Hand-coded, Wix, Squarespace or WordPress?

Speed, and why it is money rather than vanity

Page weight is the one row in that table with a direct commercial consequence. A builder site ships the platform’s entire framework to every visitor — the editor’s runtime, the animation library, the analytics wrapper, the fonts, the code for features you never switched on. A hand-written page ships only what is on the page.

In South Africa that gap matters more than it does in London or New York. A large share of local traffic arrives on mobile data, often on a congested cell, and a 4 MB page on a slow connection is not a slightly worse experience — it is a closed tab. Google’s own research has consistently put the biggest drop-off in the first few seconds of load. Every one of those visitors had already decided you were worth looking up.

This is measurable, and you do not have to take our word for any of it. Run your own site through PageSpeed Insights, then run a competitor’s. The numbers are public and they are the same numbers Google uses for Core Web Vitals.

What Google actually rewards

Here is the part that most “custom is better for SEO” sales pitches get wrong, so we will state it plainly: Google does not rank a site for being hand-coded. There is no crawler check for artisanal HTML.

What Google measures is roughly this: can it crawl and render the page, does the page load quickly and stay stable while loading, does it work on a phone, is it secure, and above all does the content genuinely answer what the person searched for. Hand-written code makes the speed and stability parts far easier to win, because there is nothing extra to download and nothing shifting around as the page assembles itself.

But content beats code, every time. A Wix site with clear, specific, genuinely useful pages will outrank a beautifully engineered custom site with three paragraphs of filler. If you take one thing from this page, take that one. If you are weighing what to spend where, the honest answer is: get the words right first, then make them load fast.

Ownership, and the part nobody mentions until you want to leave

A Wix or Squarespace site cannot be exported and rehosted anywhere else, because on those platforms the platform is the site. Your content can come out. The site cannot. Shopify is the same. If you stop subscribing, what you have is a folder of text and images and a rebuild ahead of you.

WordPress is genuinely portable, which is one of its real strengths — you can move a WordPress site between hosts, and the database and files are yours. A hand-coded site is the most portable of the four, because it is a directory of HTML, CSS and images that any host on earth will serve.

We should be straight about where this cuts against us. On a monthly managed plan you are subscribing too, and if you stop paying, the hosting stops. The difference is what you walk away holding: we hand over every file, and there is no proprietary format to unpick, so another developer can pick it up on the Monday. That is worth checking with anyone you hire, us included. The seven questions to ask a quote cover how to ask it.

Cost over time

Builders are cheaper in month one and flatter forever. Custom work is more expensive up front, or on subscription, and does not accumulate licence costs. WordPress sits in the middle and is the easiest of the three to get wrong, because its costs are quiet: a plugin lapses, an update breaks a layout, and the bill arrives as an emergency rather than a line item.

We put real three-year figures on all of this, including the running costs that never appear on a quote, in what a website actually costs in South Africa.

Four times you should use a builder instead of hiring us

We turn down work for these reasons regularly. It is cheaper for everyone to say it here.

1. You are testing whether the idea works at all. If you do not yet know there is demand, do not commission anything. Put up a builder site in a weekend, see whether the phone rings, and spend real money once you know.
2. You genuinely want to edit it yourself, often. Some people enjoy it, and some businesses change their offer weekly. If you want to be inside the site at 11pm moving things, you want a dashboard, and we do not build those.
3. Your budget cannot stretch past a few hundred rand a month. Then a builder subscription is the correct answer and there is no shame in it. A cheap site that exists beats an expensive one you cannot afford to maintain.
4. You need a large standard online store, this week. Hundreds of products, standard checkout, standard shipping. Shopify has solved that problem thoroughly and rebuilding it by hand would be us taking your money to reinvent something that already works.

Four times hand-coded is the right call

1. Speed is commercially material. You are paying for traffic, competing on local search, or serving customers on poor connections.
2. The design has to be exactly right. You have a brand worth protecting, and “close enough, within the template’s limits” is not acceptable.
3. The site has to do something specific. A booking flow that matches how you actually schedule, a quoting tool, a portal, an integration with the system you already run.
4. You want it handled, not owned as a project. No dashboard to learn, no plugin updates, no licences to renew. You ask for a change and it happens.

That fourth one is what we sell, and you can see exactly what it includes and what it costs on the services and pricing page. If you already have a site on any of these platforms and simply want to know whether it is holding you back, the free written review will tell you honestly — including “this is fine, leave it alone”, which is an answer we give more often than you would expect.

Common questions