Everyone wants to believe they have a website. WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix make that feeling cheap and easy. You point, click, pick a template, maybe drop in a logo, and you've got something that looks like a website. But looking like a website and being a website that actually works are two completely different things.
Here's what these platforms really do: they sell you autonomy. They tell you it's simple, it's yours, you can update it anytime without waiting for a developer. That's a powerful message for someone who just wants something live. But that promise falls apart the second you try to use it. You realize the theme doesn't quite fit your business, so you install a plugin. Then another plugin to optimize images. Then something to handle forms better. Then something to speed things up because the whole thing is running like a dump truck now.
The bloat starts immediately. A fresh WordPress install with a decent theme and four essential plugins is already 2MB of JavaScript before you've written a single word. Squarespace and Wix ship templates stuffed with animation libraries, tracking code, and feature scaffolding you'll never use. The platforms are optimized for flexibility, not for speed. They're built to serve a thousand different use cases, which means they serve yours with 90 percent waste.
Google doesn't care that you can update it yourself. Google cares about Core Web Vitals. It cares about Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift. It cares about page load time because users care about page load time. A slow site doesn't rank, and a site that doesn't rank doesn't generate calls. If you're a local service business trying to compete in your market, this is not theoretical. This is how you lose customers to the guy whose site loads in 800 milliseconds instead of your 3.5 seconds.
I'm not anti-platform. Plenty of people should use WordPress. Hobbyists. Bloggers. People who just want a digital footprint without thinking about it. For that use case, these platforms work fine. But if you're running a plumbing company, an HVAC contractor, a concrete business, or any local service where the website's job is to capture calls and prove credibility, you need something built for that outcome. You need a site that loads fast, that ranks for your service area, that converts visitors into leads. A Squarespace template doesn't do that. It looks fine. It might even look better than a clean high-performance site. But it doesn't do the job.
The thing about maintenance is it never stays the same. WordPress asks you to update the core, update your theme, update your plugins. You skip a few updates. Something breaks. Now you're locked out of your admin panel or your site's down entirely. You either fix it yourself, which means downtime and stress, or you pay someone to fix it, which defeats the whole "do it yourself" premise. Squarespace and Wix don't give you those problems because you don't own the infrastructure, but you also can't control anything. If they change a feature you relied on, you adapt or you're stuck. You're renting a website, not owning one.
The cost adds up too. WordPress is technically free, but you're paying for hosting, SSL, backups, plugins that actually work, and eventually a developer when things break or you need something custom. Squarespace and Wix charge you monthly. Twenty, thirty, forty dollars a month. Over five years, that's 1200 to 2400 dollars. And at the end of it, you don't own anything. You don't own the code. You don't own the data. You're a tenant.
A lean site built with actual intent looks different. It's fast because it has to be. It's clean because every element serves the outcome. It loads in under a second because every decision was made to serve speed. It ranks because Google sees a fast, mobile-friendly, well-structured page. It converts because the structure was designed around what a visitor needs to do, not around what a template builder thought looked nice.
The "update it yourself" pitch sounds great in a sales demo. In practice, most local business owners don't touch their website after launch. They're running their business. So the real question isn't whether you can update it yourself. The real question is whether it's built to perform without constant attention. A well-built static site does that. A plugin-dependent WordPress install doesn't.
Use whatever tool fits your situation. But be honest about what your website is actually supposed to do. If the answer is generate calls, rank locally, and load fast on a phone, then the tool needs to match that job. Not the other way around.