whom? If I stop paying, what happens to the site? Can I take the design and content elsewhere, and in what form? Who owns the domain? A builder answers the first honestly and the second and third with “it stays with us”. A good custom build answers all four with “you”.

If you are still unsure, compare a real quote with a real builder plan for the same page list. The cost guide has typical NZ ranges, and the small business page covers redesigns and moving off a builder. If the builder wins for your situation, use it. If you'd rather own the site, get a quote with your business type and we'll name the tier within one business day.