Wix or Squarespace is the right answer if you have the evenings to build the site and finish it, your needs are a few pages and a contact form, and you are happy to be the person who fixes it when a price changes or a page breaks. Hiring someone is the right answer if your time is worth more than the fee, you need bookings or payments that work first time, or you want the Google side handled by someone who does it every week. The real difference is not how the page looks on launch day. It is who does the work in month six.
This guide puts the two builders, a freelance designer and a run-for-you plan side by side on the things that decide the outcome, says plainly where the builders are the better choice, and sets out what to check before you hand money to anyone, us included.
Side by side
| Wix or Squarespace | Freelance designer | Run-for-you plan (how we work) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upfront cost | Nothing, or a template you buy | A one-off build fee | €499 or €1,499 |
| Monthly cost | A subscription, higher on the plans that remove adverts and take payments | Hosting and domain you arrange, plus an hourly rate for changes | €50 or €100, everything in |
| Your time | Evenings and weekends to build, then an hour or two every time something changes | A few meetings, plus writing your text and gathering photos | Ten minutes to send hours, prices and photos, then a WhatsApp when something changes |
| Who fixes it when it breaks | You, with the builder’s help pages and chat support | The designer if you can reach them, at their rate | Us, included |
| Ownership and moving away | You own the domain if you bought it. The design and layout stay with the builder | You own the domain if it was registered in your name. Check the contract | Domain in your name, you keep content and customer data, 30 days’ notice, no exit fee |
| Google set up | Yours to do; the builders give you the tools | Sometimes included, often an extra | Business Profile set up and verified, structured data, sitemap, Search Console |
| Bookings and payments | Built-in or add-on apps with their own monthly fee, plus card processing | Usually a plug-in or a third party system you then run | Included on Complete, or your existing Fresha or Booksy connected |
| .ie domain | Register it with an Irish registrar and connect it; the builders mostly sell other endings | Depends on who registers it and whose name it is in | Registered in your name as part of set up |
On the builder prices: a Wix or Squarespace plan that connects your own domain and removes the adverts costs roughly €12 to €40 a month on an annual plan, more if you pay month to month, and more again for the plans that take payments or add bookings. Squarespace has no free plan, only a trial. Wix has a free plan with Wix adverts and a Wix web address, which is fine for testing and not fine for a business.
Where the builders are the better choice
We are not going to pretend the builders are bad. For a lot of people they are exactly right.
They suit a side business that does not need to be found on Google because the work comes by word of mouth. They suit a photographer who enjoys design, has the eye for it and wants to rearrange the gallery every month. They suit a personal trainer with five clients, a club or society with a committee member who likes this sort of thing, or anyone whose site is a brochure that will not change for years. If you have the time, you like the work and you will actually finish it, a builder site costs less than any other route and you answer to nobody.
The honest test is the last clause. Will you finish it? The builder’s template is done in an evening. The about page, the service pages, the photos, the Google Business Profile, the hours and the privacy page are the months after that, and a half-finished site with placeholder text still on the second page is worse than no site, because people find it.
Where the builders catch people out
The subscription is the small cost. The real cost is the evenings, and then the Saturday morning three years in when the booking app stops syncing and the help article is written for a version of the editor you cannot find.
Add-ons add up. Bookings, a proper shop, email on your domain, a second language and some of the forms are extra apps with extra monthly fees. A site that started on a modest plan can end up costing as much as having it run for you, with you still doing the running.
Nobody is watching Google. The builder gives you the tools to set page titles and connect Search Console. It does not set them. Most builder sites we are shown have the same title on every page and no Business Profile linked, because the owner did not know those were jobs.
Moving away is harder than moving in. As we understand it, Squarespace can export pages and posts in a format WordPress reads, with the design and some content types left behind, and Wix has no full export at all. You keep your domain if you registered it yourself, your text if you saved it somewhere, and your photos. The site itself stays. The guide to moving a website sets out what to do before you cancel.
The .ie domain is a separate job. Neither builder, as far as we know, registers .ie domains directly, so you register one with an Irish registrar, show your connection to Ireland and connect it to the builder yourself. It is not hard, but it is one more thing. See how to register a .ie domain for the steps.
Hiring a freelance designer
A freelancer gives you a site that looks like yours rather than like a template, and you get a person to ring. The cost is higher up front, and the thing to understand is what happens after launch. Many freelancers build and leave. Hosting is in your name or theirs, changes are billed by the hour, and the Google work is included or not depending on who you picked. That is not a criticism; it is a different job from running a site.
The questions worth asking any designer in Ireland are the ones that reveal the month six picture. Whose name is the domain registered in? What does a price change cost after launch, and how long does it take? Is the Google Business Profile part of the job? Is VAT included in the quote? What happens if you stop trading or we want to leave? We have written more on choosing between doing it yourself and hiring in website builder vs web designer, and the fuller picture of what each route costs in Ireland is in how much a website costs.
The run-for-you option
The third route is a designer who also runs the site for a monthly fee: hosting, security, backups, changes when your prices move, and the Google listing watched. It is how we work and how a growing number of small studios work, and it is not for everyone either. You are paying every month for someone else’s time, and that only makes sense if the alternative is your time or a site that quietly rots.
Whatever the plan is called, check three things. The domain must be in your name. The notice period must be short and there must be no exit fee. And the monthly fee must include the running, not just the hosting, or you are back to doing the work yourself with a bill attached.
What we do for clients
Our two plans are built for the owner who wants the site finished, kept right and never thought about. Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month. For that you get a mobile-first site built from our templates, a .ie domain registered to you, hosting, SSL, daily backups and monitoring, a private page where you change hours, prices and photos from your phone, small changes done over WhatsApp, your Business Profile created and verified, and the structured data and question-and-answer content that AI search tools read. Complete is €1,499 to set up and €100 a month. It adds online bookings with deposits, card and Apple Pay payments into your own account, review requests after each visit, a chat assistant trained on your details, email on your domain, and monthly work on the Google listing.
Prices exclude VAT, there is no contract, you can leave with 30 days’ notice and you take the domain, the content and your customer data with you. Dublin clients we meet at the premises; everywhere else starts with a phone or video call and runs the same way afterwards. The full comparison is on the pricing page.