Website Builder or Real Hosting?
5 questions. Honest answer — including lock-in risk and what it costs to leave.
What are you building?
Will you need custom logic or a real backend?
Think: user accounts, payment flows, APIs, data that changes per user.
How important is Google ranking?
Not a minor question — builder choice has a direct architectural impact on organic rankings.
How likely are you to outgrow this in 2 years?
Be honest — migration costs are real. The right answer here shapes everything about which platform is safe.
Monthly budget for your platform?
Include everything — platform fee, apps, plugins, transaction fees.
Common Questions
No. Wix provides zero code export — no HTML, no CSS, no database export of your design or structure. Blog posts export via RSS and products via CSV, but the site design must be rebuilt from scratch on any other platform. Agency migrations typically cost $1,000–$5,000 and take 4–10 weeks, with worst-case SEO recovery averaging 523 days.
On Framer's Pro plan ($30/month), exceeding 100 GB of monthly bandwidth takes your site completely offline — not throttled, offline. Visitors see a blank page or error until the next billing cycle resets. There is no burst mode, no option to pay extra to keep the site running. The Scale plan ($100/month) charges overage fees instead.
Yes, architecturally. Webflow generates clean static HTML and CSS without platform framework overhead. Sites consistently score 90+ on PageSpeed Insights without additional optimisation. Wix sites average 35–55 on mobile Lighthouse. A B2B platform migrating to Webflow reported 128% organic traffic growth. For SEO-critical sites, Webflow is significantly stronger.
More than the plan price suggests. The $25/month Pro plan gives 100 credits/month. Authentication costs ~1.2 credits, complex features more. Building a real MVP with login, dashboard, payments, and basic CRUD typically uses 150–300 credits over a few weeks, pushing you to the $50/month Business plan or credit top-ups before your first user.
When SEO is your primary growth channel (builders cap at lower Lighthouse scores), when you run e-commerce with growth plans (Wix charges 2–4% transaction fees plus Stripe fees), when your app needs a real backend with custom server-side logic, or when you expect to scale and want to avoid platform lock-in. Real hosting from $6/month on a VPS gives you root access and no platform fees.