Wix vs a web agency: the real 3-year cost for a UK small business

Over three years, a typical small business site on Wix costs roughly £1,000 to £1,300 in subscription, domain and apps, plus 60 or more hours of your own time. A comparable site built by a UK web agency at our prices costs roughly £2,000 to £2,300 over the same period, including the build, hosting and some developer support, and about a fifth of your time. So Wix usually wins on cash. An agency wins when your hours are worth more than about £20 each, when Google is where new customers come from, or when you need bookings, payments or integrations that Wix charges extra for. The numbers, and the honest exceptions, are below.

The assumptions behind the numbers

Comparisons like this are easy to rig. Here is exactly what we compared: an eight to ten page website for a service business, say a physiotherapy clinic in Bristol or an accountant in Leeds. Home page, about page, five or six service pages, contact page with a form, a blog, a gallery and a map. Not an online shop; we cover shops further down.

All prices are rounded and were correct to the best of our knowledge in autumn 2026. Wix changes its plan names and prices fairly often, so check the current Wix UK pricing page before you decide.

The Wix scenario

• A Wix premium plan suitable for a business site, billed annually. The plans most small businesses use sit somewhere around £10 to £30 a month in the UK, with a top business tier costing much more. We used £22 a month.
• Domain free for the first year with an annual plan, then around £15 to £20 a year to renew.
• One or two paid apps (reviews, better forms, booking or an extra integration) averaging about £10 a month.
• Your time: about 30 hours to plan, write, find images and build, then about an hour a month adding posts, fixing layouts and updating details.

The agency scenario

• Our Pro Website package: 10 pages with a CMS, five custom banners, eight stock images, a dedicated project manager and full deployment, delivered in two to three weeks, for £750 + VAT.
• Good managed WordPress hosting from a UK host at about £15 a month (reputable hosts range from about £10 to £30).
• A domain at about £15 a year.
• Six hours a year of developer time for updates, small changes and checks, at our WordPress rate of £50 an hour.
• Your time: about 10 hours providing content, giving feedback and signing off, then a few hours a year.

Three years of costs, side by side

On these figures, Wix is roughly £1,050 cheaper over three years. You spend about 50 more hours on it. If your time is worth £20 an hour, those 50 hours are worth £1,000 and the two options are level. If you are a solicitor billing £150 an hour or a tradesperson who could do one more job on a Saturday, the agency is cheaper in any meaningful sense.

The VAT point people miss

Agency prices, including ours, are quoted excluding VAT. Wix’s consumer prices are shown including VAT. If you are VAT-registered you will usually reclaim the VAT on the agency invoice and the comparison above holds. If you are not registered, add 20 % to the agency build and support figures. That moves the agency total to roughly £2,560, and the break-even rate for your time to around £27 an hour.

What if your budget is tighter?

Our Startup Website package is £350 + VAT for five pages, three custom banners, five stock photos and a Google-friendly sitemap. Add the CMS (£149) and mobile responsive layouts (£99) and it is £598 + VAT. Swap that in and cut support to three hours a year, and the three-year agency total drops to around £1,630, within a few hundred pounds of Wix.

What if you need online bookings?

This is where the gap closes fast. A Wix site that takes bookings with deposits typically needs a higher plan, and often a separate booking app or scheduling tool on top. Over three years that can add several hundred pounds. Our Elite Website package at £999 + VAT includes bookings, payments and custom forms in the build, with no monthly app fee beyond your payment provider’s charges. If deposits and no-shows are your problem, read our guide to booking systems with Stripe deposits.

The differences a cost table cannot show

Ownership

Wix does not let you export a working site. You own your words, images and domain, but the website itself only exists on Wix. Stop paying, or decide to move, and you rebuild. A WordPress site we build is yours: files, database, theme and all. You can move it to any host or any developer, including one who is not us. Over three years that may not matter. Over seven or eight, it usually does.

Speed and search

Wix has improved a lot, and Wix sites do rank, particularly for less competitive searches. The limit is control. A builder has to carry code for features you are not using, and you cannot always strip it out. We hand-build classic WordPress themes without page builders and target Lighthouse 95+ on every template. On a quiet local search that difference may never show. In a competitive market, say “family solicitor Manchester”, it is one of the few levers you control. More on this in Core Web Vitals explained.

Design

Wix templates are well made, which is the problem: plenty of businesses in your town use the same ones. When a customer has three tabs open comparing you with two competitors, looking established matters. A custom design built around your services and customers does that better than a template with your logo swapped in.

Accessibility

Under the Equality Act 2010 your site should be usable by disabled customers. Wix gives you tools, but whether the finished site is accessible depends on how it is built and filled. We build every template to WCAG 2.2 AA. See website accessibility in the UK for what that involves.

Who fixes it when it breaks

On Wix, you are the developer. When the contact form stops sending emails on a Friday afternoon, it is you and the help centre. With an agency there is a named person with a phone number. Ours is answered in St Albans.

Quick comparison

When Wix is the right choice

We would rather tell you this than sell you something you do not need. Wix, or Squarespace, makes sense when:

• you are testing an idea and may not be trading in twelve months;
• your total budget is a few hundred pounds and genuinely cannot stretch;
• you like building things and have evenings free;
• the site is a digital business card and most of your work comes from referrals.

If that is you, use it well: pick a plain template, write clear service descriptions, put your phone number at the top of every mobile page and add your Google Business Profile.

When an agency pays for itself

An agency-built site usually earns back the difference when:

• most new customers find you through Google rather than word of mouth;
• one customer is worth hundreds or thousands of pounds, so one or two extra enquiries a year covers the gap;
• you need bookings, deposits, multiple languages, a client area or a link to your CRM;
• you want something that lasts five years without a rebuild;
• you would rather spend your evenings on the business.

A quick way to check: if the average customer is worth £500 in profit, the agency route needs two or three extra enquiries over three years, converted at a normal rate, to pay for itself. Most service businesses we work with need far fewer than that to see a return.

AI website builders are now sold as a third route. We compared those separately in AI website builders vs a web agency.

Moving from Wix to WordPress

If you have outgrown Wix, the move is straightforward but needs care. Because Wix does not export a working site, we rebuild the design in WordPress and move your text and images across. The part that matters most is 301 redirects: every old Wix URL is mapped to its new address so Google passes on the rankings you have earned. Wix uses some URL patterns, such as blog post paths, that differ from WordPress, so this needs a proper list, not guesswork. Switching the domain is the last step, so there is no downtime.

A typical Wix-to-WordPress migration of a ten-page site fits within our Pro Website package. Larger sites with a long blog archive are usually quoted by the hour.

Our recommendation

If you are pre-revenue or testing an idea, start on Wix and spend the money on getting customers. Once your website is a real source of enquiries, or you need it to take bookings and payments, move to a site you own. That is usually the point where the three-year sums tip the other way.

To compare options, see our fixed-price packages from £350 to £2,650 + VAT, or book hours online for something specific: website design is £45 an hour and WordPress development £50 an hour, plus VAT, and hours never expire. We work with businesses across the UK, remotely or in person in London and the Home Counties. Our web development service page explains how a project runs. Still unsure whether you need a website at all? Read does a new business need a website?

Photo: Vitaly Gariev via Unsplash