Wix, Squarespace, or a web designer for a plumber?

You're a one-truck plumber in Lake Country. You need a website. You've got three real options in front of you. Build it yourself on Wix or Squarespace. Hire a freelance designer. Or use a service built for contractors. Each one has a real cost that doesn't show up until later.

Wix and Squarespace: cheap to start, expensive to keep up

Wix and Squarespace are genuinely easy to use. You can drag a few blocks around. You can have a homepage up in an afternoon. The plans usually run $20 to $40 a month. That sounds cheap next to hiring someone.

Here's what the monthly price doesn't tell you. These platforms are built for photographers, artists, and small retail shops. They're not built for local service businesses. Those businesses live or die on local search. Getting a plumbing site to show up when someone searches "emergency plumber Waukesha" takes real setup work. That means service pages, location pages, schema markup, and review integration. Most plumbers end up spending a lot of unpaid hours learning this themselves. Or they pay someone else on top of the monthly fee to do it.

• Low sticker price, but the setup work often falls on you
• Templates aren't built with local trade searches in mind
• Adding features like online booking or a review widget often means new paid plugins

A freelance designer: better result, unpredictable cost

Hiring a freelance web designer usually gets you a nicer looking site than doing it yourself. Prices for a small business site typically run between $1,500 and $6,000 upfront. It depends on the person and the scope.

The catch shows up after launch. Most freelancers hand you the finished site and move on to the next client. Say you need a new page, a price update, or a fix six months later. That's a new invoice. Sometimes it's a wait while they fit you into their schedule. And if that freelancer stops taking on work, you can be stuck. You won't know how to update your own site.

• Higher upfront cost than a DIY platform
• Ongoing changes usually cost extra, billed separately
• Quality varies a lot from one freelancer to the next

A service built for contractors

The third option is a service built for trades: plumbers, roofers, HVAC, electricians. The pitch is simple. The site already knows what a plumbing business needs. That means service pages for drain cleaning, water heater repair, and emergency calls. It also means location pages for the towns you serve. You don't have to figure that out from a blank template.

Tanner Preserve works this way. It's Run at $97 a month or Grow at $297 a month. Every new site starts with a 14-day trial. The site gets built during that window at no charge. Your card goes on file. Nothing is charged until the trial ends. If it's not a fit, you walk away having paid nothing.

What it actually costs after year one

Here's the honest math, adding up a full year for a typical one-truck shop.

• Wix or Squarespace: roughly $300 to $500 a year in platform fees, plus whatever time or money it takes to rank locally
• Freelance designer: $1,500 to $6,000 upfront, then $200 to $500 or more for updates through the year
• A trade-built service: roughly $1,164 (Run) to $3,564 (Grow) a year, with search setup and updates built in

The trade-built option often lands in the middle. That's true once you count the hidden hours of a DIY build. It's also true once you count the surprise invoices from a freelancer.

Which one actually fits you

Say you're handy, have spare evenings, and don't mind learning the local search side yourself. Then Wix or Squarespace can work fine to start. If you want a specific custom look and don't mind paying for changes later, a freelancer can get you there. Say you want a site built around how plumbers actually get found and booked. And say you don't want to teach yourself SEO on the side. Then the trade-built route tends to save the most time.

I put together a full side by side of fifteen website builders and services on the compare page. It covers how each one handles the local search side. That's the part that matters most for a plumber trying to get found in Waukesha County.