Ask HN: Are Squarespace and Wix sites worth it?

[LouisLazaris]

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.

[solardev]

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.

[malfist]

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

[jayturley]

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.

[LouisLazaris]

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.

[matt_lo]

What platforms do you typically use?

[CM30]

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.

[jareds]

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.

[debacle]

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.

[solardev]

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.

[pedalpete]

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.

[dave2299]

There are Squarespace > Figma tools and Figma > Webflow tools so can port to Webflow easily

[dave2299]

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.

[Fine-Palp-528]

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.

[colkassad]

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.

[kjellsbells]

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.

[temp0826]

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.

[spacechild1]

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.)

[daxelrod]

Wix has embraced the entendre https://youtu.be/IddnMutPgTI?si=fCgGY9-bZT9WikWz

[OJFord]

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.

[Leprowix]

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

[runjake]

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.

[solardev]

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...

[solardev]

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...

[LouisLazaris]

Late response but as of this moment I see all comments with a "7 days ago" stamp. Not sure what you were seeing, but anyhow, thanks for your contributions to the thread.

[datadrivenangel]

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.

[Leprowix]

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!

[mediumsmart]

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.

[tcdent]

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.

[willsmith72]

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.

[solardev]

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.

[andrei_says_]

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.

[JusticeJuice]

Consider https://www.framer.com/

[anon7000]

Webflow is pretty good!

[brianbest101]

They’re fine just horribly expensive for what you get.