Ask HN: Are Squarespace and Wix sites worth it?

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.

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.

Webflow is pretty good!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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