Wix, Shopify or built from scratch.

01The three questions

Before anything technical, answer these honestly.

One: are you selling things through the site, or persuading somebody to get in touch? Two: does the site need to do something, such as calculate, book or connect to software you already use, or does it need to say something? Three: will you want to rearrange the pages yourself, or would you rather never look at it again?

Almost every case is decided by those three, and none of them are about technology.

02Built from scratch, which is now the cheap one

This is the part that has changed, and it is worth saying plainly because the old advice is still everywhere. Building a small site from scratch used to mean a bigger bill and a longer wait. It does not any more.

The tools got good enough that a small site is hours of work rather than weeks. Once there is no platform underneath it there is no platform bill either, so it is cheaper to run as well as cheaper to buy. For a brochure site that needs to be found and then left alone, this is now the default answer rather than the expensive one.

The honest trade is that you are not getting a drag and drop editor. I will show you how to change text and swap photographs, which covers what most people actually change, but if you want to redesign a page at eleven at night you will be messaging me instead.

03Wix Studio, when you want the editor

If that last paragraph bothered you, that is your answer, and it is a perfectly good one.

Wix Studio is genuinely good now, which was not always true. It renders proper pages that search engines read without difficulty, the editor is something a non technical person can actually use, and hosting and security are somebody else’s problem.

It costs a little more to buy and more to keep, because the yearly fee goes to Wix rather than to hosting, and it takes a fortnight rather than two days because there is more assembling involved. That is a fair price for being able to move things around yourself, and a waste if you are never going to.

The other trade off is that you are inside somebody else’s system. Ninety per cent of what you might want is straightforward, and the last ten per cent can be anywhere between fiddly and impossible. For a brochure site you rarely meet that ten per cent.

04Shopify, for selling at size

If you are selling a few hundred things or more, or you have a supplier feed updating stock, or you are selling into several countries with different tax rules, use Shopify. Not because it is fashionable but because the boring parts are solved: tax, delivery rules, stock, payment, refunds, the emails that go out when something ships.

Every one of those is a small nightmare to build and a permanent liability to maintain. Shopify has already done it and tested it on more shops than you will ever see.

The catch is the monthly fee and the app ecosystem. Apps solve real problems and they also slow your shop down, sometimes badly. I have seen a shop where a single app was adding seconds to every page load, which on a phone on a train is the difference between a sale and a back button.

Below that size the fee and the complexity are buying you very little. A shop built from scratch takes the payment straight into your account with nobody taking a slice, and for five to a few hundred products that is usually the better deal.

05Things that do not decide it

A few arguments you may hear that I would ignore.

• "Wix is bad for SEO." This was somewhat true in about 2015 and has not been true for years. What is bad for search is a site with nothing to say.
• "You need WordPress for a blog." Every platform does blogs. WordPress does them well and also needs updating, backing up and securing forever.
• "Custom is faster." Only if it is built well. A badly built custom site is slower than a good Wix one, and there is no support line.
• "Custom means you own it." You own your content either way. What differs is how easily it moves, which is a real point and a smaller one than it sounds.
• "It will look more professional if it is custom." It will not, on its own. Nobody has ever chosen a plumber based on what their website was built with.

06What I would do

Brochure site, small business, wants to be found and wants a quiet life: built from scratch. The same business, but you want to restructure pages yourself every few months: Wix Studio. Selling a handful to a few hundred products: a shop built from scratch. Selling at real scale or across borders: Shopify.

If you are torn between the first two, the question is not budget any more, because the built one is cheaper on both counts. It is whether you want the keys. Plenty of people genuinely do, and plenty of people have never once logged in.

And if none of that quite fits, say so rather than picking. The cases I have enjoyed most started with somebody describing an awkward problem rather than choosing from a list.