The page-speed reality nobody on Wix wants to talk about
Wix templates load slow. This is not a controversial statement — it's measurable, and Google's own PageSpeed Insights confirms it on every Wix site we audit. A typical Wix template, even one labeled "fast" or "optimized," scores between 40 and 65 on mobile Lighthouse. The reason is structural: Wix renders every page through a heavy JavaScript framework that ships ~800kB of vendor code before your content paints. That overhead exists whether your site has 5 pages or 50, whether you customize it heavily or barely at all.
On 4G, a typical Wix homepage takes 3 to 6 seconds to render. On a contractor's 5-year-old iPhone with a weak signal at a job site, that climbs past 8 seconds — long enough for 40% of mobile visitors to bounce. Google's own data shows that pages above 3 seconds lose 32% of visitors before they ever see your business name. For a local service business where every visitor cost you $5 to $15 in Google Ads, that's thousands of wasted dollars per year.
ANTHONY. builds your site on Cloudflare's edge network with hand-coded HTML and only the JavaScript your specific features actually need. The result is a 95+ Lighthouse score on mobile, sub-1-second time-to-first-byte from anywhere in the United States, and a site that loads faster on a budget Android phone than a Wix site loads on a brand-new iPhone connected to fiber. That speed difference is not a vanity metric — it's the difference between page 1 and page 3 in Google's search results.
Who actually owns your site when you build on Wix
You don't. This is the part of the Wix terms of service nobody reads until they try to leave. Your domain is yours — Wix bought it for you as part of the bundle, and you can transfer it elsewhere. But your site content, design, and structure live exclusively inside Wix's proprietary editor. There is no "download my site as HTML" button. There is no way to take a Wix site to a different host. When you cancel your Wix subscription, the public URL stops serving and your content goes into a 14-day grace period before being deleted.
We've had three customers in the last 18 months who needed to recreate their Wix site from scratch when they migrated. One had been on Wix for seven years. Seven years of blog posts, customer photos, service-page copy, FAQ content — all of it had to be manually re-typed and re-uploaded because Wix's "export" feature gives you a PDF of your pages and nothing else useful.
ANTHONY. builds your site as plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript checked into a Git repository that we hand you the keys to on day one. If something ever happens to us — we get hit by a bus, we lose interest, we move to running a brewery in Vermont — your site keeps running, your content stays yours, and any competent developer in the world can pick it up and make changes. Vendor lock-in is a hidden cost most owners only discover when they try to leave.
What "local SEO" actually requires (and where Wix falls short)
Ranking in the Google local pack — the three-result box that appears at the top of search results for queries like "roofer near me" or "plumber Rome NY" — is the single highest-ROI marketing channel for a service business. Customers searching that intent are minutes away from calling. Showing up there is worth more than any paid ad campaign.
Getting there requires four things: a clean technical foundation, proper LocalBusiness schema markup, an actively managed Google Business Profile, and citations across local directories. Wix gives you a generic schema block, no GBP automation, and zero help with directory citations. You can buy add-ons that claim to fix this — usually $20-50/month on top of your Wix subscription — but they generate boilerplate that Google's ranking algorithm has learned to discount.
ANTHONY. hand-writes the LocalBusiness schema for your specific business with full address, hours, service area polygons, GeoCoordinates, opening hours specifications, and aggregateRating. We connect your site to your Google Business Profile, set up the citation network across Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Maps, and 20+ local directories, and run pSEO (programmatic SEO) on service-area landing pages that target specific city + service combinations. That's what actually moves the local pack ranking.
The 3-year total cost of ownership
On the surface, Wix looks cheaper. A Wix Premium plan with a custom domain is $17 to $36 per month, depending on the tier. That's $204 to $432 per year. Our build is $999 one-time plus $39.99/year Edge Hosting. After year one, Wix has cost you $204-432 and we've cost you $1,039. Wix wins year one.
But SMBs don't buy websites for one year. They buy them for the duration of the business — usually 5 to 15 years for a local service company. Over 3 years, Wix Premium Unlimited at $36/month is $1,296 plus the $300-500 you'll spend on SEO add-ons that don't work — call it $1,800. Our build over the same 3 years is $999 + ($39.99 × 3) = $1,119.
By month 22, our build has paid for itself relative to Wix. By year 5, you're saving $1,000+ per year compared to staying on Wix. And that's without factoring in the value of a faster site driving more conversions — typically a 15-30% lift in lead volume when you go from a Lighthouse-50 Wix site to a Lighthouse-95 hand-coded one. For a service business closing 20 leads a month, that's thousands of dollars in additional revenue per year.