Wix vs a Custom Website: The Honest UK Maths (2026)

Quick answer

Wix’s published UK plans run roughly £9–£30+ per month (their pricing page has the current tiers), which over five years lands near £1,000+ before apps. A custom build costs £299 (one-page) or from £499 (full site) plus ~£20/month hosting: similar five-year money, entirely different endings, because one route finishes owning a portable asset and the other finishes still renting. Wix genuinely wins at the day-one stage; the maths and the export wall decide when that stops, and this guide prices the crossover honestly.

What Wix does well (credit first)

Fairness before arithmetic: Wix’s editor is the best pure DIY experience in the builder class, launch is genuinely same-day, the AI setup drafts a passable starter site from a questionnaire, hosting/SSL/updates are invisible, and the app market bolts on bookings, menus and stores in clicks. For a business that is still an experiment, a side project, or an owner who enjoys tinkering and will actually maintain the thing, that bundle at £9–£30/month is honest value, and pretending otherwise would undermine everything else this page says. The questions that decide the rest: what happens as the business becomes real, and what does leaving cost?

Side by side

The five-year maths, done properly

The chart’s numbers unpacked: a mid-tier Wix plan around £17/month is £1,020 over five years, and real-world Wix bills trend higher (app subscriptions for bookings or reviews, the tier upgrade when you need more, the periodic price rises every platform applies). The custom route: £299–£499 once plus £20/month hosting is £1,499–£1,699 over the same five years. On paper Wix looks slightly cheaper; in exchange the custom column ends with an owned, portable, professionally designed asset with no ceiling, while the Wix column ends where it started, renting, with the sixth year’s bill identical to the first’s. The pay-monthly custom route (£79/month, yours at the end) even matches the builder’s cashflow shape for businesses that chose Wix purely for the low entry. Five-year money: comparable. Five-year outcomes: not close.

The export wall (the clause that should decide it)

The single most important Wix fact gets one clear paragraph: you cannot export a Wix site. Not to WordPress, not to another host, not meaningfully at all: text can be copied by hand, images re-downloaded, but the design, structure, app data and any SEO equity in the platform’s internals stay behind, and leaving means rebuilding from zero. That converts every month of content and tweaks into deepening investment in a building you can never buy, which is fine for a placeholder and increasingly serious for a growing business. Custom builds on standard WordPress carry the opposite property, portable between hosts and developers by design, which is the ownership difference the whole builder-vs-custom series turns on.

By situation: the honest routing

Pre-launch or validating: Wix, sincerely, with the domain bought at an independent registrar (the one non-negotiable, so the future migration keeps your address) and your content drafted outside the platform. Established and on Wix now: run the outgrowing checklist in our graduation guide; if fees have compounded past build cost or rankings matter and aren’t coming, the crossover has arrived, and the migration order there protects what you’ve earned. Starting a real business with real customers waiting: skip the placeholder stage; the £299 one-pager launches in days, already owned. Multi-service business needing each service to rank: custom from day one, because the page-per-service build is the structure Wix’s ceiling squeezes first. Whichever routing applies, the wider platform comparison (including Squarespace and WordPress.com) lives in our three-way guide, and every custom price is public on the price list.

Worked example: the salon that ran both routes

A composite from the migration files: a salon launched on Wix in 2023 (£13/month tier, rational at the time), added the bookings app (+£8/month), upgraded a tier for the storefront (+£6), and by 2026 has paid roughly £900 with a template site that never ranked for “balayage [town]” against the salon up the road. The £299 custom one-pager built instead in 2023, on the same £900, would have covered the build plus nearly three years of £20/month hosting, ranked for the exact search family (words on the page, per the salon-vertical playbook), and been owned outright. The instructive part is that neither owner did anything foolish; the difference was entirely in whether a graduation date existed. Wix’s economics are fair at the placeholder stage and quietly expensive as a permanent home, which is the whole comparison in one salon.

What migration actually involves (for the already-committed)

For readers already on Wix and wincing: the move is smaller than feared when sequenced right. Domain confirmed yours (or transferred out first), content copied to documents, the custom build made alongside while Wix stays live, DNS switched on launch day, and old URL paths redirected where they had earned anything. The full order with the ranking-protection detail is in the graduation guide, and the honest timeline is days of your input spread over a fortnight of build. What you lose is the subscription; what survives is everything that was ever really yours: the words, the images, the reviews, the domain, and the customers, which is a clarifying inventory of what the platform was actually providing.

Questions that settle it in two minutes

Is the business proven, with customers who pay? (No: Wix. Yes: keep reading.) Do you need to rank for more than one service or beat established competitors? (Yes: custom; the ceiling is real.) Will anyone maintain a DIY site after the novelty? (Honest no: custom; an abandoned Wix site costs monthly AND converts nobody.) Is the £299–£499 genuinely unavailable rather than uncomfortable? (Unavailable: Wix or pay-monthly custom; uncomfortable: the five-year table above is the answer.) And the tiebreaker for the torn: imagine the business in three years, then ask which column you wish you had started, because the rebuild between them never gets cheaper than today.

A closing note on the comparison’s spirit: Wix is not the villain of this page, and the custom route is not automatically virtuous. They are different financial instruments, a lease and a purchase, honestly priced within their own logic. Businesses get hurt only when they hold the lease while needing the asset, usually because nobody put a review date in the diary. Whatever you choose today, diarise the review for twelve months out, and this whole comparison becomes a calm annual check instead of a crisis read. Twelve months is also roughly how long builder promotions take to renew at full price, which makes the review date doubly useful.