For most small businesses, build on WordPress. Wix and Squarespace are quicker to start, but you rent them forever — you can’t move your site off their platform, the monthly fee never ends, and you live inside their limits. WordPress you own outright: your content, your domain, your host, no platform tax. The old catch — that WordPress was hard to build on — is gone now that AI can build the pages for you.
A florist emailed me last month, stuck. She built a nice little site on a drag-and-drop platform two years ago, her business grew, and now she wanted to move it to a faster host and add a real store. The answer from the platform: you can’t. Not “it’s tricky” — you can’t. Her content, her layout, her two years of little tweaks all live inside their walls, and the only door out is to rebuild from scratch somewhere else. That’s the deal nobody reads before they sign up: the easy on-ramp is a locked room.
Here’s the thing the platform ads won’t tell you. Wix and Squarespace aren’t website builders so much as website rentals. You pay $16 to $49 a month — call it $200 to $600 a year, forever — and the day you stop, the site goes dark. You never owned it. You were leasing a storefront that sets its own prices and can’t be picked up and moved. That’s not a website. That’s rent on your own front door.
“A rented platform makes the first afternoon easy. WordPress makes every afternoon after it yours.”— Vincent Jordan
WordPress is the opposite arrangement. It’s open-source, it runs on any host you choose, and everything on it — your pages, your domain, your customer list — is yours to keep, export, and move whenever you want. Roughly two out of every five websites on the internet run on it, so it isn’t going anywhere and nearly everything plugs into it. The one honest knock on WordPress used to be real: more powerful, but harder to build on than the drag-and-drop crowd. That knock is exactly what just expired.
So which should you actually pick?
If you want a personal page you’ll never move and never grow, a rented platform is fine — no shame in it. But if this is a business, pick the thing you own. Designer Talk is an AI page builder that lets you build WordPress pages by describing them in plain English — no drag-and-drop, no design skills. It closes the only gap that ever made WordPress harder than Wix: now you describe the page and it appears, on a site you actually own. (Get started with Designer Talk today and build yours as you read.) Set your colors and font once in Brand Settings, then it’s one plain sentence per section. Here’s the flow, for a fictional florist in Madison:
create a hero section for Wildflower & Vine, a florist in Madison — headline about fresh seasonal arrangements and same-day local delivery, our phone number (608) 555-0151, and a button that says Order Flowers.
Now the photo — photos never go in the section prompt. Hit the + button in the section chat, choose Generate Image, and describe the shot:
A bright florist studio with buckets of fresh seasonal flowers, a wooden work table, soft natural light through a big front window.
It saves straight to your Media Library. Click Insert on the image, tell the section “use this as the hero background,” then keep talking until it’s right:
Add a line that we deliver across Madison seven days a week.
Make the Order Flowers button bigger.
Add a small link for wedding and event inquiries.
Do that for each section and you’ve got a real site — on a platform you own, that no company can lock you out of or charge you rent to keep. Wix and Squarespace make the first afternoon easy. WordPress makes every afternoon after it yours. Pick the one you can still move in two years.
Describe the site you want in plain English — and keep it, move it, and grow it on WordPress you own.
Get Started Today