Thinking about building your own Horwich business website with Wix, Squarespace, or GoDaddy? Here is the honest comparison — what you get, what you give up, and when a professionally built WordPress site is the smarter choice.
Short answer: for a Horwich business that wants to rank on Google and convert local customers, a professionally built WordPress site wins every time. Here's why.
An honest look at the main options available to Horwich businesses in 2025.
Fine for a hobby. Not competitive for a Horwich business in a market with real search volume.
Better design than Wix but still rented, still template-based, still weak for aggressive local SEO.
The weakest option for SEO. Widespread in Horwich. Easy to outrank with a properly built WordPress site.
The right choice for any Horwich business that wants to rank, convert, and own their digital presence long-term.
Website builders are marketed on low monthly prices that feel affordable. The hidden cost is what you never build.
A Wix site on the Business plan costs around £17/month — £204/year. After five years that is over £1,000 spent on a platform you do not own, a site that looks like thousands of others, and a URL that has never ranked for anything competitive in Horwich because the SEO limitations made it impossible.
A £149.99 WordPress site from Mako Digital costs less in year one than Wix costs in year one. It is bespoke, you own it outright, and it is built to rank. In year two you are paying only hosting. The ROI comparison is not close.
We believe in being straight with people. A website builder is adequate if: you need a temporary placeholder with no SEO ambition, you are testing a business idea before investing, or your business genuinely has no local competition and any online presence will do.
For any Horwich business that wants to rank in local search, compete with established competitors, and convert online visitors into customers — a website builder is not the right tool.
It depends on your goals. If you need a simple placeholder site and have no intention of ranking on Google, a website builder might be adequate. If you want your Horwich business to appear in local search results, generate enquiries, and compete with established local competitors, a professionally built WordPress site will outperform any website builder in every measurable way.
Wix is a hosted, closed platform — you rent it monthly, cannot fully own the underlying code, and are constrained in what SEO customisation you can do. WordPress is self-hosted, fully owned, and gives you complete control over every technical SEO element. In a competitive local market like Horwich, that SEO flexibility is the difference between ranking and not ranking.
Yes. We regularly migrate businesses from Wix, Squarespace, and GoDaddy to WordPress. Full content migration, proper 301 redirects to protect any existing rankings, and a bespoke new build that performs better on every metric. You end up owning something rather than renting it.
A website builder costs £150–£400 per year in perpetuity — you are paying forever and you own nothing. A one-page WordPress site from Mako Digital costs £149.99 once, plus hosting at around £5–15/month. Within 12 months you are paying less than most website builder plans, and you own the site outright.
No. We provide a full handover walkthrough at launch so you can update content, add pages, and make routine changes without needing us. WordPress has a straightforward admin interface that most business owners pick up quickly. You are never locked out of your own site.
Already on Wix, Squarespace, or GoDaddy? We migrate you to WordPress with full content migration and SEO protection. Or start fresh from £149.99.
Related: Web Design Horwich • WordPress Developer Horwich • Website Cost Horwich • Horwich Web Design Agency