Wix vs Squarespace vs hiring someone

For a first web presence — yes, they're a reasonable starting point. The templates are professional, the setup is accessible, and you can be live quickly. The limitations come later: mobile speed that can affect search rankings, no structured data built in for AI search visibility, and a time cost that compounds with every change you make yourself. Whether "good enough" is enough depends on how much you expect from your site. If it's a placeholder, it's fine. If it needs to work — to be found, to convert, to grow — the gap between "good enough" and "actually good" is real.

The subscription is small. The time is not. Most owners underestimate how long design, copy, and SEO take when you're learning them as you go — and then forget to count the ongoing hours for updates, fixes, and changes after launch. There's also the less visible cost: a slower site that ranks lower on Google, and a site without AI-search signals that's invisible to buyers who now ask ChatGPT or Perplexity for recommendations. The honest total is higher than the monthly platform fee.

Yes, and it'll look better than doing it yourself. But you'll inherit a Squarespace site — with its mobile speed ceiling and its absence of AI-search signals — and you'll be managing it yourself once the freelancer is done. Gameplan builds and runs: ongoing changes, updates, and optimisation included. If you want a one-time build you're happy to manage yourself, a freelancer is a reasonable option and we'll say so. If you want something that works without becoming your responsibility, that's a different conversation.

It is. Webflow produces cleaner code, better mobile speed scores, and more design flexibility than either. If you're a designer or you're hiring one full-time, it's a serious tool. The catch: Webflow's editor is built for designers, not business owners. Making changes post-launch typically means going back to a Webflow specialist — which means it's not really DIY, and it's not really managed either. You get the complexity of a custom build without the ongoing support. Gameplan builds in Astro (a modern static framework), hits the same performance ceiling as Webflow or better, and includes everything that happens after launch: updates, SEO, AI search signals, and ongoing changes. You get the result without owning the technical layer.

On Google — to some degree, yes. Most builder-hosted sites have basic on-page SEO, and they'll be indexed. Whether they rank well enough to bring in real traffic is a separate question: slower load times on mobile and the absence of proper structured data are real disadvantages. On AI search — no, not reliably. Most DIY builder sites have none of the signals that get businesses cited in AI-generated answers (structured data, answer-first content, FAQ schema). A buyer who asks ChatGPT who to hire for what you do in your city will almost certainly not see your site in the answer.

Yes — and more cleanly than a builder-hosted site. Your site is standard portable code in a repository under your own account. Your domain, your analytics, your asset. Any competent developer can read it, modify it, or take it over. If you leave Gameplan, you take the site with you and run it yourself or hand it to someone else. There's no proprietary platform you're locked to. We build it this way deliberately — the relationship should earn itself, not enforce itself.