Guide
Custom website, Shopify or a website builder: how to choose
By Studio Swing
If your site is a handful of pages that you will edit yourself, and nothing unusual has to happen on it, a website builder such as Wix or Squarespace is usually enough, and paying a developer would be money you did not need to spend. If selling products online is the main job, Shopify is usually a strong fit, because checkout, payments and inventory are its core. A custom-coded site earns its cost when the site has to do something the platforms do badly, when speed and design control matter commercially, or when you need code you can take anywhere.
On this page
Two businesses, two honest answers
Most people search this as “website builder vs web developer”, but the real choice is between three kinds of ownership: renting a finished tool, renting a selling platform you can shape, or owning code outright. Each one moves the work, the cost and the risk to a different place.
Say you run a three-person bookkeeping practice. You need a home page, a services page, a page about the team, a contact form and a way for clients to book a call. Your content changes twice a year. A builder handles all of that. You pick a template, write clear copy, connect a booking tool, and you are done. A custom site would cost you more and give you nothing your clients would notice.
Now say you make and sell candles: 40 scents, three sizes each, gift sets, seasonal stock and wholesale orders from a few shops. You need variant pricing, stock counts, shipping rules, discount codes and a checkout that customers trust with a card. That is Shopify’s home ground. Building that from scratch would mean rebuilding, slowly and expensively, what Shopify already provides out of the box.
A third case: a firm that sells industrial parts to trade buyers, with 3,000 products, technical specifications, account pricing per customer and a quote request instead of a basket. Here a builder can run out of room quickly. Shopify includes native B2B features on Basic, Grow, Advanced and Plus. Basic, Grow and Advanced support up to three active B2B market catalogs when using new Shopify Markets; assigning catalogs directly to individual companies requires Plus. Check those capabilities against the pricing and quote workflow before deciding whether apps, custom theme work or a custom-coded site are needed.
None of these businesses is wrong. They need different tools.
What each option actually is
A website builder (Wix, Squarespace and similar) is a hosted product. You rent the software, the hosting and the templates as one package. You edit pages in a visual editor. The company keeps the software updated and secure. You cannot change how the underlying system works, only what the editor lets you change.
Shopify is a hosted commerce platform. Like a builder, Shopify runs the hosting, the software and the security of checkout: Shopify states that it is certified Level 1 PCI DSS compliant and that this “extends by default to all stores powered by Shopify”. Unlike most builders, Shopify lets a developer edit the theme’s code directly. Shopify’s own help center describes theme files as Liquid (Shopify’s templating language) plus HTML, CSS, JSON and JavaScript, and advises owners without web development experience to hire a developer rather than edit that code themselves.
WordPress (self-hosted) is free software that you install on hosting you choose. It is flexible, with a large library of themes and plugins, but someone has to keep the software, theme and plugins updated, because outdated plugins are a common way sites get compromised. We cover what that work involves in our guide to website maintenance.
A custom-coded site is built for your business from code a developer writes. Hosting, integrations, licensed components and other services may have recurring dependencies. Every page, interaction and integration is exactly what was specified. It is also exactly what was specified: anything not built in is not there.
Who owns what, and what you can take with you
This is the question most owners only ask when they want to leave, which is the worst time to learn the answer.
Wix says plainly that “your site must run on Wix’s servers”, because its architecture does not support hosting elsewhere. Your words and images are yours, but the site as a working thing stays on Wix.
Squarespace lets you export some content as a file formatted for WordPress. Its help center lists what does not export, including store pages, product blocks, video blocks, drafts, style settings and custom CSS. The design does not come with you.
Shopify exports products as a CSV file. Shopify notes that product images are not included in that file, only their web addresses, and the images must still be publicly viewable for an import elsewhere to fetch them. Your theme design is tied to Shopify’s templating language, so it would need rebuilding on another platform.
A custom-coded site is code. If your agreement says you own it, you can move it to a compatible host with the documented runtime requirements. When we build a site, the client owns the finished site, its content and its code at handover.
None of this makes a builder a bad choice. A small site is quick to rebuild anyway. It matters more as the site grows: the more pages, products and design work you invest, the more it costs to move.
What each option costs you over time
We do not publish prices, and platform prices change, so check each provider’s pricing page for current figures. The shape of the costs is more useful than the numbers anyway:
| Row | Builder | Shopify | Self-hosted WordPress | Custom-coded |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Upfront | Low: a template and your time | Low to high, depending on theme work | Low to high, depending on theme and plugins | Highest: everything is designed and built |
| Monthly | A subscription | A subscription, plus paid apps | Hosting, plus paid plugins | Hosting |
| Per sale | Varies by plan | Payment processing; extra transaction fees if you use a payment provider other than Shopify Payments | Payment processor fees | Payment processor fees |
| Upkeep | Mostly the platform’s job | Mostly the platform’s job, apps excepted | Yours: core, theme and plugin updates | Yours: dependency updates and hosting |
| Changing your mind later | Rebuild | Rebuild the theme, export products | Portable | Portable |
The transaction fee row catches people out. Shopify’s help center says third-party transaction fees “apply on all third-party and alternate payment gateways even when Shopify Payments is activated”, and the rate varies by location. If Shopify Payments is not available in your country, that fee is part of the real cost of every order.
Apps are the other quiet cost. A Shopify store or a builder site often reaches the features it needs by adding subscriptions one at a time: reviews, translations, booking, product filters. Add them up before comparing the platform against a custom build.
When a builder is enough
If a website builder is enough for you, we will say so. It usually is when:
Checklist
- the site is a small number of pages and you will edit them yourself;
- the features are standard: a contact form, a booking link, a gallery, a simple blog;
- you sell a few items, or none, online;
- you need to be live soon and can write the content yourself;
- the site supports your business rather than being the business.
What decides whether a small site works is rarely the platform. It is whether the pages say clearly what you do, for whom, and what to do next. A builder site with sharp copy and real photos can outperform an expensive custom site with vague copy.
When Shopify is the right call
Shopify fits when online sales are central and your products behave like normal products: they have prices, variants, stock levels and shipping rules. You get a checkout that customers already trust, payment security handled by Shopify, order management, and a large ecosystem of themes and apps. A good Shopify build is not a template with your logo on it. It is a theme designed around your products and how your customers choose them, with product pages that answer the questions shoppers actually ask (see what makes an ecommerce product page useful).
Per-customer price lists are available natively through direct company catalogs on Shopify Plus; check the plan before assuming an app or custom code is needed. Shopify gets harder when your business has rules beyond the chosen plan: quotes instead of carts, complex bundles, products configured from many parts. Each exception is usually solvable with an app or custom code, but each one adds cost and another moving part.
When a custom-coded site earns its cost
Custom code is worth paying for when at least one of these is true:
The site must do something specific. A product configurator, a quote workflow, a member area, a data-heavy catalog, an integration with your stock or booking system that no plugin handles well.
Speed and design control matter commercially. Google publishes Core Web Vitals targets (for example, the main content appearing within 2.5 seconds), measured on the pages you actually serve. Any platform can meet or miss them, but a custom build gives you full control over what loads and when.
The content is the product. Large guides, bilingual sites, many location or service pages with real differences: structures that templates fight against.
You want no platform between you and your site. Your code, your host, no subscription deciding which features you may have.
Custom also has honest downsides. It costs more upfront. Changes need a developer unless an editing system is built in. And it needs upkeep: the code depends on other software, and that software gets security updates.
Does the platform decide how you rank in search?
Less than people fear. Search engines rank pages on what they say, how well they answer the search, how they perform for visitors and whether they can be crawled. You can build a well-structured, fast site on a builder, on Shopify or in custom code, and you can build a slow, confusing one on all three. What a platform changes is how much control you have when something needs fixing: on a builder you can only use the settings provided, while on a custom site anything can be changed by someone who can write the code. No one can honestly guarantee a first place in search, whatever the platform, and we do not.
What switching will not fix
A new platform will not fix an unclear offer, missing prices or photos that do not show the product. It will not bring visitors who are not searching for what you sell. If your current site is not producing enquiries, find out why before choosing a platform, because the cause is often on the page rather than under it. Our guide to why a website gets visitors but no enquiries walks through the usual causes.
A checklist before you choose
- Write down the five things the site must do for customers (book, buy, request a quote, read, compare).
- Mark which of those are standard features and which are specific to your business.
- Count your pages and products today, and estimate them in two years.
- Decide who will edit the site week to week, and what they are comfortable using.
- List every paid app or plugin you would need, and add their monthly costs to the platform’s.
- Check your payment options: is Shopify Payments available where you trade, and if not, what does each order cost?
- Read the platform’s export documentation and note what would not come with you.
- Ask any developer or studio, in writing: who owns the code and content at the end?
- Choose the simplest option that does all five things from step 1.
Next step
If you are weighing these options for a real project, our websites page explains what we build, and our Shopify page covers store builds specifically. To understand what moves the price of each route, read what affects the cost of a website. If you would like a straight answer on which route fits your business, including “use a builder”, you can discuss your project with us.
Sources
1. Wix Help Center, “Exporting or Embedding Your Wix Site Elsewhere”: https://support.wix.com/en/article/exporting-or-embedding-your-wix-site-elsewhere
2. Squarespace Help Center, “Exporting your site”: https://support.squarespace.com/hc/en-us/articles/206566687-Exporting-your-site
3. Shopify Help Center, “Exporting products”: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/products/import-export/export-products
4. Shopify Help Center, “Third-party payment providers” (transaction fees): https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/third-party-providers
5. Shopify Help Center, “Editing theme code”: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/themes/customizing-themes/edit-code
6. Shopify, “PCI DSS compliance”: https://www.shopify.com/pci-compliant
7. web.dev, “Web Vitals” (Core Web Vitals thresholds): https://web.dev/articles/vitals
8. web.dev, “Top ways sites get hacked by spammers” (outdated themes and plugins): https://web.dev/articles/top-ways-sites-get-hacked-by-spammers