I frequently recommend Wix to freelance clients who just need a basic site. Once they set it up, it basically keeps going for years and years, which is not true of most other stacks, including Wordpress. It's an easy service from a single vendor, so no need to deal with different hosting/CDN/SSL/etc providers. I think it's a wonderful thing for clients with simpler needs.

The benefit for clients is that they can pay you once, for a few hours, to help them set it up (if they even need that)... and then they basically don't need you anymore. I've "lost" several happy clients this way, but I'd rather they just use that service than waste their money on a developer they don't really need. It's very easy to use, reliable, and cheap. And they have a single vendor to go for any sort of support they might need for their website.

In contrast to many of the over-engineered Next.js or Gatsby sites I've seen, Wix is far, FAR easier to maintain and I get pretty much zero complaints about it after initial setup. All the other stacks I've ever made for clients, whether they were in Next, React, Angular, vanilla HTML, Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, other CMSes... all became a maintenance headache after 2-3 years, and usually obsolete, unusable, and completely rewritten within 4-5. Not so with the Wix sites; they just keep going year after year and the client never worries about it again, logging in to post an occasional update every week or so but otherwise letting it do its thing.

I wouldn't choose to use it for a personal project anything more advanced than a personal blog or a very simple marketing site. But it's fine for what it is, and the web is better off for having services like this for regular people to choose from. Not everything needs a super-heavy JS frontend.

If you want something that just works for years and years, static sites are fantastic for that. Hugo is what I use for my astrophotography blog and it's blazing fast and...well...static

It's not about what I (as a web dev) need, but what works for "halp, I need a website" clients who don't know anything about tech. Hugo still implies the need for a build setup and hosting, which in turn means DNS, SSL, CLI, etc. Which often means more dev time. Your average yoga teacher or restaurant or nonprofit would have no idea how to deal with all that (and they shouldn't have to). That's why the page builders are better for them, IMO.

At some point you'll want to upgrade the hugo generator, and then you'll need to wade through their release logs. I neglected my personal site for years and I had to hunt down various errors and deprecations. It's out of reach for non-developers to do. A 1.x compatibility promise would go a long way.

My wife's site runs on Squarespace, and she's been self-sufficient since it was set up.

As an agency owner, we don't use these tools regularly but we have clients who do, and we support them. As far as the domains, they are a registrar like any other. You can transfer the domains away or to them like any other registrar. This means that the customer "owns" it for the period of time it is registered for with an accredited registrar. The web builder companies do not own it on your behalf.

There are no real SEO penalties, but as with any web property, you have to do the work to get all the SEO working as you want.

As far as benefits for developers, give me an open source tool any day that I can improve on, extend, or mess up with sketchy coding. These tools are meant for consumers to build their own sites for the most part. They represent the initial commodification of "get a website". They are more difficult and/or expensive to extend than a tool like WordPress, Laravel, Hugo, etc. And they are walled gardens, which means they are difficult to migrate away from.

What platforms do you typically use?

Thanks. Yeah, that’s good to know that there’s nothing shady going on with the domains. It does seem very inexpensive when you factor in the domain and hosting, so I was curious if there’s any drawbacks.

It's extremely expensive. At $17 or $21 a month which works out to $250 a year you could go to a million other places. For $5 dollars a month wordpress will include a domain and 6 gigs. Hostinger is $2.99 with domain.

Wix doesn't let you move your files.

Good point about the files. Wix is a walled garden.

But cost wise, $20 a month is nothing. The first time they run into a WordPress security, theme, or extension issue, they'll spend more than a year's worth of Wix hosting to hire a dev to fix it.

> Wix doesn't let you move your files.

That's skeezy behaviour on Wix's part.

BUT

hope you're not using your web host as the only copy of "your files". You should never _need_ to "move your files" away from Wix.

We started with SquareSpace just for a quick website and the ability to make quick updates, try different things, etc etc.

It was fairly inexpensive, squarespace doesn't "own" your domain.

We ended up going to webflow which, though a bit complicated to set-up, is much more flexible and you "design" your own site.

I'm a former webdev, both of these platforms are probably better than handrolling these days.

Squarespace is a great balance between having no website at all and WordPress.

Wix is overly complicated bloat, and you are better off just using WordPress if you need the bells and whistles or Squarespace if you don't.

What did you find overly complicated about Wix compared to Squarespace? (I don't have a dog in either race... started with Squarespace, but clients found Wix easier to use over time. Maybe that balance has shifted again recently?)

Compared to Wordpress, though, either is much simpler because they're fundamentally site builders as opposed to CMSes. With Wordpress you really have to think about concepts like "schema" and try to understand posts vs pages vs comments, and it gets way more complicated once you start adding in page-builder plugins or ACF or SEO optimizers or performance enhancements... Wordpress is way more powerful (and thus complex, buggy, and expensive in dollars and time) than any of the "build your own website" services, Wix or Squarespace.

I've setup a test website for my father's business. We own the domain which was bought separately and we just point it to the servers for our WordPress plan (I didn't want to be bothered with self-hosting). The main reason to go with WordPress was setting up WooCommerce to start selling some stuff online to augment the main business. I can't say I enjoy the experience of getting the look and feel right, and it hasn't really changed in twenty years. It's as enjoyable as formatting a Word document.

The domains do seem to be yours, since both services let you transfer the domain away:

https://support.wix.com/en/article/transferring-your-wix-dom...

https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/205812338-...

As far as I know, their SEO is fine, though they'll usually do worse in things like page speed than a site built from the ground up. I don't recall any sites my previous employers built with said services struggling to rank in Google.

As for whether they'd be recommended? Well to be honest, I'd say only for small companies and individuals who need the most basic of websites and don't fancy paying very much for it. For a client in that situation, you may as well just throw together a quick site on one of these services, change a few images and colours and call it a day. At least then they won't keep coming to you for web hosting help or updates.

I use Typedream. Pretty happy with the results. Squarespace was just too inflexible (in my opinion). Didn't try Wix. Any of the point-click tools, you give up a bit of creative freedom for the time-to-value & ease of maintenance.

One data point I have discovered: many organizations block wix.com by default, because it's popular with phishing actors who mock up Google/Apple/Microsoft logins on free accounts and Wix has been relatively slow to take those down.

Paid Wix sites usually have their own domain and aren't on xxxx.wix.com.

But they still use Wix CDNs like wixstatic.com and parastorage.com. I wonder if those are blocked too...

Squarespace is fine. We've been talking about replacing it for almost a decade now at my org, but it's easy to edit and relatively cheap so we keep it. Domain is registered separately.

Mongo in (British? West country which happens to retain relatively more Saxonism and other Germanic influence?) English too actually, or more often 'mong', but it's not prevalent enough that I've made the link before.

I have a guy doing some construction work for me right now and when he found out I write software he asked if I could help him out with a website.

"Ehh I don't really do that kind of software..."

If I was to give this guy a simple marketing site, that he can take to go host on his own, that I can hopefully vibe-code into existence, what should I use?

I mean, I know how to do this stuff, but handing him a node package seems wrong.

A no-code website builder, 100%. You don't want to maintain that thing. A good builder (I like framer) let's non technical people take ownership over it while still providing flexibility in UI and high speed (for SEO & bounce rate). After seeing landing pages that non tech friends have built, there's no way I'd do it from scratch. Too buggy and time consuming.

Maybe you can look at squarespace templates together, you help him obtain a domain, set it up, connect email, create the initial site for him, show him how to make changes.

These are trivial for us but for him would be a great starter and timesaver.

Consider https://www.framer.com/