Short answer: if you have a simple business, decent photos, and the patience to maintain it yourself, Squarespace is a reasonable choice. Wix is similar but messier under the hood. A custom site wins when speed, search visibility, or specific features matter, or when you would rather hand the whole thing to someone and get on with running your business. The price gap is smaller than most people think.
Who should build it themselves
You are a good DIY candidate if all of these are true:
- You need five pages or fewer and none of them do anything complicated.
- You already have good photos, or you are willing to take them.
- You will actually log in and update hours, menus, and photos when they change.
- You are fine paying a subscription every year for as long as the site exists.
If that is you, pick Squarespace, choose a template with restraint, and resist the urge to add every block. Plenty of island artists and small shops run perfectly good Squarespace sites.
Where templates break
I get called in to fix template sites more often than to build from scratch, and the problems are the same every time.
Speed. Template platforms load a large amount of code you are not using. On a phone standing on Straight Wharf with one bar of signal, that difference is the difference between a customer reading your menu and giving up.
Search visibility. Templates can rank, but the defaults are generic. Page titles, descriptions, image alt text, and structured data are often left as placeholders, and Google treats a placeholder like an empty page. I cover the fix in my local SEO guide for Nantucket businesses.
Seasonal logic. Nantucket businesses change hours constantly between Daffodil weekend and Stroll. Templates make you edit hours in three places by hand. A custom site can pull hours from one source, including your Google Business Profile.
Features. Rental calendars that sync with Airbnb, charter deposits, gallery inventory with sold markers, member logins. Templates handle these with third-party plugins that cost extra and break on updates.
Design ceiling. Every Squarespace site looks like a Squarespace site. That is fine until your competitor's does too.
What custom actually buys
A custom site is not a mysterious thing. It is a small set of files written for your business specifically, hosted somewhere fast, with nothing in it you do not need. In practice you get:
- Pages that load in under a second on a phone.
- Metadata and structured data written for the searches your customers make.
- Exactly the features you need and no plugin roulette.
- Ownership. You get the files. There is no platform to be locked into.
The trade-off is that you are not going to drag and drop a new page yourself at midnight. For most owners that is a relief, not a loss. For content that changes often, like a menu or a blog, a custom site can still give you a simple editing method.
The cost comparison people get wrong
The sticker price of Squarespace looks low because it is spread over years.
| Option | Year one | Five-year total |
|---|---|---|
| Squarespace Business plan plus domain and email | About $600 to $1,200 | About $3,000 to $6,000 |
| Custom starter site with hosting | About $2,000 to $2,600 | About $2,600 to $5,000 |
| Custom full project with photography | About $2,500 to $5,000 | About $3,000 to $6,500 |
The custom starter site is often the cheapest option over five years, and it is faster and better for search from day one. See how much a website costs on Nantucket for the full breakdown.
Migration reality
If you already have a Squarespace or Wix site, moving is not scary. Your domain moves with you. Your content can be exported or rebuilt. The important part is keeping your existing page addresses working or redirecting them so you do not lose whatever search ranking you have earned. I rebuilt Evelyn Hudson's fine art site this way, and it went live without losing a single indexed page.
My honest recommendation
Small, simple, and self-maintained? Squarespace. Anything that sells, books, or needs to be found? Build it custom, get real photos, and own it. If you are not sure which you are, send me a note and I will tell you plainly, even if the answer is a template.
