The Mafia of Web Designers inside Wix and Squarespace

Wix and Squarespace, and to a lesser extent GoDaddy and WordPress.com are all trying to get small business owners to “Get their website” from them. I’ve talked to two different people that became my clients in the last few months about their experience and the Web Designer Mafia that you’ll find from those providers.

Wix and Squarespace Promise you a Pizza but Deliver a Lunchable

Yep, I went there. Sure, they are easy. Sure, they resemble a business website like that Lunchable resembled a pizza top an 8th grader, but come on! Make sure you know what you are ordering. There are Lunchables, there are $7 Hot and Ready pizzas, and there are scrumptious cracker-crust, known only to locals, life-changing bar pizzas. (I’m looking at you Turoni’s Forget-Me-Not on Weinbach.)

All of that easy-to-build drag and drop goodness comes at a cost. That’s what this article is about. The hidden costs of those easy websites. This is coming from a WordPress web designer that has gained clients in the last few months from GoDaddy’s AI, Wix, and Squarespace.

Every Site is going to have a Learning Curve – Learn WordPress in 2026, not Flash

There were some titans of Flash web design in Evansville in the late 1990s and 2000s. They were my friends and I was in awe of their craft. They made beautiful websites that brought in audiences far beyond the Tri-State area. I tried to learn how to do some of that but it never stuck.

Well, unfortunately it didn’t stick in the web world either. Flash is done and gone.

Learning how to build a website in Wix or Squarespace is going to be very similar. They have a walled garden with their own interface, design philosophy, and design structure. That design structure is fine and easy, as long as you stay with Wix and Squarespace. If you want to move your website somewhere else, you lose that builder and those design techniques.

The time spent in learning the Wix way or the Squarespace way isn’t portable to another website paradigm. You’ll have to learn a new thing. Again.

On the other hand, WordPress is used on 40% of the internet. 40% of websites all over the world use WordPress. Even the White House. Microsoft, Adobe, IBM, Sony, CNN, the New York Times, Spotify, and Mercedes-Benz all use WordPress.

That also means that if you need to hire someone to help you with your site, it will be easier to find them.

Plugins, Add-ons, Extensions, oh My!

All of these web design environments have their own systems and structure. They also don’t want to give you everything at once so you are overwhelmed. My non-profit clients need The Events Calendar but my industrial clients need complex forms that you can only build with Gravity Forms. I don’t automatically put them on every site I build from the beginning.

Wix and Squarespace do the same thing, but they don’t have as many. So on the one hand, you might not be overwhelmed with all of the choices and features you can add to your site. You can keep it simple with a few of those, like a guy with a hammer and a saw.

Or, with a system like WordPress, you can have a whole army of developers making things that are optional for you to install. The vast majority of them are free, and work on any WordPress site, whether you host it at Hostgator, WPEngine, or GoDaddy. You can’t have that kind of portability with Wix or Squarespace. What happens on Squarespace is stuck on Squarespace.

Would You Like to Hire a Web Designer to Help You With This Confusing Interface?

Which is where we come to what I call the Wix and Squarespace mafia.

Right there, in the interface that you’re trying to figure out, is an ad for a web designer to take over the design and build of your site! Is this too hard? We get it, give up and pay somebody to build your website from right here.

It’s genius really. They control the shopping experience. They have vetted web designers that have already proved themselves. And even better, they lock you in to continue being their customer. Think about it, while you could hire a WordPress designer and take your website to any of the hundreds of WordPress hosting companies, once you have the sunk cost of a Wix web designer, you’re going to stick with Wix. Once you’ve paid a web designer to make your custom SquareSpace site, you’re not going anywhere else soon.

So not only are they selling you their own website hosting, and their own website builder, they are also locking you in to use their own web designers.

This business model relies on your increasing sunk cost, rather than a growing marketing relationship.

Which brings us to the main point:

Don’t just Hire a Web Designer. Hire a Strategic Marketing Partner

A website builder might feel like a great replacement for a web designer, but it’s not. It makes you the web designer. You didn’t start your HVAC company so you could fight with Squarespace every Tuesday. I don’t do my own taxes. I hire an accountant to apply his skill to my taxes.

If you want your web design to truly be a part of your company’s marketing, you want to hire a web designer that has more than a few marketing chops. You want somebody that knows how your website needs to attract visitors (SEO), give them what they are looking for (Content marketing), and then convert them into hot leads and paying customers (Web design!).

Purna Virji puts it like this in High Impact Content Marketing:

Marketers [including web-designers] should be strategic, consultative partners rather than order-takers. Often, the latter happens due to tight deadlines and filter-down conversations. We all know how it feels when you’re just executing, without creating. Asking clarifying questions and approaching the goal-setting process in a consultative way can help you be seen as the strategic partner you are.
I’m going to say this again in bold for those in the back. We’re consultative partners who co-create strategies to meet mutual goals.

What You Really Want When You Want a Web Designer

One of my clients was remarkably clear. “I don’t care if we redesign the website or what. The point is leads. We want leads, and if redesigning the website is the way to do it, let’s go.”

Godaddy and Squarespace sell websites, but if you want good leads, hire a web designer that is a full-service marketer. You’ll have a quality sales asset that will last a long time and do a great job.