Compare: DIY website builders
Wix or Squarespace, or a care specialist?
Wix and Squarespace are good products. Plenty of care providers have a site on one of them, built by a manager on a quiet evening, and some of those sites work well enough.
The question is not whether a builder can make a nice looking page. It is whether that page does the jobs a care website has to do. This page sets that out fairly, including when a builder is the sensible choice.
Scorecard
A care specialist vs a DIY builder
A dash means it can be done on a builder, if you know to do it and have the time.
Side by side
A tick means it is a strength of that option, a dash means it depends on who does the work, a cross means it is usually missing.
| Care specialist | Wix or Squarespace | |
|---|---|---|
Quickest to get something live A builder can have pages up in an afternoon. A proper care site takes weeks. | ||
Lowest cost in the first year A builder plan costs far less upfront. Count your own hours as well as the subscription. | ||
CQC rating shown properly (Regulation 20A) Both builders can usually hold the official CQC widget as an embed. Someone has to know to add it and where. | ||
Easy to read for older visitors Templates can be made accessible. Text size, contrast and plain wording depend on whoever edits. | ||
Ranks for "care homes in [town]" The platforms handle the technical basics well. The local pages and content that win a busy town are down to you. | ||
Care schema and structured data Builders add general markup. Care service and FAQ markup usually needs custom code. | ||
Enquiry forms that handle care data carefully The forms work well. What you ask, where it goes and what the privacy notice says is on you. | ||
Carer recruitment pages Easy to add a jobs page. Harder to make one that ranks and brings applications. |
What Wix and Squarespace do well
Both are mature, well supported platforms. Hosting, security certificates and software updates are handled for you, so nothing breaks because someone forgot to patch a plugin. The editors are visual, which means a manager can change opening hours or add a photo without calling anyone.
Squarespace is known for polished, consistent templates. Wix gives you a very flexible editor and a large marketplace of add ons. Either will give a new service a presentable home on the web quickly, and for a small cost compared with any agency.
You can hold the account and the domain in your own name, which is more than some agencies offer. That matters, and it is worth checking in any contract, ours included. We have written more on this in who owns your care home website.
Where care websites tend to get stuck
None of the gaps below are faults in the builders. They are things a template cannot know about care, so they fall to whoever builds the site.
Your CQC rating
Regulation 20A requires your current rating to be shown clearly on your website. The official CQC widget keeps it up to date automatically, but it has to be added, in the right places, and checked after each inspection. Our free CQC rating display checker will tell you whether your current site passes.
Older visitors and worried families
Many of the people reading a care website are in their seventies or eighties, or are adult children reading on a phone late at night. Stylish templates often use light grey text, small type and thin fonts. They look lovely in the preview and are hard work for the people you most need to reach. See how we build accessible websites.
Being found in your town
Builders cover the technical basics of search well. What they cannot do is decide which towns, services and questions deserve their own pages, write them, and keep them improving. That is the work that gets a provider onto the first page for care in a competitive town. Our competitor snapshot shows who you are up against.
Enquiries and care data
A family enquiry often includes health details about a relative, which is special category data under UK GDPR. The form itself is easy. Deciding what to ask, who receives it, how quickly someone replies and what your privacy notice says takes care knowledge, not a template.
Recruitment
Most providers need a steady flow of carers as much as they need residents or clients. A single jobs page rarely ranks. See what goes into carer recruitment pages that do.
The real cost is usually your time
The subscription is the smallest part of a DIY site. The larger cost is the hours: building it, writing it, keeping the rating current, adding pages, and learning enough about search to know what to add. For a registered manager, those hours come from somewhere.
The fairest way to compare is cost per enquiry over two or three years, not the price on day one. If a builder site brings the enquiries you need, it is the cheaper option. If it looks fine but the phone does not ring, it is not cheap at all. Our enquiry value calculator helps put a number on what one enquiry is worth to you.
When Wix or Squarespace is the right choice
If you are opening a new service and need something presentable online this month, a builder is a very sensible start. Get your CQC widget on it, a clear phone number, and a simple enquiry form.
If your budget is small, a tidy builder site plus a well kept Google Business Profile will serve you better than stretching for an agency you cannot afford to keep.
If you enjoy doing it yourself and have the time to keep learning, many providers run a perfectly good site this way. Use the checklist below and our free tools, and you will avoid most of the common mistakes.
If you build it yourself, do these
- Add the official CQC widget and check it after every inspection.
- Use large, dark text and test every page on a phone.
- Put your phone number at the top of every page.
- Give each service and each town you serve its own page.
- Write a privacy notice that covers what your enquiry form collects.
- Keep the domain and every login in the organisation’s name.
Run your site through our free website grader to see how it scores.
Common questions
Is Wix or Squarespace bad for SEO?
Can I add the CQC rating widget to Wix or Squarespace?
Can we move from Wix or Squarespace to a new site later?
Should we start on a builder and upgrade later?
Free buyer's guide
Still weighing it up?
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