There was a time when WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix had a real place in the market.
They solved a real problem. Back then, a hard-coded custom website was the top-tier option. It was better, but it was slower, harder to build, and expensive enough that a lot of small businesses were never seriously considering it. So platforms like WordPress became the middle ground. They let developers build faster, and they gave business owners a more reachable option.
That made sense then. It doesn't make much sense now.
The problem is that WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix were always compromise systems. They had to be. They were built to work for everybody, which means they were never built perfectly for anybody. They try to do a little bit of everything, for every kind of user, in every kind of situation. That sounds fine until you realize what it creates: more bloat, more limitations, more junk under the hood, more things slowing the site down, and more things getting in the way of ranking well on Google. And that's the part most business owners never get told.
As a car guy, the best way I know how to explain this is with cars.
Take a hard-coded website and compare it to a Bugatti Chiron. The Chiron is insanely quick. It looks incredible. It's comfortable. It's easy to drive. It does everything you could ever want a car to do, and it does it at a level almost no other car ever has. The problem is obvious: it's insanely expensive. That's what hard-coded websites used to be. They were the top-tier option. Better in every meaningful way, but priced out of reach for most small businesses.
Now take WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix and compare them to something like a BMW X6. The X6 tries to be everything. It wants to be sporty. It wants to be practical. It wants to be luxury. It wants to have some off-road attitude. But because it's trying to do all of that at once, it doesn't really do any of it well. It's not truly sporty. It's not a real off-roader. It's not especially comfortable because it's trying too hard to feel sporty. It's big and bulky, but it's not even that practical inside. So what do you end up with? A vehicle that tries to do everything and ends up being weirdly bad at almost all of it.
That's WordPress. That's Squarespace. That's Wix. They are built to be everything for everybody: builder, CMS, template system, plugin system, drag-and-drop editor, blog platform, business website, DIY tool, marketing tool. And because they try to do everything, they don't do the thing that actually matters especially well. They don't give you the cleanest structure. They don't give you the best performance. They don't give you the best speed. And they absolutely do not give you the best foundation for ranking on Google.
That's the real issue.
A website's first job is to get found. Not sit there looking decent. Not make the owner feel like they "have a website." Not give some developer a familiar dashboard. It needs to get discovered on Google. It needs to load fast. It needs clean structure. It needs solid infrastructure underneath it. Because those things affect ranking.
And right now, a lot of businesses are only getting away with these bad systems because their competitors are using the same bad systems. So you end up with a bunch of handicapped websites competing against other handicapped websites. One WordPress site outranks another because it's a little less bad. A Squarespace site beats a Wix site because it's a little cleaner. But they're all still compromised.
That works right up until somebody in that market builds it properly. The moment one competitor shows up with a hard-coded site built the right way, the whole search landscape changes. They take the spot. Everybody still sitting on bloated platform junk gets pushed back.
That's why this matters.
There was a time when the Bugatti was too expensive and the X6 was the reachable option. That's why WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix had a place. But today, with better systems, better workflows, automation, and AI, hard-coded websites can be built faster and cheaper than ever. So now the question is simple: if you can get the Bugatti for X6 money, why the hell would you buy the X6?
That's where this market is now. These platforms are still everywhere, not because they're the best option, but because they're the familiar option. Developers got comfortable with them. Agencies built their process around them. Business owners keep hearing the same names, so they assume that must still be the standard.
It isn't.
A lot of people are still paying hard-earned money for websites built on outdated systems by people who are more attached to their tools than they are committed to getting the best result. That's the real problem. WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix had their place. That place is shrinking fast. And at this point, a lot of business owners are not choosing them because they're better. They're choosing them because nobody told them the game changed.