The thing nobody selling you either option will say
Website builders are good now. Not "good considering," actually good. A careful person with decent photographs can produce something on Squarespace that looks better than plenty of professional work from a few years ago, in a weekend, for the price of a couple of coffees a month.
If someone tells you builders are all slow rubbish, they're selling something. If someone tells you a custom site is always a waste of money, they're selling something too.
What follows is the actual tradeoff.
What builders are genuinely good at
Getting you live fast. Days, not weeks. For a new business that needs to exist online before it needs to look distinctive, that's the whole ballgame.
Letting you change things yourself. This is the big one and it's underrated. Changing your hours at 9pm without emailing anyone is worth real money, and it's the single most common reason people outgrow a developer rather than a platform.
Bundling the boring parts. Hosting, security patches, SSL certificates, backups. All handled. You will never think about any of it, which is correct, because thinking about it is not your job.
Built-in commerce and booking. If you need to sell things or take appointments, these platforms have solved that already. Rebuilding it custom is expensive and usually pointless.
Where builders start to hurt
Speed. Builders ship a lot of general-purpose code so the editor can do anything, plus whatever apps you've added. That weight lands on your visitor's phone. It's usually survivable and occasionally bad, and it gets worse with each app you install.
The layout you can't quite get. Every builder has a ceiling. You'll want something slightly different from what the template does, and you'll spend an evening fighting it, and you'll settle. Once or twice is fine. Every month is a signal.
Cost creep. The platform fee is the start. Then a booking app, an email tool, a popup thing, a gallery upgrade. Each looks small. Check the annual total sometime, because it's frequently the surprise in this whole comparison.
Portability. This is the one to actually think about. Your content lives in their system in their format. Moving to another platform later means rebuilding, not transferring. You're renting, and rent goes up.
What hand-coded actually gets you
Speed by default, because there's nothing there that isn't needed. No editor runtime, no plugin stack, no general-purpose code handling cases your page doesn't have.
Exactly the design you wanted, rather than the closest thing the template allows.
Files you own. HTML and CSS are a standard. Any developer can pick them up. There's no platform to be locked into and nothing to migrate if you move host.
Nothing to update. No plugin security patches, because there are no plugins.
What hand-coded actually costs you
I should be as clear about this side.
You usually can't restructure it yourself. Text edits can be made easy — this site has a proper editor for exactly that reason. But "move that section above the other one and add a photo grid" generally means asking someone. If you want to redesign your own pages on a whim, a builder is straightforwardly better and I'd tell you so.
It costs more up front, because someone is doing the work instead of a template.
You're dependent on a person, not a platform. A one-person shop can get busy or get hit by a bus. Ask what happens to your site if that person disappears, and don't accept a vague answer. (Mine: you own the domain and the content, and the files are plain HTML any developer can host anywhere.)
How to actually choose
Skip the feature comparisons. Three questions decide it.
How often will you change the structure of your site, not just the words? Often means builder. Rarely means it doesn't matter. Almost never means custom is fine.
Is your website a business card, or is it doing the selling? If people find you by word of mouth and use the site to check you're real and get your number, a builder is genuinely sufficient and spending more is a waste. If you're competing for people who don't know you yet, the site is doing sales work, and how it performs starts to matter commercially.
How long do you expect to keep it? Under two years, rent. Five or more, ownership and portability start to compound.
Where I land, stated plainly
I think builders are the right answer for a lot of small businesses and I'd rather say so than pretend otherwise. If your site is a well-maintained business card, keep the one you have and spend the money on something that grows the business.
Custom becomes worth it when the site has an actual job to do, when speed on a phone affects whether people call you, and when you want to own the thing outright instead of renting it forever.
That's a real distinction, not a sales line. It's also why I offer to redesign a homepage for free before anyone commits to anything. If you look at it and think your current site was fine, that's a legitimate outcome and it costs you nothing to find out.
Built on Squarespace or Wix and wondering whether it's holding you back? Send me the URL and I'll tell you honestly, including if the answer is "this is fine, leave it alone."