Wix or Google Sites vs. a Custom Website

Most small businesses that ask us about Wix or Google Sites are not asking which builder is better. They are asking whether they have outgrown the one they already use. The honest answer is sometimes no. A builder is a reasonable choice when the site has a small job, the owner has time to maintain it, and nobody needs it to rank for competitive local searches. It stops being reasonable when the site has to win calls from Google, hold several service pages, or connect to booking, payments, or a CRM.

This guide compares the two builders with the two ways we build sites: the $199-per-month managed Starter plan and a custom build. Our prices below are the ones published on our pricing guide. We do not quote Wix prices because Wix changes its plans often. Check Wix's current pricing page before you compare totals.

The four options side by side

The dollar comparison favors the builders. Google Sites is free, and a Wix plan usually costs less per month than our Starter plan. What the builders do not include is labor. With a builder, you are the designer, the copywriter, the SEO, and the person who fixes the form at 9 p.m. The managed plan buys back those hours. The custom build buys you a site shaped around requirements a template cannot hold.

When Google Sites is enough

Google Sites was built for internal team pages, class sites, and project hubs inside Google Workspace. It does that well. It is also a fair choice for a one-page placeholder while you plan a real site, or an event page that will be gone in a month.

It is the wrong tool for a local business that wants to show up in search. You get little say over how pages appear in results, no way to add LocalBusiness structured data, and no way to set redirects when you rename a page. Lead capture means an embedded Google Form, which sits in a frame on the page and is awkward to track as a conversion. If a plumber in Oak Park or a dentist in Lakeview is relying on a Google Sites page to win searches against competitors with real service pages, the platform is the bottleneck.

When Wix is enough, and where it gets expensive

Wix is a real website platform, and its search settings are better than its old reputation. Titles, descriptions, redirects, and basic structured data are all available. An owner who enjoys editing the site, needs a small brochure site, and is not competing hard in search can run a Wix site for years without a problem.

The costs show up in three places:

• Your time. Every page, photo, and fix is yours to make. When a busy season hits and nobody has time for the editor, the posted hours go stale and the menu PDF goes out of date.
• Stacked apps. Bookings, stores, pop-ups, reviews, and chat each add an app, and some add their own fees. Each one can also add weight to the page. Run the homepage through PageSpeed Insights on mobile before you add another.
• No exit. Wix does not let you export a site to another host. If you outgrow it, the move is a rebuild: copy the text and images, rebuild the design, and redirect every old URL. That is manageable for five pages and painful for fifty.

What changes on a managed or custom site

Three of our own projects show where the line sits. None of them is a Wix-to-custom story. They are here because each one shows a different reason a site needs more than a template, or doesn't.

Next Level QC: structure that matches how people search

Next Level QC is a gymnastics, cheer, and tumbling gym in the Quad Cities. Its old site put every program on one generic page, so it could not rank for the separate searches parents actually make. We rebuilt the site with dedicated pages for gymnastics, cheer, tumbling, and the fitness center, each with its own local signals for Bettendorf, Moline, and the wider Quad Cities. In under three months the site went from minimal search coverage to roughly two dozen #1 rankings, and local visibility rose from about 65% to roughly 97%. The case study has the details. The takeaway for a builder site: the gain came from page structure and on-page work, which a builder makes hard to plan and harder to maintain.

Mu Sigma Lambda: requirements a template cannot hold

Mu Sigma Lambda is a national sports fraternity that started with no members and no digital setup. It needed membership registration, recurring dues through Stripe, event coordination across university chapters, and a merchandise store. We built a custom WordPress site with Stripe payments and launched a separate Shopify store. The platform has since onboarded thousands of members across multiple universities. That mix of recurring payments, member data, and a second commerce system is the kind of project that becomes a pile of builder apps and workarounds. See the Mu Sigma Lambda project.

Egg N Curry: when a simple site is the right answer

Egg N Curry, an Indian restaurant with a long menu, needed a clear menu design, location and contact details, and a link into its preferred online ordering platform. We built a simple site around that. No custom application, no stack of integrations. Projects this size are what the $199 Starter plan exists for. A builder could also handle it if the owner has time to keep the menu and hours current. See the Egg N Curry project.

How to move off Wix or Google Sites without losing traffic

A platform move is a migration, not just a new design. The checklist below covers the builder-specific steps. The redesign guide covers the full URL map, tracking plan, and launch checks.

1. Confirm you control the domain. It should be registered to the business, under a login you own. If you bought it through Wix, plan the transfer to another registrar before launch week.
2. Export the evidence. Pull pages and queries from Google Search Console and note which pages bring clicks and form fills.
3. List every live URL. Wix blog posts usually sit under /post/. A Google Sites address that never had a custom domain lives on a sites.google.com path you cannot redirect, so update the links that point to it.
4. Map old URLs to new ones and set 301s on the new host. Once DNS points away from the builder, the builder's redirect settings stop working. Every redirect has to live on the new site. Send each old page to its closest replacement, not the homepage.
5. Copy the content by hand. Neither builder offers a full export, so save text, images, and alt text before you cancel.
6. Rebuild and test the forms. Send a test lead from every form and confirm it reaches the right inbox and records as a conversion.
7. Keep the same Google Analytics property so before-and-after numbers stay comparable.
8. Update the Google Business Profile website link the day the new site goes live. Our Google Business Profile service covers this along with the rest of the listing.
9. Cancel the builder plan last, after the new site has been live and checked for a couple of weeks.

Which one should you pick?

• Google Sites if the page is internal, temporary, or a placeholder, and nobody needs it to rank.
• Wix if you want to do the work yourself, the site is small, and search is not where your customers come from.
• The $199 Starter plan if you need a small, fast, maintained site with search basics done for you and do not want to spend your evenings in an editor.
• A custom build if the site needs several service or location pages, booking, payments, ecommerce, CRM connections, or a design that a preset cannot cover.

Not sure which bucket you are in? The website cost calculator gives a rough range in a couple of minutes. Or send your current Wix or Google Sites URL through the project form. We will tell you whether to stay, move to a managed plan, or scope a custom build, along with the URLs that need redirects if you move. You can also review the web design service first.