Short answer: Wix is fine if you have spare time, a simple offer and no need for the site to win you work. Hire a designer once you're busy, need bookings, a catalogue or integrations, or depend on the site for leads, because a week of your own time learning a builder is rarely cheaper than a fixed-price build.
This isn't really a website-quality argument. Wix, Squarespace and Shopify's own builder are all capable of producing a decent-looking site. The real question is what you're trading for the money you save.
What a builder actually gives you
A drag-and-drop builder trades money for your own time, and it's genuinely fast for a straightforward brochure site if you enjoy the process. You're the designer, the copywriter, the SEO person and the person who fixes it when a template update shifts your layout. For a very small business with time to spare and a simple offering, that trade can make sense.
Where it stops making sense
Three situations flip the maths: you're already busy running the business, the site needs to do something specific (bookings, a catalogue, integrations), or the site is meant to generate leads and every day it's mediocre is a day of enquiries you didn't get. A week of your own time spent learning a builder, at what your time is actually worth, is rarely cheaper than a fixed-price build.
The performance gap nobody mentions in the comparison articles
Builder platforms load a full framework before your page even starts rendering. A hand-coded static page is just the file, nothing to load first. That's the difference between a sub-second load and two-to-four seconds, and Google's Core Web Vitals score you on exactly that gap. It compounds: slower site, lower rank, fewer people who even see the site you spent a week building.
The honest middle ground
If your business is genuinely simple and static, and you have the time and inclination, a builder is a reasonable choice, and there's no shame in it. If you don't have that time, or the site needs to actually perform, hiring gets you a working site this week instead of a half-finished one in a month, built by someone who does this daily rather than for the first time.
See what a hand-coded site actually costs to have someone else build →