The Real Cost of 'Free' Website Builders for Irish Businesses

You have probably been told that starting your business website for free is the smart move. Get something online quickly, see whether it brings in customers, then invest more once it is working. It sounds reasonable.

I was on a call this week with a business owner who had followed that advice three years ago. She had spent those three years on a Wix Core plan, paying around $29 a month, building out her services pages, writing a blog, accumulating Google reviews that all linked back to her Wix URL. When she came to us wanting a proper WordPress site, the first thing she asked was how long migration would take.

The answer was not what she expected. Because Wix does not export your site.

What 'Free' Actually Means on a Website Builder

The Wix free plan is real. It costs nothing. Here is what it comes with.

Your website address will be username.wixsite.com/yourbusiness, not yourbusiness.ie or yourbusiness.com. Wix displays its own advertising on every page. Storage is capped at 500MB. Bandwidth is limited to 1GB per month. You cannot sell anything through it.

That is not a business website. That is a demonstration environment dressed up as one.

Picture the scenario. Your potential customer searches for your business on Google, clicks through, and lands on a page with Wix advertisements running alongside your logo and your services. They have no way of knowing those ads are not related to your business. You have no way to remove them without paying for a plan. First impressions in that moment are doing real work, and not in your favour.

The free plan is designed as an on-ramp, not a destination. Wix's intention is that you will see enough value to upgrade. That is a reasonable business model for them. Whether it is a reasonable starting point for yours is a different question.

The Business Plan Trap

The minimum Wix plan that removes the branded subdomain, removes the advertising, and gives you something a business can credibly use is the Core plan. Wix prices this at $29 per month, billed annually. That is $348 per year. EUR pricing varies by region and billing cycle, but runs broadly in the same range.

Squarespace, which markets itself as the design-focused alternative, prices its Core plan at $23 per month ($276 per year). Their Plus plan, which unlocks fuller commerce features, sits at $39 per month. Squarespace includes a free domain in year one on most paid plans; that benefit drops away on renewal, and the domain becomes a separate annual cost.

Neither price is outrageous taken in isolation. The problem is what they accumulate to over time, and what you get in return for the spend.

A Wix Core subscription for three years: approximately $1,044 before any price adjustments. Squarespace Core over the same period: around $828. Your content, your design, and your growing search profile are locked inside each respective platform for that entire time.

The Three-Year Maths

Here is a direct comparison across 36 months using published pricing and what each platform includes.

Platform	Annual Cost (approx.)	3-Year Total	Custom Domain	Ads on Site	Full Content Export
Wix Free	€0	€0	No (Wix subdomain)	Yes	No
Wix Core	~€330	~€990	Yes	No	Partial only
Squarespace Core	~€280	~€840	Year 1 only	No	Partial only
Web60 (WordPress)	€60	€180	Connect own domain	No	Full ownership

Note: Wix and Squarespace prices are based on published USD rates and vary in EUR by region. Web60 is €60 per year all-inclusive, with the same price on day 365 as day one.

A craft jewellery designer in Killarney recently worked through this comparison with us. She had been on Wix Core for two and a half years, paying monthly. When she added it up, the platform had cost her over €800, on a website she could not take with her and which had, by her own account, limited what she could do with her Google ranking. The gap between that figure and €150 for equivalent time on Web60 was not abstract any more.

You Do Not Own What You Build on Wix

This is the part that surprises most business owners when they hear it.

When you build a website on Wix, the files live on Wix's servers in Wix's proprietary format. You are the customer. You are not the owner.

If you decide to leave, here is what Wix allows you to take with you. Blog posts, via RSS feed. Product listings, as a CSV file with names and prices. That is broadly it.

Page layouts cannot be exported. Your visual design, the spacing, the typography, the section structure you spent time building, none of it is portable. Forms cannot be exported. Image galleries do not transfer in any usable format. You are not migrating; you are starting over.

This is confirmed in Wix's own support documentation. It is not a bug. It is a structural feature of how website builders sustain their recurring revenue model. The more you build inside their platform, the harder it becomes to justify leaving it.

The same principle applies across most visual website builders, as we explored in our piece on why Canva-built sites are not really yours to keep. The tools are convenient. The ownership trade-off is real.

WordPress works the other way. Your content lives in a database you control. Your files sit on a server you own access to. If you ever want to move hosts, hand the site to a developer, or switch providers entirely, you take everything with you. Every page, every post, every image, every setting.

One thing worth knowing before you begin a WordPress migration from Wix: if you have built search history on a Wix URL and move to a new domain, some of that history will not transfer immediately even with proper redirects. Google takes time to consolidate authority across a domain change. The best time to start on the right platform is before you have built that history. The second best time is now, with a clear migration plan.

The SEO Ceiling You Will Eventually Hit

Wix has genuinely improved its SEO capabilities over the past few years. It generates sitemaps automatically, supports custom meta descriptions, and handles basic structured data for some content types. That is real progress.

There is still a ceiling. Most growing businesses will find it.

WordPress gives you complete access to your URL structure, your canonical configuration, your site's internal architecture, and the full plugin ecosystem. Tools like Yoast and Rank Math provide granular control over how search engines read and interpret every page on your site. You can manage redirect chains precisely, implement advanced schema markup, control crawl budget, and adjust your indexing strategy as your business evolves.

When organic search is a genuine growth lever for your business, that level of control is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between building SEO authority that compounds over time and working within the constraints of what a platform lets you adjust.

The One Scenario Where a Website Builder Makes Sense

There is a situation where a free or cheap website builder is genuinely the right answer, and I want to be straight with you about it.

If you need a single page online by Friday — a temporary landing page for an event, a holding page while a permanent site is under development — and you are certain it will never need a second page, a contact form, or an eCommerce section, then Wix Free or Squarespace Free Trial are perfectly reasonable tools. Fast. No setup required. No ongoing cost. Gone when the purpose is served.

That is the legitimate use case. It is also a minority of what Irish businesses are actually trying to do online. Most local firms need a website that builds an audience, handles enquiries, grows with them over time, and earns ground on Google. For that job, starting on a platform you cannot take with you creates work you will eventually have to undo.

I got this wrong early in my career. A client asked what they should use to get something online quickly with minimal spend. I suggested starting with Wix's free plan to test the idea. They upgraded to Core a month later and never migrated. Three years on, they were paying Wix every month for a site they had long outgrown, with no clean exit. I should have told them to start on WordPress with a managed host that handled the setup. The initial simplicity was not worth the ceiling they later hit.

What WordPress Actually Costs When You Account for Everything

The standard objection to WordPress is that it is more complicated and more expensive once you add hosting, plugins, themes, and maintenance on top of the free software.

That argument made more sense five years ago. It makes much less sense now.

Managed WordPress platforms have changed the equation significantly. Web60 runs entirely on WordPress at €60 per year: an AI website builder that produces a professionally designed site in under 60 seconds, hosting on enterprise-grade Irish infrastructure, free SSL, nightly backups, malware scanning, and privacy-first analytics that do not require a cookie consent banner. You describe your business. The site is built. You own it from day one.

That is what €60 a year buys you at Web60, with no add-ons required and no renewal surprise on the second invoice.

WordPress also powers roughly 43% of all websites on the internet, according to W3Techs, the web technology survey organisation that has tracked this across millions of sites for years. It is not a niche technical choice. It is the majority choice, made by local businesses, publishers, and organisations that need a platform they can trust to last.

If you have been quoted a monthly maintenance plan on top of your hosting, our breakdown of what agencies actually charge for WordPress maintenance, and whether you need it is worth reading before you commit to any ongoing spend.

The Decision That Lives Underneath This One

No website platform stays free for long. The question is where the costs appear: in monthly fees, in missing functionality, in migration work down the line, or in the ceiling you reach when your business grows beyond what the platform was built to handle.

A free website builder is not free. It is deferred. The invoice arrives later, in a different currency.

Your business website is an asset you will spend years building an audience around. Starting on a platform where your content, your design, and your SEO work belong to you rather than to the platform changes what is possible in year two and three. That is the decision worth making clearly, upfront, before the cost of switching becomes part of the calculation.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Wix free plan good enough for a business website?

No. The Wix free plan gives you a branded subdomain (username.wixsite.com/yoursitename) rather than your own domain, displays Wix advertisements on every page, limits storage to 500MB and bandwidth to 1GB per month, and disables all eCommerce functionality. For a business that needs to appear professional online, the free plan is a demo environment rather than a working business website.

How much does Wix actually cost per year in Ireland?

The minimum Wix plan that removes ads and allows a custom domain (the Core plan) is priced at $29 per month billed annually, equating to approximately $348 per year. EUR pricing is broadly similar but varies by region. Over three years at the Core level, Wix costs roughly the equivalent of €840 to €990 depending on currency rates and any plan changes.

Can I move my website from Wix to WordPress?

Not without significant manual work. Wix does not offer a full site export. Blog content can be extracted via RSS feed and product data as CSV, but page layouts, design elements, and forms cannot be exported in any format that other platforms can read. Moving from Wix to WordPress typically means rebuilding the site from scratch rather than migrating it. This is a by-design characteristic of how the Wix platform works.

What is the real difference between Wix and WordPress?

Wix is a closed platform where your website lives entirely within their ecosystem and you have no access to the underlying files. WordPress is open-source software that you host on a server you control, or through a managed host. WordPress gives you full ownership of your content and data, access to tens of thousands of plugins and themes, and the ability to move your site to any host at any time. According to W3Techs, WordPress powers roughly 43% of all websites globally. It is the majority choice, not the complicated one.

Is WordPress too complicated for someone without technical skills?

It used to be. The traditional route of choosing hosting, installing WordPress, configuring themes, and managing plugins was a real barrier for non-technical business owners. AI website builders have changed that. Platforms like Web60 let you describe your business and receive a fully designed WordPress site in under 60 seconds, with everything configured and running. The technical complexity has been handled. What you get is the full power of WordPress without the learning curve that put people off it in the first place.

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