What to Consider Before Hiring a Web Designer: Which Website Platform Is Right for Your Business?
You’ve found a few web designers you like, started looking through their services, and suddenly realized they’re all recommending completely different ways to build your website. One designer exclusively uses Squarespace, another swears by Showit, someone else works in Wix Studio, and another tells you WordPress is the only way to build a “real” website.
If you don’t build websites for a living, how the hell are you supposed to know who’s right?
The truth is, there isn’t one website platform that’s best for every small business. Squarespace, Wix, Showit, and WordPress can all be used to create great websites, but they have different strengths, limitations, and approaches to things like design, functionality, maintenance, and scalability. The right choice depends much more on what your business actually needs than which platform happens to be trending among web designers right now.
This is also something I think your website designer should be able to explain to you. “This is the platform I use” isn’t really an answer to “Why is this the right platform for my business?” If you’re investing thousands of dollars in a custom website, you should understand why it’s being built the way it is, what you’ll be able to do with it after launch, and whether it has room to grow with your business.
So, let’s talk about four of the website builders you’re most likely to encounter when hiring a web designer for your small business: Squarespace, Wix, Showit, and WordPress.
Squarespace: Best for small businesses that want design, functionality, and easy management
Full disclosure: I’m a Squarespace website designer, so obviously I have a favorite here. But I design primarily in Squarespace because it works incredibly well for the kinds of small businesses I work with, not because I think every website on the internet belongs there.
For many service-based small businesses, Squarespace hits a really nice middle ground between custom website design, business functionality, and ease of ownership. I can create something that feels completely specific to a client’s brand while still handing them a website they can reasonably understand and update after we’re finished working together. That last part is especially important to me because I don’t think you should need your website designer on retainer just to change a photo, update your services, or add a new page.
Squarespace can also handle considerably more than I think it sometimes gets credit for. Depending on the needs of the business, it can support blogging, portfolios, e-commerce, appointment scheduling, payments, digital products, memberships, customer accounts, email marketing, and other business functionality. That means a business can start with a relatively simple small business website and add functionality as it grows instead of paying upfront for every feature it might need five years from now.
That’s a big part of how I approach Squarespace website design. Maybe right now you need a five-page service website, a portfolio, and an inquiry form. In a year or two, you might want to add booking, sell a digital product, expand your services, or create another revenue stream. I’d rather build a strong foundation now and have a plan for how we can expand it later than make your website unnecessarily complicated from day one.
Of course, Squarespace isn’t the answer to everything. If a business needs highly unusual application-level functionality or extensive custom development, I’m not going to try to force that business into Squarespace just because it’s the platform I prefer. But for many service-based small businesses, I think it offers an excellent balance between a custom-feeling website, useful business tools, scalability, and the ability to actually manage what you own.
WIX: Best for businesses that want a lot of design flexibility and built-in tools
Wix deserves more credit than its old reputation sometimes gives it. If your mental image of Wix is a clunky DIY website someone threw together ten years ago, the platform has changed considerably. Wix Studio gives professional web designers much more control over layouts, responsive behavior, custom breakpoints, CSS, and the overall visual experience, while Wix itself offers a large collection of built-in business tools.
That flexibility can be a major advantage in the hands of a designer who knows the platform well, but it’s also one of the reasons I would pay particular attention to how a Wix website is being built.
Wix Studio gives designers granular control over how a website behaves across different screen sizes. That can create really interesting layouts and give a designer a lot of freedom, but more control also means more opportunities for inconsistency if responsive behavior isn’t handled carefully. Elements can be adjusted specifically for desktop, tablet, and mobile, so I would want to know that the designer is thinking about those experiences throughout the entire project rather than designing an elaborate desktop website first and figuring out mobile afterward.
For many small businesses, a significant amount of website traffic will come from people using their phones. Your website needs to work just as thoughtfully on a small screen as it does in the beautiful desktop mockup you approved during the design process. If I were hiring a Wix designer, I would specifically ask how they approach responsive website design, how thoroughly they test different screen sizes, and what happens to that system once I start making my own updates.
That doesn’t mean Wix websites can’t be fantastic on mobile. They absolutely can. It means the flexibility of the platform makes the skill and process of the designer particularly important.
Good to know: Wix is an Israeli company headquartered in Tel Aviv. If the ownership or location of companies you financially support is something you consider when making purchasing decisions, that may be relevant information when choosing your website platform.
Showit: Best for highly visual and brand-forward businesses
If you’ve spent any time looking at websites for photographers, wedding professionals, creative studios, or other visually driven businesses, you’ve probably come across Showit, whether you realized it or not. There’s a reason designers who care deeply about visual expression are drawn to it. Showit gives designers a lot of freedom over layout and composition, which makes it possible to create websites that feel editorial, artistic, and deeply connected to a brand.
For a business whose website is primarily there to showcase work, communicate a strong visual identity, and generate inquiries, that can be a great fit. A photographer, for example, may care far more about having a beautiful portfolio experience and a strong inquiry path than having a website that manages several different parts of the business behind the scenes.
Where I would start asking more questions is when the website needs to take on more functionality.
Showit can connect with outside business tools, and its blogging system uses WordPress behind the scenes. E-commerce and other functionality can also be incorporated through third-party platforms and integrations. That gives you plenty of options, but depending on what you need your website to do, you may end up managing several different systems to create the complete experience.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Plenty of businesses intentionally use specialized tools for different parts of their operations. The important thing is understanding that setup before you invest in the website. Ask your designer which features are native to the platform, which will require another service, what those additional services cost, and what you’ll be responsible for maintaining once the website is yours.
Showit is a good example of why I don’t think choosing a website platform should come down to which one produces the coolest-looking portfolio. A beautiful website is important, but you also need to understand what’s happening underneath the design and whether that setup makes sense for the way your business actually operates.
WordPress: Best for businesses that genuinely need maximum flexibility
WordPress is probably the platform on this list with the biggest range of possibilities. Because WordPress is open-source software, it can be extended with themes, plugins, custom code, and different hosting setups to create everything from a relatively straightforward small business website to something much more technically complex. If your business has highly specific functionality that can’t easily be handled by an all-in-one website builder, that flexibility can be a very good reason to choose WordPress.
The tradeoff is that all of that flexibility can come with more responsibility. A WordPress website may involve separate hosting, themes, plugins, updates, backups, security, and ongoing compatibility between different pieces of the site. The exact experience also depends heavily on how your website designer or developer chooses to build it. Two businesses can both say they have a “WordPress website” while having completely different setups behind the scenes.
This is where I think small business owners need to ask more questions before assuming WordPress is automatically the more professional or powerful choice. I’ve talked to business owners who invested thousands of dollars in WordPress websites only to realize later that they weren’t comfortable maintaining them without their original designer. If your website requires professional help every time you need to make a relatively simple change, that ongoing relationship and expense should be something you understand before choosing the platform, not something you discover six months after launch.
That doesn’t make WordPress a bad choice. For a business that genuinely needs extensive customization or more complex functionality, the additional flexibility may be completely worth it. My issue is when a relatively straightforward small business website gets built on a complicated setup simply because that’s the platform the designer prefers to use. Sometimes we’re making a small business website way more complicated than it needs to be.
I have enough feelings about this particular subject that I wrote an entire article about whether WordPress is good for small businesses and why I often recommend a simpler setup instead. The short version is that I think the technology behind your website should match the actual needs of your business. More complicated doesn’t automatically mean better.
So, which website builder is best for your small business?
I wouldn’t start by asking which platform is best. I’d start by asking what your business actually needs.
Think about what your website needs to accomplish today and what you can realistically see yourself adding over the next few years. Consider how often your services, pricing, team, portfolio, or content will change and whether you want to make those updates yourself. Think about whether you want most of your website functionality living in one ecosystem or whether you’re comfortable managing several connected tools. Most importantly, ask whether you genuinely need complicated custom functionality or whether you’re being sold a more complicated website than your business actually requires.
Once you understand those things, choosing between Squarespace, Wix, Showit, WordPress, or another website builder becomes a much more useful conversation.
When you’re interviewing potential web designers, I would ask them directly: Why are you recommending this platform for my business, and what happens if my website needs to do more in a few years?
A good web designer should be able to explain why their recommendation makes sense for your business instead of simply telling you that it’s the platform they always use.
I’m a big believer in starting with what a business actually needs and adding functionality as it grows. You don’t need to pay today for every feature you might want five years from now, but you also don’t want to discover a year from now that the website you just invested in has nowhere to go. Ideally, you’re choosing both a platform and a designer that can meet your business where it is today while leaving you room to grow into whatever comes next.
Looking for a Squarespace website designer?
This is exactly why I build most of my client websites in Squarespace. For the small businesses I work with, it gives me the flexibility to create a custom Squarespace website that actually feels like the business behind it, while giving the owner something they can understand, update, and continue building on after launch.
My approach to Squarespace website design starts with figuring out what your business actually needs the website to do now, where you’re hoping to take the business next, and how your customers need to experience it along the way. From there, we can build what makes sense today and create a path for adding more when you’re ready.
Explore Custom Squarespace Website Design →
This article is part of The Small Business Guide to Hiring a Web Designer. You can also read 5 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Hiring a Web Designer, The Different Types of Web Designers and How to Choose the Right One, and Why I Hate WordPress for Most Small Business Websites.
