AI website builder or custom site?

Speed, low starting cost and no servers to look after. For a one-page presence, an event, a test of whether an idea attracts interest, or a business whose needs are genuinely simple, a builder is often the sensible choice — and spending more would be waste.

Many builders host your site on their platform and nowhere else. Wix states that a site must be hosted and operated on Wix's servers and that its architecture does not support external hosting. Squarespace can export some content as a WordPress file, but not store pages, product blocks, style settings or custom CSS. In practice, leaving either platform means rebuilding the site.

That is acceptable if you go in knowing it. What to avoid is discovering it after the site has become central to the business. Whatever you choose, register the domain in your company's own name and keep your text and images somewhere you control.

Google does not penalise content just because AI helped write it. Its guidance asks that it be accurate and useful, and warns that generating many pages without adding value can breach its spam policy on scaled content abuse. It asks for the same review of titles, descriptions, structured data and image alt text, because AI tools can state wrong things confidently. For shopping data, Google asks that AI-generated product titles and descriptions be identified as such.

A builder's generated copy is a first draft. The parts that win customers — what you actually do, for whom, and what makes you different — still have to come from you.

Start on a builder if it fits today, with the domain in your name and your content kept outside the platform. Revisit the decision when the site starts to limit the business rather than serve it. A rebuild at that point is easier with the content ready and the domain already yours.