Website builders promise the dream: launch your site in minutes for $10 a month. And for the first year or two, that promise holds up.

The problems start when you try to grow, when you try to leave, or when you need something the platform wasn't built to do.

This isn't speculation. The data tells a clear story:

A global survey by WP Engine found proprietary CMS platforms cost up to 44% more than WordPress over time
Migration agencies routinely quote $2,000 to $15,000 to move businesses off platforms they outgrew
Research tracking 892 domain migrations found the average site took 523 days to recover its search traffic, with 17% never recovering at all.

Ease is valuable early. Later, it becomes a constraint you pay for in other ways.

You're renting, not owning

The most expensive discovery businesses make usually come when they try to leave that beautiful website they built? It can't move with them.

Wix: no export, period

Wix's own help center states it plainly:

"To clarify, the content you build on Wix belongs to you (see Wix's Terms of Use). The reason you can't use another host for your Wix site is that the SaaS architecture does not support external hosting since it uses Wix’s proprietary technology and relies on Wix’s services to operate. "

You can export limited data:

Blog posts via CSV (capped at 1,000 items)
Product lists (up to 5,000)

But the website itself? The design, page structure, custom styling, forms? All of that stays behind.

As one web design professional put it: "When you use Wix, you are simply renting a website."

The lock-in extends further than most people realise. A 15-year Wix customer complained in the company's forums after discovering there's no migration tool to move from Wix Editor to Wix Studio:

“Therefore, it seems that WIX is focusing on developing and improving WIX Studio as their main product for advanced web design, and the migration feature from WIX editor to WIX Studio is not a high priority for them in 2024.”

Even upgrading within the same company means rebuilding from scratch.

Squarespace: better, but with gaps

Squarespace offers XML export, but with significant holes:

Album pages, cover pages, portfolio pages, and store pages cannot be exported
Squarespace 7.1 has no XML export support at all
Images may not migrate with content, leaving only reference links that break the moment you cancel

Shopify: subtler lock-in

Products, customers, and orders can be exported cleanly to CSV. But:

Analytics history? Gone permanently
Customer browsing behaviour? Can't take it
Abandoned cart sequences? Stays behind
Customer passwords? Can't migrate (encryption), so every customer must reset credentials.

One industry analysis warned: "The average store waits 3-5 years before considering a platform switch. That's 3-5 years of customer behavior data trapped in a system you can't take with you."

GoDaddy: nothing at all

GoDaddy Website Builder has no export tools whatsoever.

Migration guides explicitly advise users to "right-click each image and 'Save Image As'" to preserve their content. WPBeginner reports hearing "almost every week" from small business owners who selected GoDaddy for its simplicity and now face expensive migrations.

The bottom line: What starts as a $200/year website can cost $2,000 to $10,000 to migrate when you outgrow it, plus months of disrupted traffic.

How $10 a month becomes $116 a month

The advertised price bears little resemblance to actual operating costs once you factor in transaction fees, app subscriptions, and feature paywalls.

Transaction fees compound quickly

Shopify's structure:

Basic plans charge 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction through Shopify Payments
Using any third-party gateway? Add 0.6% to 2% platform fee on top
Using PayPal on Basic? That's PayPal's 2.9% + $0.30, plus Shopify's 2% = ~5% per transaction

For a store doing $10,000/month in sales: ~$320 monthly in processing fees on Basic, rising to $500+ if using non-Shopify payments.

Squarespace's hidden tiers:

Basic plan: 2% commerce fee + 7% fee on digital products
Eliminating digital product fees? Requires Advanced at $99/month (6x price increase)

App costs add up invisibly

Shopify's 8,000+ app marketplace looks like an asset until you realise essential functionality requires multiple paid subscriptions:

Feature	Monthly Cost
Email marketing	$5 to $100+
SEO tools	$10 to $50
Reviews/UGC	$10 to $100
Upselling tools	$20 to $50
Live chat	$15 to $100

Real-world app spending: $15/month for minimal stores to $200+ for scaling operations. Many apps use usage-based pricing that escalates with sales volume.

Feature paywalls force upgrades

Wix: Removing branding requires Light plan ($204 annually just to look professional)
Wix: Abandoned cart recovery requires Business plan at $39/month
Squarespace: Advanced analytics requires Plus plan at $39/month
Shopify: Advanced reporting requires $399/month; custom reports require Plus at $2,300/month

A real Year 1 breakdown

Small Wix ecommerce store starting with the advertised Core plan at $29/month:

Cost	Amount
Core plan	$348
Professional email (Google Workspace)	$59
Two essential premium apps	$240
Payment processing on $24K sales	~$750
Year 1 total	~$1,397

That's an effective cost of $116/month. 4x the advertised price before any business growth.

The technical ceiling you can't see until you hit it

Beyond direct costs, website builders impose technical constraints that limit SEO performance, design flexibility, and integration capabilities.

Page speed: most sites fail Google's benchmarks

Testing by Tooltester revealed Wix's average mobile load time reached 20.73 seconds in some analyses. The ideal? 1 to 2 seconds.

Squarespace requires 609KB of JavaScript before background images even load.

These aren't user errors. They're platform-level limitations baked into the architecture. With properly configured WordPress hosting, sites routinely pass Core Web Vitals because you control the technical stack.

SEO limitations prevent competing at scale

URL structure restrictions:

Wix forces /post/ prefixes for blogs, /product-page/ for products
Shopify mandates /products/, /collections/, /pages/ prefixes
These rigid structures cannot be changed

Schema and technical SEO:

GoDaddy cannot add schema markup at all
Squarespace auto-generates a schema that can't be edited or removed
Wix provides no sitemap editing or robots.txt access

Only Webflow offers full control over meta tags, robots.txt, 301 redirects, and XML sitemaps without coding.

Design and content limits

Wix: Cannot change templates after initial selection; redesigning = rebuilding entirely
GoDaddy: One colour and one font for the entire site
Webflow: Hard ceiling of 10,000 CMS items
Shopify: REST API capped at 40 requests/minute on Basic

The jump from Webflow Business ($49/month) to Enterprise? Approximately 32x to $15,000+ annually.

Why does it feel fine until it doesn't

Each platform serves specific use cases well before becoming a constraint.

Wix

Works well for: Simple business sites, portfolios, personal projects, and very small ecommerce

Becomes limiting when:

You need complex inventory rules or multi-channel selling
Sites exceed 50+ pages (speed becomes an SEO liability)
You want to change your design significantly (template lock-in)

Squarespace

Works well for: Creatives, photographers, portfolios, consultants

Becomes limiting when:

Product catalogues exceed 10,000 items
You need subscriptions or B2B features
Digital product files exceed 300MB (vs Shopify's 5GB)
Transaction fees of 5-7% become significant

Shopify

Works well for: Serious ecommerce of all sizes

Becomes limiting when:

Transaction fees erode margins ($50K monthly sales = $1,000+ in extra fees)
Content marketing needs outpace basic blog functionality
B2B features require Plus at $2,300+/month
App costs exceed $500-$1,000/month

The pattern in the data

Analysis shows only 0.82% of the top 1 million websites use Wix, compared to 29.13% using WordPress among the top 100,000.

As one researcher noted, Wix's market share inversely correlates with website traffic. “The more traffic a website gets, the less likely it is to use Wix.”

The real cost of leaving

When businesses outgrow their platforms, migration costs expose the hidden "exit tax."

Migration pricing

Complexity	Cost Range
DIY	$0-$500 (40-200+ hours work)
Simple sites	$500-$2,000
Medium complexity	$2,000-$5,000
Ecommerce	$1,500-$15,000+
Complex/enterprise	$5,000-$50,000+

Freelancer rates: $50-$150/hour. Rush jobs carry 25-50% premiums.

SEO risks can devastate traffic for years

Research analysing 892 domain migrations:

Average recovery time: 523 days (up to 1.5 years)
17% of sites failed to recover even after 1,000 days
One documented case: 90% traffic loss, 1.5-year recovery

The primary risk? URL structure changes. Wix URLs don't match WordPress conventions. Squarespace blog URLs (/blog/post-title) differ from WordPress's default format.

Missing or broken 301 redirects are the leading cause of SEO drops during migration.

Worse still: To maintain redirects after leaving Wix, you must keep paying for your Wix plan.

With WordPress on managed hosting, you own your site files and database. Switching hosts means moving your actual website, not rebuilding it from memory.

What businesses wish they'd known

Migration testimonials reveal consistent regrets.

Reddit users consistently express surprise that there is no "export button". One user who lost 90% of search traffic documented their 1.5-year recovery:

WordPress vs proprietary: the numbers

The WP Engine TCO study found WordPress offers up to 44% lower Total Cost of Ownership:

Factor	WordPress	Builders
Core software	Free	$192-$432/year minimum
Transaction fees	0% platform fees	0.6-7% depending on plan
Plugins	60,000+ (many free)	Paid marketplace only
Migration	Change hosts freely	"Rebuild tax"

When you factor in managed WordPress hosting with built-in caching, CDN, and automatic updates, the total cost often undercuts website builders while delivering better performance.

The consistent theme: platform selection requires evaluating 2-5 year needs, not just immediate convenience.

The convenience-constraint tradeoff

Website builders deliver genuine value for specific use cases. Wix and Squarespace enable beautiful sites without code. Shopify provides purpose-built ecommerce infrastructure. Webflow offers design freedom with clean code.

But the research reveals a consistent pattern: ease of entry correlates with difficulty of exit.

Proprietary systems that simplify setup create lock-in, turning affordable monthly fees into expensive migration projects. Transaction fees that seem small at launch compound into significant margin erosion at scale.

The alternative? WordPress paired with quality managed hosting gives you the best of both worlds: a user-friendly CMS with thousands of themes and plugins, plus full ownership of your site and the freedom to move whenever you want.

The question isn't whether a platform is "easy" today. It's whether it will still serve your needs in 2-3 years, and what leaving will cost if it doesn't.

The most expensive website isn't the one with the highest monthly fee. It's the one that costs $5,000 to $15,000 to replace when you outgrow it.

A smarter starting point

If you're launching a new site or planning an escape from a platform that's outlived its usefulness, choosing the right foundation matters more than the monthly fee.

Hosting.com's Managed WordPress represents what modern WordPress hosting should look like: enterprise-grade infrastructure without enterprise complexity.

The technical foundations are solid. AMD EPYC processors, NVMe storage, and Cloudflare Enterprise CDN deliver sub-100ms response times globally. Each WordPress installation runs in its own isolated container, so you're not sharing resources with thousands of other sites on the same server.

What matters more for the long term: you own everything. Your site files, your database, your content. If you ever want to move (though the performance guarantee suggests you won't), you can export your entire WordPress installation and take it anywhere. No rebuild tax. No starting from scratch. No 18-month SEO recovery.

The migration path works both ways too. Their team handles unlimited free migrations from any platform, with a preview URL to test before going live. If your site doesn't load faster after the move, they'll give you a year free.

Pricing starts at a few dollars per month, with WP Rocket and malware protection included. Compare that to the hidden costs we've outlined: no transaction fees eating into margins, no forced upgrades to remove branding, no app marketplace draining your budget.

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Harry Boxhall