Wix, WordPress, or hire someone? Run the five-year numbers, not just year one
Wix costs a few hundred NT a month; hiring someone costs tens of thousands. The comparison looks obvious — but it leaves out three costs and one risk. This piece lays out the full five-year total, including the one everyone forgets: your own time.
Most people make this decision the same way: look up what Wix costs per month, glance at a design studio's quote, and figure the answer is obvious.
For year one, it is. But a website isn't a one-year purchase — and the year-one math leaves out three costs.
The short version:All three options are right for someone. None of them is the stupid choice. But the cost of choosing wrong isn't spending more money — it's being stuck two years from now somewhere you can't move out of.
What the three paths actually are
DIY platforms (Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and the like)
You sign up, pick a template, drag things into place, and go live. Hosting, certificates, backups and updates are the platform's problem, not yours.
WordPress
An open-source website system that runs a very large share of the world's websites. You (or someone you hire) rent the hosting, install it, pick a theme, add plugins. Enormously flexible, capable of a lot.
Hiring a custom build
You hand over the requirements and get back a website built for you.
The five-year total, with the three overlooked costs added back
Cost one: your own time
This is the biggest one, and it never shows up on any comparison chart.
Building a decent website yourself on Wix — not just dropping a template in place, but getting the copy right, the photos processed, the mobile version checked, every page reading properly — takes most people twenty to forty hours, spread across several weekends, each one starting with remembering where you left off.
If your time has value (you're running a shop, taking client work, doing sales), converting those hours into money usually costs more than the price difference you saved.
The flip side: if you're at the stage where you have more time than money — just started out, no orders coming in yet — then doing it yourself is the right call. You're paying with what you're least short of right now.
Cost two: the fees that come back every year
Platform subscriptions keep running. They usually start cheap, but the moment you want your own domain, want the platform's ads gone, want one more feature, the plan jumps a tier. Multiply by five years and the number is bigger than most people expect.
On the WordPress side it's hosting, plus plugins — many of the useful ones are annual subscriptions, so five plugins means five bills a year.
Cost three: maintenance, in time or money
This one matters most with WordPress. The core, the theme and every plugin get updates, and updates sometimes fight each other — one day you open your site and the layout is broken. Not updating is worse: most compromised WordPress sites got there through a plugin that went too long without an update.
Either you look after this yourself or you pay someone to. It doesn't go away on its own.
The risk nobody counts: can you leave?
The question worth asking more than the money one —two years from now, if you want to switch, can you take it with you?
DIY platforms: the content is yours, but the layout, the features and the whole back end belong to the platform. Switching platforms means rebuilding, and your accumulated SEO (the trust Google has built up in your address) starts over too.
WordPress: portable. That's its biggest advantage — the data and files are in your hands.
Hiring a custom build:it depends what the contract says. This is the one question to ask before signing — whose name is the domain registered under, and do you get the source code. Some agencies finish the site and it lives inside their system; you paid for it but you can't take it away.
Our own contract says it plainly: the domain is registered in the client's name, and the source code is delivered to the client. Not because we're unusually generous, but becauseif you can leave at any time, we have to be good every time.
So which should you choose
Choose a DIY platform if: you're validating a business that isn't proven yet, the budget is genuinely tight, you'll be editing content often yourself, and you can live with a layout that looks a bit like everyone else's. For a personal brand or small studio just starting out, this is a perfectly sensible place to begin.
Choose WordPress if: you need a lot of articles, or one specific plugin happens to solve your problem, and you have someone (yourself or an employee) willing to spend time on it regularly. Its flexibility is paid for with ongoing maintenance duty.
Hire someone if: this website is the face of your business, it needs to last for years, your time is better spent on your actual work, or you need something the platforms can't do — connecting to a LINE Official Account, hooking into your own booking flow, or caring about load speed and being found in search.
A middle option: static websites
There's a fourth path that gets talked about less.
A static website means the pages are generated before delivery — when a visitor arrives, the files are sent straight over, with no database lookup and no computation on the spot.
What that means in practice —it loads fast, there's almost nothing to break into (no admin login page, no plugins), hosting costs are close to zero, and there's no monthly pile of updates to install.
The trade-off is that it doesn't suit membership systems or shopping carts. But if what you want is a company website that explains things clearly, gets found, loads fast and needs no attention for five years, this approach has the lowest long-term total cost of the three.
This is what we build. Pricing starts at NT$9,000, with maintenance plans at NT$1,000–3,000 per month (monitoring, backups, certificate renewals, small edits, a monthly report) — or you can not renew at all. The site is yours; leave it alone and it keeps running.
If you're on Wix or WordPress now and want to move over, migration including 301 redirects (in plain terms: old addresses forward automatically to the new ones, so the trust Google built up doesn't reset to zero) is part of the standard process.
To run your own numbers,the services pagehas the full three-tier breakdown and timelines — or write to us: [email protected].