Wix, Squarespace or a site built in code: what a Tyler business needs

Plenty of good Tyler businesses run on Wix, Squarespace or GoDaddy’s builder. Some of them should keep doing that. This is how we tell the difference, including the times we’d tell you not to hire us.

When a builder is the right call

• You’re just starting and need something up this week so people can find a phone number.
• Your site is one page with your hours and a way to reach you, and you don’t sell services people search for by name.
• You enjoy editing it yourself and have the time to.

In those cases a builder is cheap, fast and fine. Put your real photos on it, make sure the phone number is a tap-to-call link, and spend your energy on your Google Business Profile instead. (Here’s how to get that right.)

What you give up

A builder rents you a site. That’s the trade, and it’s worth knowing what’s in it.

• You can’t take it with you. Wix says so directly: a Wix site has to run on Wix’s servers and can’t be exported to host elsewhere. If you leave, you rebuild. Your domain name stays yours; the site doesn’t.
• It looks like the template it came from. Thousands of businesses start from the same few themes. Customers may not know the name of the template, but they know the look.
• It carries code for features you don’t use. A builder has to support every kind of site at once, so every page ships with it. On a phone on a weak signal, that is the difference between a page that opens and one that doesn’t.
• You pay every month, forever. That’s fine while the site does its job; it’s worth adding up over five years.

What changes when a site is written in code

A site written for one business only contains what that business needs. The pages are built ahead of time, so they arrive fast. The look comes from the work you actually do, not a theme; for C & E Construction it’s a garden-center bench of plant tags, for Marquez Concrete it’s the delivery ticket that comes with every load. Every service and every town you cover gets its own page, written for the people who search for it.

And it’s yours. The code sits in a repository you control, it runs on hosting you can move, and anyone who knows the tools can pick it up after us.

What it costs is a real project up front instead of a subscription. We quote each one in writing, at a fixed price, before any work starts; here’s what moves that price.

If you’re already on a builder

You don’t start over from nothing. When we rebuild a site, we carry your content, photos and reviews across, keep your domain where it is, and redirect every old address to its new page so nothing people have shared or bookmarked breaks.

The honest test is simple: if your site is bringing in the calls you want, leave it alone. If it isn’t, or you can’t tell, we’ll look at it with you and say what we’d change, even when the answer is “nothing yet.”