The standard advice when you're starting a UK small business is: "just use Wix, it's free". That's true at the headline. It's not true once you do the 5-year maths.
This post compares the real total cost of ownership across template tools and custom builds for a UK SMB, including the time cost on you, the exit cost when you want to leave, and the opportunity cost of running a slower or weaker site.
TL;DR
Over 5 years, for a typical UK SMB:
- Wix Premium: £1,020 to £2,100 in subscription, plus roughly 40 hours of your time. Recognisably templated.
- Squarespace Business: £1,140 in subscription, plus roughly 30 hours of your time. Best template aesthetic.
- GoDaddy Website Builder: £700 to £1,500 in subscription (rises sharply after year 1), plus your time. Weakest of the three.
- Custom build (£3,000 upfront + £50/mo hosting): £6,000. You own it.
- Pay-monthly custom plan: £3,000. You own it.
The template tools are cheaper. The gap is smaller than it looks. And the gap doesn't account for the things you can't put on a spreadsheet: design quality, performance, ownership, and the maintenance time falling on you forever.
Subscription costs, honestly
UK pricing as of May 2026 for the most common template tools, based on the plan tier a typical small business actually picks (the one with custom domain and basic e-commerce):
- Wix Combo / Unlimited: £17 to £25 a month. 5 years: £1,020 to £1,500.
- Wix Business Premium: £35 a month. 5 years: £2,100.
- Squarespace Business: £19 a month. 5 years: £1,140.
- Squarespace Commerce Basic: £30 a month. 5 years: £1,800.
- GoDaddy Standard: £10 intro, £20 renewal. 5 years: £1,080.
- GoDaddy Premium: £15 intro, £30 renewal. 5 years: £1,620.
Add typical domain renewal (£12 a year, £60 over 5 years) and you have your subscription baseline. Most UK SMBs end up at the £1,200 to £1,800 mark over 5 years on a template tool.
The time cost most people don't count
The template tool puts the labour on you. Time spent learning the editor, designing the pages, writing the copy, fixing the mobile layout, updating it when something changes.
Realistic time estimates for a 5-page small business site, first build:
- Wix: 25 to 60 hours over 4 to 8 weeks of evenings and weekends. The editor is forgiving but you spend a lot of it deciding things.
- Squarespace: 15 to 40 hours. Cleaner constraints mean fewer decisions, faster build.
- GoDaddy: 20 to 50 hours. The editor is weakest but the templates are simpler.
Plus maintenance over 5 years: 1 to 4 hours a month on edits, content updates, fixing things that break when the platform updates. Total maintenance over 5 years: 60 to 240 hours.
At an opportunity cost of £30 to £50 an hour for owner-operator time, the unaccounted labour on a template site over 5 years is £2,500 to £15,000. Most owners write this off mentally because it doesn't show on a bank statement, but it's real.
The custom build alternative
A custom 5-page UK website costs £2,500 to £5,000 upfront from a small agency, plus £30 to £100 a month hosting. Over 5 years that's £4,800 to £11,000.
The maintenance time on the client side is dramatically lower because the agency or hosting provider handles it. A typical owner spends 5 to 20 hours over 5 years on a custom site (mostly approving content updates and reviewing the occasional design tweak), versus 60 to 240 on a template tool.
The pay-monthly variant is £0 upfront, £50 a month for 24 months, then £50 a month rolling. £3,000 over 5 years, build included, maintenance included.
What the spreadsheet doesn't capture
Subscription cost is the easy number. The harder questions are about what you're getting for it.
Design quality
Template sites look templated. Anyone who has built one will recognise another instantly, and most of your customers have built one. For a hobby site this is fine. For a business where credibility matters, it's a real cost.
The signal a template site sends, fairly or not, is "this business didn't invest in its own brand". For trades, professional services, healthcare, and any business where the buyer is partly choosing on trust, that signal costs enquiries.
How much? Hard to measure, but ask any UK small business owner who switched from Wix to a custom build whether their conversion rate changed. Many will tell you it did.
Performance
Template editors carry runtime overhead. The Wix or Squarespace editor isn't just generating HTML; it's loading a JavaScript layer that lets you edit the site in the browser. That layer ships to every visitor whether they're editing or not.
The result: mobile Core Web Vitals scores in the 50s to 70s on Wix and GoDaddy, 70s to 85s on Squarespace. Custom static builds routinely score 95+.
Whether this matters depends on whether you compete on Google search. If your traffic comes from local search, paid ads to a specific landing page, or word-of-mouth, page speed is mostly invisible. If you're competing organically for commercial-intent UK searches, it matters substantially.
Ownership
Template sites are tenants. You rent the platform. Cancel the subscription and the site goes away. You can copy text and download images manually, but the layout, the design, and the content structure don't export to anything portable.
Custom sites are owned. You hold the source code in a repository. If you ever want to migrate to a different host, hire a different developer, or sell the business, the site moves with you.
The exit cost on a template site is the cost of rebuilding from scratch when you leave. The exit cost on a custom site is zero.
Maintenance lock-in
Template tools require maintenance from you forever. The platform updates, the editor changes, a feature you depend on gets deprecated, a new browser doesn't render an element correctly. Every few months something needs your attention.
Custom sites delegate this to whoever maintains the site. With a pay-monthly plan it's the operator; with a one-off agency build it's whoever you choose to hire. The maintenance hours leave your calendar.
When templates genuinely win
This isn't a teardown of template tools. Three cases where they're the right call:
- Hobby or placeholder sites. Anything where you're not selling, just having a URL. Templates are fastest to ship and cheapest to run.
- DIY-friendly owners with time. Some people genuinely enjoy the design fiddling. If you're one of them, you have free weekends, and the brand isn't a competitive differentiator, templates work fine.
- Total budget under £600 over 24 months. If even £50 a month is a stretch, the cheapest Wix tier is the honest answer for now. Run it. Upgrade later.
When custom wins, even on cost
Custom wins on cost when:
- Your time is worth more than £30 an hour and the maintenance burden of a template tool eats real hours
- The design quality differential converts to even one or two extra enquiries a year
- You'd otherwise pay an agency or freelancer for periodic redesigns of your template site (a common pattern that quietly costs more than a one-off custom build would have)
- You're competing on Google and faster pages win you traffic the slower site loses
- You're planning to sell the business and a portable, owned site adds asset value
For a UK small business in a credibility-sensitive sector (accountants, solicitors, trades wanting commercial work, professional services), the honest 5-year answer is usually custom. The template wins on a spreadsheet but loses on the things the spreadsheet doesn't show.
The middle path most providers don't talk about
The conventional choices are £0/month-on-template or £4,000-upfront-on-custom. There's a third option: pay-monthly custom plans.
The mechanic: the build is included in a 24-month hosting commitment at £50 a month. The build cost is recovered over the term rather than paid upfront. Over 5 years, the total is £3,000, build included.
The trade-off is the 24-month commitment. The upside is a custom design, a custom build, and maintenance handled, at a price that beats the cheapest custom agency build on raw 5-year cost.
This is the option most agencies don't talk about because it cannibalises their pricing. It's also why it exists.
The honest answer to "should I build a template or a custom site" is: depends on what your time is worth and whether your brand needs to look like yours. If you want to talk it through with someone who'll tell you both sides honestly, see the bureau's Custom Websites plan.