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Ask HN: Are Squarespace and Wix sites worth it?
I’ve been involved in web dev in different forms for 20 years, but I’ve never done anything with these types of websites.

My questions are:

* When you register a domain with them, is the domain legally yours?

* Are there any SEO penalties for using these apps to build websites? Does anyone own a website or client site hosted on Squarespace or similar that’s ranking high on Google?

I can see the benefit for developers but I’m wondering about the benefits for clients.

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.
I recently moved two sites from GoDaddy's predatory WordPress offering (they were charging $1k a year just for some security add-on) to use Hugo + DecapCMS + AWS Amplify. Decap is a fantastic "good enough" CMS to do anything clients of this size need, the only downside is it takes about 1 minute to deploy any changes. Amplify let's you lock a version of Hugo to use, or bring your own, and it will build and deploy your site on any new commit if your repo is in Github or Gitlab. Both clients are currently billed $0.51 per month, and the only reason it is that high is because Route53 costs $0.50 per month per hosted zone. So both these clients went from paying nearly $3k each year for a WordPress site to paying just over $6 a year for a site with nearly the same functionality and none of the maintenance or security concerns. And once everything is all set up, which honestly is not that hard, the only "tech" they need to know is how to sign into Gitlab, which are the credentials they use to log into their Decap admin.
I mean, yes, that sort of setup is less fragile than someone's clobbered-together homebrewed site, but it still requires a dev to maintain. What happens to your client's site if you or they can't maintain the dev-client relationship anymore, for any reason? They'd have to find another dev willing to take over that setup from you.

That sort of thing sounds great for an agency managing multiple sites running off the same template and framework, but for freelancers, it's still too bespoke to be easily portable between clients, hosts, and other freelancers. If someone came to me with a stack like that (and they have), I'd offer to help them migrate it to a more standard setup like Wordpress or Wix for a one-time cost, after which they would pay the vendor directly. But otherwise I wouldn't want to be responsible for maintaining it, especially for just one or two clients.

It's just way too much setup and maintenance. The AWS setup time would itself cost (in dev hours) a month or two's worth of hosting, and Hugo updates or DecapCMS changes would take even more time. Even if the costs to me were $6 a year, the dev hours required to keep a site like that going would far surpass what it would cost them to just pay $20 a month for a vendor-hosted + managed system.

It also introduces multiple points of failure, and if I were hit by a bus or something went wrong while I was on vacation, they'd have no idea if they need to talk to their web host, their CDN, AWS, DecapCMS, Github, or me... they probably don't need to talk to me at all (nothing I can do about any of those services if they have an outage), but they will have no support outside of me.

I don't have anything against self-hosted setups like that for the right audience — I have many such ones myself — but I think they're way more trouble than they're worth for clients who aren't already web-savvy.

I work for another headless CMS (not Decap) and I frequently have to try to help customers who inherited an old site from another agency who didn't properly explain what a headless system is, and they get really frustrated because they end up having to pay a few hundred dollars to a third-party dev just to add a new article category or whatever. It's the kind of thing that would take them ten minutes on Wix/Squarespace/Wordpress, but requires a dev for a stack like you're recommending, and it'd take anywhere from a few minutes (if it's a common stack, like Next/Astro + Vercel) to several hours/days (anything more than 2-3 years old, especially). That will far, far exceed the time and money it takes to host for several years on any of the standard consumer platforms.

For some of these sites, even the original developer who first made them for the first owner didn't want to take them on again — they knew how much work it would be to update them to a usable state again (but that's usually more Gatsby than Hugo).

I'd be very, very wary of recommending such a stack to anyone who is not working with an agency or is already themselves a developer.

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.

I used to run my personal website on Hugo but after a few years I wanted to upgrade the Hugo version and was suddenly out in the cold - there was no real path to upgrade, everything only works together once and as soon as I started upgrading, there was mismatch between the generator, the theme, and whatever widgets I used.

Moved to wordpress.com since that. No more worry about keeping things working, I can focus on the content. Admittedly, the horrible load times of wordpress.com sites are causing me to look at alternatives - waiting 5 seconds for the homepage to show up is not really acceptable.

I wish someone made a hosted version of a static site generator - they maintain the compatibility between individual components, provide some online editor for content, but the output is just a bunch of static files generated from this. Have not found one so far but if you know one, please drop a line!

> Admittedly, the horrible load times of wordpress.com sites are causing me to look at alternatives - waiting 5 seconds for the homepage to show up is not really acceptable.

It shouldn't be that slow. Did you enable Jetpack caching and such?

WordPress sites can be lightning fast if cached well. I forget what the WordPress.com options are, but if you host on Pantheon, Wpengine or similar, it can be very very fast.

You can also self-host on Cloudways (managed WordPress containers), now owned by DigitalOcean, or use Gridpane to deploy it to any VPS with a dashboard.

> I wish someone made a hosted version of a static site generator - they maintain the compatibility between individual components, provide some online editor for content, but the output is just a bunch of static files

(Disclaimer: I work for one) Headless CMSes can often do this, but usually you have to bring your own frontend. Astro makes this setup pretty easy to maintain (it all works together and is maintained by a single vendor). Of course Next would work too but it's much more complicated. You'd still have to manage the frontend though :(

There might be a static generation plug in for WordPress too. I can't remember exactly.

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.

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.

Well, Wix isn't really file-based (to the user's eye). They're probably just a bunch of entries in a database. It's more that Wix doesn't offer any sort of easy export to a standard format.

Editing in Wix is kinda like Dreamweaver was in the old days, a bunch of WYSIWYG widgets and building blocks you drag around on a virtual canvas.

If they wanted to, they could probably offer a static HTML export of the rendered pages, but as far as I know, they don't.

Thats fake news you CAN move away from wix for one and second of all in terms of cost it is pricier than other platforms but they have sooo many integrations that you would end up buying plugins for anyways on wordpress…

Oh and Wix has top notch SECURITY!

What platforms do you typically use?
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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'm very happy with Squarespace. I'm a Backend developer primarily focused on Java, but since I'm the person who knows tech I was handed a WordPress site for a preschool. The original creator picked a budget hosting company that had no automatic upgrades and didn't force you to migrate off unsupported versions of PHP. The site was running on a several year old WordPress version and an unsupported version of PHP. I told my wife "I need to look at this at some point, were going to get hacked." Her response, "no one is going to hack a preschool site." Two weeks later the site was trying to send you to a malware site and the database was destroyed. While I was able to rebuild the WordPress site on nearlyfreespeech.net and run it for less then $5 a month we moved to Squarespace. It's well worth the $20 a month because my wife can now manage the site with out any help from me. More importantly the fact that she can manage it with out being in the technology field means it's going to be very easy to hand it off to someone else once our children are no longer in the preschool.
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.

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.

There are Squarespace > Figma tools and Figma > Webflow tools so can port to Webflow easily
Squarespace is fantastic for early iterating. I started a company about 8 months ago bootstrapped, I’ve spent about 5k total. 12k revenue last mo w/ Squarespace site as front end. Using various things like Elfsight for some embedded widgets, Heyflow for embedded lead forms. I can change anything I need in 5 min. Not particularly technical background.
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.
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.
I used Squarespace for a domain and website for a relative who had a very low tolerance for futzing around. No major issues. They also have O365 for email and there have not been any problems with eg email being rejected.

The biggest issue: I've learned that SQS really doesnt like people trying to go their own way, even if technically it is supported.

For example:

- you can embed your own JS scripts...but it's clunky, and debugging is not fun, because you are fighting with objects wrapped in squarespace's own object model.

- you will have a far, far more pleasant time using their payment systems, appointment tracking systems, etc than trying to integrate your own choice of third party. Thats great if they already do what you want, less so if not. So you def want to look at all the ancillary services like those that your client might need and confirm that they can live with what SQS offers.

- Finally, I no longer work on this site, but I do not remember seeing any versioning, source file backup, etc. They do have a staging system though. So you might want to consider how to preserve your client's site in case of screwups.

I recently moved someone's setup to Wix and was so pleasantly surprised. The old setup (put together by someone else years ago) was a security nightmare bleeding all kinds of warnings about outdated PHP and such, and was too fragile to update safely without grokking it way more deeply than anyone (me, helping these non-techy friends for free) for. I dumped all of the assets from the old site and basically remade it using wix over a few days in my spare time. Pretty easy, boatloads of features if you wish to dig into them (alas, the most complex thing we needed was a contact form), and I no longer have to worry about a bot/script kiddy using a 10 year old PHP exploit and taking it down (the biggest selling point to me). Additionally the admin app for it is pretty impressive. Lots of integrations, seo, analytic type stuff available.

It's gotta be a game changer for non-tech folks. You could really easily run a small business out of the features available.

Did this topic get resurrected and then re-timestamped somehow? The timestamps say many of the comments were posted 16 hours ago, but I definitely posted these way longer ago (like 3 days ago, I think). There's also a lot more voting activity now and possibly some green-name astroturfing.

I know HN has a "second-chance pool" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308), but I didn't know it would artificially change the timestamps too...

Wix has alot of integrations included so it is interesting in terms of saving costs! For clients its a really nice platform that requires no maintenance whatsoever and less headaches for me!

No more panicked clients email late in the evening no more headaches in that sense…

Their new version Wix Studio offers even more flexibility and you can even go headless if you wanted! They offer alot to devs that takes the time to understand Velo code (JS)

I may sound biased at this point but Vevo has 10m monthly users and their website is built using Wix…

Only downside for the moment is performance in terms of loading times/general performance and i think thats mostly related to their native CDN thats offered by default… this becomes more apparent when browsing Wix sites on mobile

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.
What personally made me switch over is when i had a client project for a restaurant that needed to setup delivery/takeouts it took me literally 2 days to have everything up running setup!

I was even able to configure that when orders are placed on the website they would get a phone call with a automated voice telling them an order #xxx has been placed all with no code whatsoever and this was integrated by default!

They are worth not having to pay a Webdesigner. And the clients these systems are made for get all the SEO penalties they deserve while having peace of mind. And If the site has the core search parameters where am I and what service am I looking for in the domain name there should be no issue in finding them on google after a couple of months.
PSA: "wix" is how you pronounce the German word for "wank". Try to suggest your client to set up a "wank site"... Beautifully demonstrates the importance of checking your brand name in other languages.

My other favorite is MongoDB which in German literally means RetardDB. (Sorry for the slur, but that's what it is.)

Wix has embraced the entendre https://youtu.be/IddnMutPgTI?si=fCgGY9-bZT9WikWz
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.
In German it's the only possible meaning, unfortunately... ("Mongo" is short for "mongoloid")
I'm not aware of any other meaning in English either.
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.
You really shouldn't. Help him set up a Squarespace/Wix/Wordpress or similar that you don't have to maintain.

Anything you code, manually or vibe-ly, is going to become a pile of unmaintainable garbage in a year or two and either you're going to have to help him fix it then or he's going to have to pay hundreds for someone else to do it for him (if he can find anyone).

Please believe me when I say I've wasted way too many years of my youth trying to hack together things like that for clients. That way lies madness. Don't let yourself go down that path. It's not a good use of time and money for you or your client.

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/
Webflow is pretty good!
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