Website builder or web designer for a builder: Wix, Squarespace, a Checkatrade profile, or a site you own

For a builder, a website builder such as Wix or Squarespace is a fair start when you have a handful of finished jobs to show and an evening a week to keep the site up, and a web designer earns the fee once you want a page for each kind of job and each town you work in, kept for years. The difference that matters most is what you keep if you leave: Wix says its sites have to run on its own servers, Squarespace exports only part of a site, a Checkatrade profile was never yours, and the free website Google used to attach to Business Profiles was switched off in 2024. Whichever route you take, register the domain in your own name first.

Four routes, and what each leaves you holding

The free Google website that was switched off

For years a Google Business Profile could generate a basic website at a business.site address, and for some small firms it was the only site they had. Google turned those websites off in March 2024. Its help page at the time said visitors to an old address would be redirected to the Business Profile until 10 June 2024 and would see a "Page not found" error after that, and business.site addresses were taken out of the profile's website field. People still go looking for it: "google business profile website builder" turns up among the searches in this site's own Search Console.

The lesson is not about Google in particular. A website a platform gives you lasts exactly as long as the platform wants it to, and when it goes, every van livery, business card and directory listing that carried the address points at nothing. Any builder still printing a business.site address has a job to do this week.

Leaving a platform: what we found moving a garage off Wix

A tuning garage we moved off Wix went live on its new site on 7 October 2026. Weeks later its www address was still presenting a security certificate the old platform had issued in August, although the domain's DNS pointed at our server and the domain sat in no Wix account we could find. It took a support case, opened on 2 November, to chase it, and at the time of writing, on 3 November, the case is still open; the old certificate has to be gone before it expires on 12 November. A move off a website builder is not finished when the new site loads. Check the certificate on both the www address and the bare domain, and keep checking until both show the new one.

What a website builder does well, said fairly

Wix and Squarespace are quick, cheap to start and good enough to put five real jobs, your towns and a phone number in front of a homeowner who has been given your name. For a one-van firm in its first year that is most of what a website needs to do, and we would rather a builder had that than nothing, or a Facebook page as the link on the Google profile.

Where they cost a builder is time and structure. The pages that win extension and loft searches are a page per job, with your own photographs and the towns in the captions, and the reasons a site goes quiet without them are in our guide to why builder websites get no enquiries. Someone has to write those pages, size the photographs for a phone, keep the speed up and add a project every month. On a website builder that someone is you, in the evenings, and the platform is rarely what holds a builder's site back: what is on it, or missing from it, does.

Which route, in which year

1. Before anything else: register the domain in your own name, at a registrar you can log into, with an email address you control. Whoever builds the site gets access, never ownership.
2. First year, fewer than ten finished jobs photographed: the Google Business Profile set up properly, because it is free and it brings the town's searches, plus a simple site on a website builder on your own domain.
3. Ten or more jobs photographed and you want the extension and loft searches: a site with a page per kind of job and per town you work in, built so that you own the code and can host it anywhere.
4. Already on Wix or Squarespace and it brings work: do not move for the sake of it, add the job pages first. If you do move, list every page that shows in Search Console, keep those addresses or redirect them, and check the certificates on both versions of the domain after the switch.
5. The platform profile: keep it while it pays, with its website link pointing at your own site.

Five questions to ask any web designer before you sign

• Whose name is the domain registered in, and can I log into the registrar myself?
• Can I take the site to another host, and in what form do I get it?
• Who owns the words and the photographs once the site is live?
• What happens to my email if I stop paying for hosting?
• Is there a minimum term, and what does leaving cost?

A designer who answers all five in writing is selling you a website. One who cannot is selling a subscription with your logo on it, whatever the contract calls it.

Our own answers are on the website design for builders page: the domain in your name and the site yours from the day it goes live. If you already have a site on a builder platform, the free score check on this site grades it in about a minute, and the quote form gets you a plain answer on whether to fix it or move it.