Wix is a subscription drag-and-drop website builder — you pay roughly £9 to £36 a month, pick one of 900 templates, and edit everything in a visual canvas hosted on Wix's infrastructure. It is enormously flexible inside the editor and enormously locked-in outside it. 1 Week Sites is the opposite trade-off: £1,000 once for a bespoke site, hand-coded in Next.js, live in seven days, running on your own Vercel account from your own GitHub repo. The subscription stops the day the site goes live. Over five years a £22-per-month Wix Business plan costs £1,320 plus any third-party apps; a 1 Week Sites build costs £1,000 plus roughly £60 a year for domain and email. Break-even lands around month thirty-eight. Pick Wix when you want maximum editor flexibility and plan to keep paying for it. Pick 1 Week Sites when you want to own the outcome.
Upfront vs five-year
Wix Business at £22/mo × 60 months = £1,320. Third-party app costs excluded for parity.
When Wix is the right call
- You need a site live this weekend and you want to drag blocks around yourself without a learning curve.
- You run a booking-heavy business — Wix Bookings is mature, cheap, and genuinely good.
- You love the editor flexibility and don't mind the subscription as a cost of doing business.
- You need multi-language or a sprawling menu of pages that would be a faff to hand-code.
When a 1 Week Sites build is the better buy
- You want to own the code and the hosting — so no platform can hold your site hostage or hike the rent.
- Core Web Vitals matter to your paid or organic traffic, because Wix sites commonly land in the 50–70 Lighthouse mobile range.
- Your brand can't afford to look like every other Wix site — you want bespoke typography, layout, and detail.
- You plan to keep the site three years or more and the meter running on Wix is starting to add up.
Wix vs Squarespace vs WordPress vs bespoke
Most people weighing Wix are also weighing Squarespace and WordPress. Wix is the most flexible visual editor of the three. Squarespace is more design-led and consistent. WordPress is the most extensible but needs someone to maintain it. A bespoke Next.js build is the fastest and the only one you actually own — more upfront, nothing ongoing except hosting you control. Longer version in /writing/squarespace-vs-wix-vs-bespoke.
| Wix | 1 Week Sites | Winner | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | £0 trial → £9–36/mo | £1,000 once | Depends |
| Ownership | Rented | Yours | 1 Week Sites |
| Typical mobile Lighthouse | 50–70 | 95+ | 1 Week Sites |
| Editor flexibility | Extensive drag-and-drop | Markdown / CMS | Wix |
Side-by-side
| Wix | 1 Week Sites | |
|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | £0 trial, £9–36/mo after | £1,000 once |
| Ongoing cost | £108–432 per year, forever | £60 per year (domain + email) |
| Timeline to live | Hours DIY, 1–4 weeks with a designer | 7 days |
| Ownership | Site lives on Wix, can't be exported | Code on your GitHub, hosting on your Vercel |
| Performance | Mobile Lighthouse typically 50–70 | Mobile Lighthouse 95+ target |
| Design freedom | Very flexible within the editor | Bespoke — anything reasonable is on the table |
| Editing after launch | Visual editor, no code needed | Markdown or a small CMS — I can bolt one on |
| Exit cost | No real export — it's a rebuild | Everything is yours already |
| Accessibility | Editor-dependent, often WCAG-weak | WCAG 2.2 AA baseline built in |
| Revisions | DIY or hire a Wix partner each time | One round included same week |
Five-year total cost
The £22-per-month Business plan is the typical small-business Wix tier. Over five years it comes to £1,320 in subscriptions — before any paid apps or designer fees. A flat-fee bespoke build looks dearer on day one and cheaper by month thirty-eight.
| Option | Five-year total | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Wix Business (£22/mo × 60 months) | £1,320 | plus £0–1,500 optional designer setup, plus any third-party apps |
| 1 Week Sites + 5 years of hosting | ~£1,300 | £1,000 build + £60/yr domain & email |
Common questions
Can I actually move my content off Wix?
Not cleanly. Wix doesn't export a usable site — you get blog posts as an RSS feed, and maybe a contact CSV, but pages, layouts, and media all need rebuilding. That's why the migration is essentially a fresh build, which is what I do anyway — seven days, fixed fee, your content rewritten into the new structure.
Is £1,000 really all-in, or do I pay extra later?
£1,000 is all-in for a five-to-seven-page bespoke marketing site: brief, design, build, one revision round, launch. No monthly fee, no retainer, no kill fee. You pay for your own domain (≈£12/year) and email hosting (≈£4/month on a provider of your choice). Nothing goes through me.
What about Wix's newer AI site builder?
The AI builder is a faster on-ramp to the same product — a Wix site you can't export, that still ships a lot of shared JavaScript, that still costs £9 to £36 a month forever. It's impressive for a first draft; it doesn't change the underlying trade-off.
Why is your bespoke site faster than Wix?
Wix has to serve every type of site from one codebase, so each page ships the editor's runtime plus whatever widgets are in use. A bespoke Next.js site only ships what your page actually needs. That's usually the difference between a mobile Lighthouse score in the 50–70 range and one at 95+.
When is Wix the right answer instead?
Wix wins when you need a booking flow, multi-language, or a genuinely long catalogue of pages — and you want to edit it all yourself without a developer. If that's you, Wix is fine. I wrote a longer take in /writing/squarespace-vs-wix-vs-bespoke.
Do you migrate from Wix, or only build from scratch?
Both. A migration from Wix is the same seven-day sprint — brief Monday, design Tuesday, build Wednesday–Friday, revisions Saturday, launch Sunday. Refund applies identically: if the new site isn't live by day seven, full refund within 48 hours.
Bespoke, live in seven days.
£1,000 flat. Paid upfront. Full refund if I miss day seven. Code, hosting, and domain all in your name.