Local Ladder vs Website Builders: Wix, Squarespace and GoDaddy for UK Trades

Local Ladder and a website builder are not the same purchase. Wix, Squarespace and GoDaddy sell you software and you build the site yourself, from £7.49 to £16 a month on their entry plans. Local Ladder builds and runs the site for you, along with the Google Business Profile, reviews and content behind it, for £199 a month plus VAT.

So the cash comparison is lopsided, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. The real comparison is a tool against a service, and which one you need depends on where your business is.

Where I stand. I run Local Ladder. I earn money when a tradesperson chooses the service over the tool, so read this with that in mind. Every builder price below comes from the builder’s own UK pricing page on 11 October 2026, and every claim about what they can and cannot do links to their own help centre.

The Short Version

If you need a presentable page to send people to, you have the evenings to build it, and you are not yet sure which jobs you want more of, use a builder. Wix’s Light plan at £9 a month or Squarespace’s Basic at £12 a month will do the job, and neither ties you in beyond the year you pay for.

If you are an established trade that wants the website to bring in the work you want more of, and you would rather be on the tools than learning a page editor, that is what I built Local Ladder to do. The pricing page has the whole service on one line.

What Each Option Costs in 2026

Prices from each company’s own UK page on 11 October 2026. The builders display prices for yearly plans paid in full, before VAT.

	Wix	Squarespace	GoDaddy Website Builder	Local Ladder
Free option	Free plan with Wix ads and a wixsite.com address	14-day trial	Free plan	None; 30 days to love the site or the first payment back
Entry plan	Light, £9 a month	Basic, £12 a month (£16 if billed monthly)	Starter, £7.49 a month	£199 a month plus VAT, one plan
Mid plan	Core, £16; Business, £25	Core, £17; Plus, £29	Professional, £17.99	Not applicable
Top plan	Business Elite, £119	Advanced, £79	Ultimate, £74.99	Not applicable
Billing	Yearly in advance for the displayed price	Yearly in advance; monthly costs more	Yearly in advance	Monthly, three month minimum, then 30 days notice
Domain	Free for the first year on paid plans, then renews	Free for the first year on annual plans	Not shown on the plan page	Yours, registered in your name
Who builds it	You	You	You	Me, with a homepage direction in 48 hours and the site live within 14 days
What else is included	Hosting, templates, editing tools	Hosting, templates, editing tools	Hosting, templates, editing tools	Google Business Profile management, reviews, monthly content, 100 UK citations, AI search setup, hosting and care

Year one on a builder’s mid plan is about £200. Year one with Local Ladder is £2,388 plus VAT. That gap is the whole argument, so the rest of this page is about what the £2,200 buys and whether you need it.

The Cost the Pricing Pages Leave Out

The builder’s monthly fee is the smallest cost of a DIY website. The largest is your time.

A first website reliably takes 20 to 40 hours to build, which I covered in my guide to what a plumber website costs. For a tradesperson billing £40 an hour, that is £800 to £1,600 of work not done, spent on a job you have never done before.

Then there is the writing. A site that ranks for “boiler installation [your town]” needs a page for boiler installation, another for emergency call-outs, another for bathrooms, each written properly.

The template gives you the boxes. Filling them is the work, and it is the part most trades never finish.

And there is everything the website sits on top of. Your Google Business Profile wins the map pack, which is where “plumber near me” searches go, 90,500 of them a month in the UK (Google Ads data, September 2026).

No builder plan touches it. Reviews, citations and the monthly page or post that keeps the site moving are all on you as well.

None of that is a criticism of the builders. They sell software, and they are clear about it. It is the list of jobs you are taking on when you choose the tool.

Who Owns the Website

This is the question I would ask before price, and the builders answer it differently.

Wix. Your content belongs to you, and Wix says so. The site does not travel. Wix’s help centre: “The reason you can’t use another host for your Wix site is that the SaaS architecture does not support external hosting.” If your plan expires, “your site will revert to a free Wix URL, and any custom domain connected will be disconnected.”

Squarespace. You can export “certain content” to an .xml file for WordPress: layout pages, one blog, text and image blocks. Style settings, custom CSS, page-specific headers and footers, index pages, video blocks and drafts do not export, and Squarespace warns that content on an expired site “may already be deleted” depending on how long it has lapsed.

GoDaddy. Its UK builder page says “Download your code anytime. You always have control over your code.” I have not tested what that download contains, so treat it as GoDaddy’s claim rather than mine.

Local Ladder. You own the site, the domain and the content from the day it launches, and the domain is registered in your name. If you leave after the three months, the website goes with you. That is the arrangement I would want from anyone building a site for me, and it is the one I wrote into the pricing page.

The pattern across the builders is that the longer you stay, the more you have built that only works there. For a brochure page that is a small risk. For a site carrying five years of rankings, it is the whole business.

What a Trade Website Has to Do

A builder and a built site can both do these five things. The difference is who makes sure they are done.

1. The phone number in the header of every page, as a tappable link. Most trade traffic is on a phone.
2. A page for each service you want more of, written for the searches people type, with a price or a range on it.
3. Fast on a phone on mobile data. Template sites carry a lot of code and uncompressed photos, and a slow page loses the visitor before the first photo appears.
4. Wired into your Google Business Profile, because the map pack takes the near-me searches and the website has to back it up.
5. Proof. Real photos of your own jobs, your accreditations with the numbers, and reviews that update.

I put seven real electrician sites through those tests in my best electrician websites guide. The ones that passed were built and looked after; the ones that failed were mostly left alone after launch, whoever built them.

When a Builder Is the Right Call

I will say this plainly because a lot of comparison pages will not: for some trades a builder is the better buy.

• You are in your first year. You have few reviews, an empty gallery, and you are still finding out which jobs you like. A £9 to £16 a month site is proportionate.
• You need a page to put on the van and the business card, and word of mouth already fills the diary.
• You have the evenings and you enjoy it. Some trades do, and they build decent sites.
• Your job values are small. If an extra job is worth £80, a £199 a month service needs 30 extra jobs a year to pay for itself, and that is a lot to ask of any website.

Whichever builder you choose, finish your Google Business Profile first. It is free, it takes an evening, and it does more for a local trade than the website does.

When Local Ladder Is the Right Call

• You are established, doing £10,000 a month or more, and you know which work you want more of: the extensions rather than the fence panels, the boiler swaps rather than the dripping taps.
• You can see what one extra job is worth. At £2,000 a job, the service pays for itself on two extra jobs a year. The pricing page has a slider that does the sum for your own figures.
• You would rather be on the tools than in a page editor at ten o’clock at night.
• You want the whole system run, because a website on its own was never the thing that brought the work in. The profile, the reviews, the content and the citations are what the site sits on, and that is the part I do every month.

What that looks like for your trade is on the service pages: plumbers, electricians, builders and the rest.

Local Ladder vs Wix, Squarespace and GoDaddy, in One Line Each

• Wix. The biggest of the three, from £9 a month, and the one you can never move. Right for a first site; wrong for a site you plan to keep for a decade.
• Squarespace. Cleaner templates, from £12 a month, with a partial way out to WordPress. The best-looking DIY option, and still DIY.
• GoDaddy. The cheapest entry at £7.49 a month and a claim that you can download your code. Fine for a holding page.
• Local Ladder. Ten times the price, none of the work, and the site is yours. Right for an established trade that wants more of the work it actually wants; wrong for a sole trader in year one.

The Honest Middle Ground

Some trades do both. Start on a builder, finish the Google Business Profile, collect reviews for a year, and move to a built site once there is a business worth building it around.

That is a sound order, and I would rather you did that than paid me before you were ready.

If you are at the second step and want to know where you stand first, I audit trade businesses’ local visibility for free: a grid showing where you rank across your area, who is above you, and the three changes worth making first. No obligation, and you keep it either way. See where you rank and I’ll run yours.