When you’re considering building a website quickly and easily, platforms like Wix and Squarespace are very tempting. They offer drag and drop interfaces, beautiful templates, and hosting built in. But they come with trade-offs. For many business or serious users, those trade offs can end up costing more in freedom, performance, or SEO down the road. Below are some of the biggest cons.
Limited Customization & Flexibility
- With Wix, once you pick a template and the site is live, you can’t change your template without starting over. That limits redesigns or pivots without redoing much of the site.
- Squarespace, while offering clean templates, often limits what advanced users can do. Elements such as layout customization, template structure (especially in older versions), or controlling CSS/JS deeply are more restricted compared to open CMSs.
SEO Limitations
Search Engine Optimization is vital for visibility. Some website builders make SEO easier in basic ways, but limit what you can do with the more advanced technical pieces.
- Squarespace’s default settings sometimes enforce things like non unique meta descriptions (Site Meta Description used across multiple pages) unless overridden. This isn’t ideal.
- There are limits in Squarespace: slow page speed, lack of support for modern image formats like WebP, default schema or structured data you cannot change, limited control over robots.txt or canonical tags.
- Wix has similar concerns: when you add many features, high‑res images, or videos, load times and performance can suffer. Slow site speed can be a penalty in search rankings.
- Performance and Loading Speed
- As mentioned, bloated templates, lots of scripts, large image files, or extensive use of design elements can slow the site. For both Wix and Squarespace, users report sluggish performance when overloading the site(s).
- Because you don’t have full control over hosting environment or ability to finetune server‑side optimizations, you’re often at the mercy of the builder’s infrastructure. If they don’t optimize for certain metrics (e.g. time to first byte, caching, etc.), you can suffer. Especially important for mobile users.
Costs & Hidden Fees
- Although Wix and Squarespace offer lower‑tiers or starter plans, many features you’ll want (e.g. ecommerce, custom domain, removing platform branding, better analytics, higher traffic allowances) are behind paywalls. Upgrading can become expensive
- Also, even in the paid plans, there may be limits on storage, bandwidth, or page elements. If your site grows, you may eventually want more than what’s included.
Migration & Platform Lock-in
- One major drawback with proprietary builders is exporting your site. With Wix, for example, you can’t fully export your site and move it elsewhere easily. Your content, design, and structure may need to be rebuilt.
- This kind of lock‑in means you may be stuck with limitations of the platform even when you want to scale or change features. It also ties your site to their hosting, their pricing, and their performance.
Design Restrictions & Uniformity
- Even though templates are pretty, many are used by multiple users, which means sites can begin to look similar unless you invest time in customizing. But customization is limited, as noted above.
- Older templates or certain theme structures may have built‑in limitations around headings, layout structures, image alignment, etc. You may find those fiddly things frustrating.
Less Control Over Technical/ Backend Features
- Things like robots.txt, canonical URLs, XML sitemap control, structured data/schema markup are often less customizable on Squarespace or Wix than on more open or self‑hosted platforms.
- If you need custom functionality, integrations, or unusual behaviors (e.g. custom JavaScript, advanced backend logic, special API integrations), these platforms may be constraining.
What Alternatives/Workarounds Are There?
If you think the cons above may affect you, here are a few things to consider:
- Using Saltech Systems (for example) to get a more customized solution. Saltech Systems can build more flexible, performance‑optimized websites with full control over SEO, hosting, backend, and design.
- Consider content management systems like WordPress, where you host on your own server (or managed server) so you have wide control.
- If you do use Wix or Squarespace, try to plan ahead: choose a template you really like, optimize images, limit extra scripts or plugins, monitor performance, and make sure your SEO basics are tight.
Conclusion
Website builders like Wix and Squarespace have a lot of appeal—they let you get a site up quickly with decent design and less technical overhead. But the trade‑offs can become significant: in performance, flexibility, migration ability, and SEO control.
If your goals include serious SEO, growth, custom functionality, or future scaling, it might make more sense to invest in a more flexible solution. Teams like Saltech Systems specialize in building those more robust websites that avoid many of the pitfalls listed above, while still delivering strong design and usability.
