Wix and Squarespace are good at one thing: handing you the tools to build a site yourself. The question was never whether they work. It's whether you've got the evenings free, and whether a template you built in a weekend ever gets found. Here's the honest comparison.
A website builder gives you a website. It doesn't give you customers.
That's not a knock on Wix or Squarespace. They're genuinely clever tools, and for the right person they're the right answer. The trouble starts when a busy owner-operator treats "I've got a website" and "I get found online" as the same thing. They aren't.
Building the page is the easy 20%. The 80% that actually wins work is the bit the platform can't do for you: the service pages, the area pages, the schema, the structure that makes Google and ChatGPT put you in front of someone ready to buy. That takes time and know-how, and you've got a business to run.
So the real comparison isn't Zenlio versus Wix. It's your evenings versus ours. Here's how the two stack up, including the times you're better off saving your money and building it yourself.
Everything below is the long version. The comparison table gives you the headline differences at a glance, then there's a short set of questions to help you work out which route actually suits you, a table you can filter by what matters most, and a calculator that puts a real number on the time a DIY build costs, not just the subscription. Skip to whichever bit is useful.
Four honest questions. No email required and no catch, just a straight steer based on how you answer.
Answer all four questions above to get your steer.
No fake-neutral scoring. Wix and Squarespace are good tools. The real question is whether you have the hours, and whether the site ever gets found. Where they win, we say so below.
| Wix / Squarespace | Zenlio LocalDone for you | |
|---|---|---|
| Who builds it | You do, in their editor. | We do. One 10-minute form from you. |
| Who writes the words | You. Every page. | We write every page for you. |
| Time until it is live | As long as you can spare. Usually weeks of tinkering. | Under a week. |
| Built for local SEO | The tools are there. Ranking is on you, and most never do. | Service pages, area pages and schema built in from day one. |
| Found in AI search | Not out of the box. | Structured so ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity can read and recommend you. |
| Real monthly cost | From £9 to £29 a month, plus every hour you put in. | From £49 a month, build and management included. |
| Ongoing changes | You, back in the editor. | Us. Send an email, it's done. |
| What you own | A site locked to their platform. | A site that's yours, wherever you want to host it. |
Competitor pricing reflects publicly reported UK figures at the time of writing and varies by trade, plan and location.
With a DIY builder, every part of the job sits with you: designing the layout, writing every page, then coming back each time something needs to change. Zenlio Local moves all three onto us. You answer a short set of questions once, we design and write the site, and every change after that is an email rather than a login. The difference isn't really about skill, most owners could learn a page builder if they had to. It's about where the hours go.
The sticker price is only half the number. Wix and Squarespace run from around £9 to £29 a month, but that figure says nothing about how many evenings it takes to get a site live, or how many more it takes to keep it current. Zenlio Local starts from £49 a month with the build, hosting, SEO and changes included, and is usually live inside a week. The calculator below puts an actual figure on that gap, using your own numbers rather than ours.
A DIY builder gives you the tools for local SEO. It doesn't use them for you. Zenlio Local pages are built around the specific jobs and areas you cover, marked up with schema so search engines and AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini can read and recommend you, from the day the site goes live rather than whenever you get round to it.
With a builder, your site lives inside their platform. Leave, and you leave the site behind. With Zenlio Local, the domain is registered in your name and the files are yours, so if you ever move on, you take everything with you.
Move the sliders to match your own numbers. This isn't about picking a side, it's about seeing the actual figure once your time is counted properly.
Real monthly cost: £116
Your time required: 0 hours a month. We build it, we keep it updated.
You'd save an estimated £1,912 over three years with Zenlio Local, and you wouldn't spend a single evening on it.
Figures use the £9–£29 monthly range already quoted on this page for DIY builders, the Zenlio Local plan pricing above, and whatever hourly value and hours you enter. It's a rough guide, not a quote, your own numbers will vary.
We would rather point you to Wix than sell you something you don't need. Here's when it's the right answer.
Pre-revenue, just starting, and the website is a nice-to-have rather than your main way of getting work. A £12 a month Squarespace page is a sensible place to begin. Save the £49 a month until the business is actually bringing in money to spend on it. There's no version of this where spending more before you need to is the smart move.
Some people like building their own site and have the evenings free. If that's you and you know your way around SEO, a builder gives you the tools to do a decent job. If you're the sort of person who reads a help doc for fun and doesn't mind SEO being a slow grind rather than a finished job, you'll probably enjoy getting there.
If you just need a tidy page that says you exist, and you're not relying on it to ring the phone, DIY is fine. The moment you need it to win work, the maths changes. Plenty of trades genuinely don't need a website doing any selling, word of mouth already covers it. If that's you, a simple DIY page is doing exactly the job it needs to.
Before you know whether the business itself works, a full done-for-you build is spending ahead of the evidence. Get a DIY page up, prove there's demand, then decide whether it's worth the step up once you actually need more than a placeholder.
A live site isn't the same as a found one. We build for the searches your customers actually type, so you show up when they're looking, not just when they know your name. That's the gap most DIY sites never close: they're live, they're tidy, and almost nobody who's searching for what you do ever sees them.
Templates give you one services page. We build a page for each thing you do in each place you do it, so each one ranks for its own search. Bury three services and two towns on one crowded page and none of them rank properly. Split them out and each one gets its own shot.
People ask ChatGPT who to call now. Sites built the right way get pulled into those answers. Yours will be, from launch. Most of your rivals haven't noticed this yet. It isn't a future feature, it's already how a growing number of people find a tradesperson, especially the ones who'd rather ask a question than scroll ten search results.
The hours you'd spend fighting a page builder are hours off the tools. You fill in one form. We handle the rest and keep it updated. That's not a soft benefit either, it's the whole basis for the cost comparison further up this page.
Pulled in with proper schema so your star rating shows in search results, building trust before anyone clicks. First impressions happen in the search results now, long before anyone reaches your site, so getting this right matters more than it used to.
Three-month minimum, then cancel any time. You own what you pay for and can take it with you. No platform holding your site hostage. If it stops working for you, walking away costs you a conversation, not a rebuild.
"Under a week" isn't a marketing line, it's roughly what the process looks like end to end. Here's the sequence, so there's no mystery about what happens after you get in touch.
Tell us about the business: what you do, where you work, and who you want ringing the phone. Ten minutes, no jargon required.
We map out which service and area pages you actually need, based on real searches, not guesswork.
Every service, every area, written properly for the job you actually do, not spun from a generic template.
We send it over for a look. Flag anything that's wrong or missing. This is the one step in the whole process that needs you.
Schema, structure, mobile, speed: the technical groundwork that decides whether it ever gets found, done before launch rather than bolted on afterwards.
Usually within a week of that first form, depending mostly on how quickly step four comes back to us.
Google Business Profile connected, analytics in place, and any future changes handled by email from there on.
For a simple page you maintain yourself, yes. They're well-built tools. The catch is that building the site and getting it found are two different jobs. Wix hands you the first. The second, ranking in Google and AI search, is where most DIY sites quietly fall down, because it takes time and know-how the platform can't do for you.
Because ranking isn't about the platform, it's about how the site is built. We write a dedicated page for each service in each area, mark it up with schema so search engines and AI tools understand it, and structure the whole site around the searches your customers make. A Wix template can do this in theory. In practice, almost nobody has the time to.
Yes, on the sticker. But Wix is you doing the work, and a busy owner's time is worth more than the gap. Our £49 includes the build, the hosting, the SEO and the changes. Add up the evenings you'd spend on a DIY site, plus the work it doesn't win because it never ranks, and the cheaper option usually turns out to be the expensive one.
Yes, and a lot of our clients come to us that way. We take what's working, fix what isn't, and rebuild it to be found. You keep your domain and your content stays yours.
No. Three-month minimum so there's time for the SEO to work, then you can cancel any time. You own the site and can take it elsewhere. We don't believe in trapping people with a platform they can't leave.
You can, but you won't need to. Most clients would rather send us a quick note and get back to work than log into an editor. Changes are part of the plan, so just email and we handle it.
Your domain stays yours, we don't take it from you. If it's already registered in your name, we point it at the new site and your email keeps working exactly as it does now, because email routing and website hosting are separate things. If it's still sitting under a Wix or Squarespace account, we'll talk you through moving the registration into your own name first, so you're never depending on a builder account you don't fully control.
Your Google reviews live on your Google Business Profile, not on your website, so switching your site doesn't touch them. Rankings are a fairer worry. If a page is already ranking for something useful, we look at it before we touch anything and make sure the new version covers the same ground properly, rather than just disappearing. Nobody can promise a ranking never moves during any rebuild, but we plan the switch so there's no gap where you vanish from search.
You can. The site is yours, the domain is registered in your name, and if you ever leave we hand over the files. What we don't do is migrate a Zenlio build into a Wix or Squarespace account, because we build static sites rather than platform templates. If you did want to go back to a DIY builder down the line, you'd be starting that build fresh, the same as anyone would.
Multi-location is exactly the kind of thing a DIY builder handles badly, because you end up either cramming every branch onto one page or paying for several separate sites. We build a proper page for each location, structured so each one can rank in its own area, under one site and one plan. Franchise setups vary enough that it's worth a quick call to talk through what your agreement allows before we scope it.
You email us what's changed, a new price, a closed date, a finished job you want added, and we make the change. There's no dashboard to learn, no editor to fight with, nothing to log into. That's the entire point of the done-for-you plans: the parts of running a website that assume you're comfortable with tech are the parts we've taken off your plate.
Either way works. If you've already got one, we use it. If you don't, we register it for you as part of the build, and it's registered in your name, not ours, so you're never renting your own web address back from an agency.
Roughly: you fill in one form telling us about the business, we draft the structure and the words for every page, you get a look and ask for any changes, we build it properly with the SEO and schema in place, and it goes live, usually within a week of that first form. The exact timeline depends a little on how quickly we hear back from you at the review step, since that's the one part that involves you.
No. Decent phone photos are usually fine, and if you don't have a logo yet we can work with a simple wordmark to start. What matters far more than production value is that the site is structured to be found. A beautifully shot site that never ranks is worth less than a plainer one that does.
Because that one-off fee bought you a page, not a plan to get found. A lot of our clients have been exactly there: they paid someone once, got a nice-looking template, and it's sat quietly ever since without bringing in work. Zenlio Local isn't a rebuild of the same idea at a higher price, it's the ongoing SEO and maintenance that a one-off design fee was never going to include, on any platform.
Not really, because the plans scale with what you need rather than forcing a big build on you. Starter covers a straightforward site done properly. You only need Professional or Growth once you've got more services, more areas, or more competition to out-rank. If a handful of pages is genuinely all your business needs, say so on the call and we'll scope it that way.
Fill in one form and we start building. Live in under a week, built to rank in Google and AI search. Or book a quick chat first if you'd rather talk it through.
See exactly how your current site, or the option you're leaning toward, measures up. Free, no signup, before you decide.
Already have a site? Score whoever built it against what a good provider should deliver.
Take the scorecard →