How Much Does an Ecommerce Website Cost in the UK?
- Website Design
For most UK small businesses the best website builder is Squarespace if you want it to look good with little effort, Wix if you want to move things around yourself, Shopify if you are selling more than a handful of products, and WordPress if you want to own the thing outright. That is the short list, and choosing between them is less about features than about one question almost no comparison article asks: can you take your website with you when you leave?
An honest word before the rest. We build on WordPress for a living, so read the WordPress section knowing that. We have also talked plenty of people out of it, because for a lot of businesses it is more machinery than the job needs.
Website builders fall into two groups, and the split matters more than any feature list.
Wix, Squarespace and Shopify are closed platforms. Your site lives inside their system, built with their tools, and it cannot be moved out. If you want to leave, you rebuild from scratch somewhere else. You can export your words and your images, but not the site.
WordPress is the other kind. The site is a set of files and a database that you can pick up and move to a different host or hand to a different developer. When people say you own a WordPress site, that is the practical thing they mean: not that you have a licence, but that nobody can hold the site itself hostage.
Neither is automatically right. Renting is a perfectly sensible arrangement if what you get is good and the rent is fair. It is just worth deciding on purpose rather than finding out in three years.
The best-looking results with the least effort. The templates are genuinely well designed and it is hard to make a Squarespace site ugly, which is not true of every builder here. Editing is straightforward without being fiddly.
The trade-off is flexibility. When you want something the template does not do, you often cannot do it. For a business whose site is a well-presented brochure, that ceiling never gets reached. For anything with unusual functionality, it gets reached quickly.
Suits: consultants, studios, restaurants, therapists, anybody whose website mainly needs to look credible and take enquiries. See our fuller WordPress and Squarespace comparison if you are weighing those two.
More flexible than Squarespace and easier to get wrong. You can drag anything anywhere, which is liberating until you look at the site on a phone and find that the desktop version and the mobile version have drifted apart.
Wix has improved a great deal and the current version is a serious product. It also has the largest app ecosystem of the closed platforms, so bookings, forms and payments are usually a few clicks away.
Suits: businesses that want to tinker themselves and are willing to check their own work on a phone. Our WordPress and Wix comparison goes deeper, and we have also written a direct three-way platform comparison.
If selling online is the business rather than a sideline, Shopify is usually the right answer and the argument does not need to be long. Stock, payments, shipping, tax and the checkout are all handled, and the checkout in particular is the part nobody should be building themselves.
Where it stops making sense is a shop with a handful of products bolted onto a mainly informational site. At that scale you are paying a monthly platform fee for machinery you barely use. We compared the two routes in WooCommerce against Shopify.
The most capable and the most demanding. Nothing here has a ceiling you will hit, it runs a large share of the web, and you can move it anywhere. It is also the only option on this list that will not maintain itself: updates, backups and security are somebody’s job, and if that somebody is nobody, the site quietly rots.
That maintenance requirement is the honest reason not to choose it. A neglected WordPress site is worse than a tidy Squarespace one. Our complete guide to WordPress for UK businesses covers what running one properly involves.
| Builder | Best for | Can you take it with you? |
|---|---|---|
| Squarespace | Looking good with little effort | No |
| Wix | Editing it yourself, add-ons | No |
| Shopify | Selling as the main business | No |
| WordPress | Ownership, no ceiling, growth | Yes |
If you are genuinely torn, the deciding factor is usually time rather than money. A closed platform trades flexibility for somebody else handling the upkeep. WordPress trades upkeep for having no ceiling. Work out which of those you actually have spare.
Most website builder roundups are funded by affiliate commission, which is not a scandal but does shape what gets recommended and in what order. It also explains a consistent blind spot: exit costs almost never appear, because no platform wants a section about leaving.
Two other things worth knowing. First, the cheap tiers usually put the platform’s branding on your site and give you a subdomain rather than your own address, so the realistic starting cost is the tier above the advertised one. Second, whichever you choose, the domain name should be registered in your own name and not by an agency or a builder on your behalf. That is the single most common way businesses discover they do not control their own website.
Squarespace for most, on the balance of quality against effort. It produces a professional result quickly, it is hard to break, and the ceiling is high enough that a typical service business never reaches it. Choose differently if you are selling seriously, in which case Shopify, or if you want to own and extend the site indefinitely, in which case WordPress.
It is the most flexible of the closed platforms and the reviews are deserved. Whether it is best for you depends on whether that flexibility is something you will use. Drag-and-drop freedom is an advantage if you enjoy fiddling and a liability if you do not, because it is entirely possible to build something on Wix that looks wrong on a phone without realising.
All of them run on monthly or annual subscriptions with several tiers, and the entry tier is rarely the one you want because of the branding and subdomain limits. Prices change often enough that quoting them here would go stale, so check current pricing on Squarespace and Wix directly. Budget for the domain separately, and remember WordPress has no platform fee but does have hosting and maintenance costs instead.
By UK small business usage the names that come up repeatedly are Squarespace, Wix, Shopify, WordPress and GoDaddy. We have left GoDaddy out of the detail above because its builder is the weakest of the group and its main advantage is that people already have a domain there, which is not a good reason to build a website somewhere.
From WordPress, yes, easily. From a closed platform, not really. You can copy the text and download the images, then rebuild the site somewhere else. Budget for a rebuild rather than a migration, and factor that into the decision now while it costs nothing.
We have no stake in which one you pick, and we would rather tell you a builder is the right answer than sell you something bigger. If the honest answer is that you have outgrown one, that is where our small business web design comes in. If you want to talk it through before committing, you know where we are.
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