Squarespace, Wix, or custom: which is right for a salon?

I build custom sites for a living, so treat this accordingly. But I would rather you pick the right thing than the thing I sell. Sometimes that is Squarespace.

Squarespace

$19–$29 a month on the plans a salon would use (Basic $19, Core $29, billed annually). Monthly billing costs more. The strongest option if you are building it yourself. Templates are genuinely well designed, it is hard to make something ugly, and it handles images well. That matters when your business is visual.

Where it falls short: the templates are widely used, so your site will resemble other salons. Customising beyond the template gets frustrating fast. Pages tend to be heavier than a hand-built site, which shows on cell data.

Pick it if you have a weekend, decent photos, and needs that fit a template.

Wix

$17–$39 a month for the relevant plans (Light $17, Core $29, Business $39, all billed annually and paid in full; there is a $159 Elite tier no salon needs). More flexible than Squarespace. You can drag anything anywhere. That freedom is also the problem: it is very easy to build something that looks fine on your laptop and falls apart on a phone.

Where it falls short: performance. Wix sites carry a lot of overhead, and mobile speed is where salon sites are won or lost.

Pick it if you want maximum control and are willing to check every screen size yourself.

Showit

$22 a month billed annually ($259/year), or $39 a month ($470/year) with the WordPress blog add-on, plus whatever you pay for a template. Popular with photographers and beauty brands because the designs are gorgeous and you place things freely.

Where it falls short: you design desktop and mobile separately, which is twice the work and the step people skip. It is also the least beginner-friendly of the three.

WordPress

Hosting from $10 a month, plus plugins and a theme. Enormously powerful and genuinely overkill for a salon. Page builders like Elementor make it approachable and also make it slow: a typical Elementor page loads several megabytes of code before a single photo appears.

The real cost is maintenance. Plugins need updating, things break, and security is your problem.

Custom-built

$999–$5,000 depending on who builds it. Written for your business specifically. No template overhead, so it loads fast, and it is designed around how your clients actually book.

Where it falls short: more up front than a builder, and you cannot redesign the whole thing yourself at midnight. If you love tinkering, that is a real downside.

What actually matters when you choose?

• Mobile speed. Most clients arrive on a phone, often on cell data. This is where builders lose most.
• Booking integration. All of them can link to Vagaro, Square or GlossGenius. Doing it so it does not feel bolted on is the difference.
• Image quality. Your work is the product. Squarespace is good here; heavier builders compress badly.
• Who fixes it. With a builder, you. Worth pricing your own hours honestly.

So which should a salon pick?

Building it yourself and want the least pain: Squarespace. You will have something decent in a weekend.

Your time is worth more than the price difference, or you want it to actually be fast: custom. That is what I do, and it is $999 flat with a year of hosting included.

Already on WordPress and it feels slow: that is not your imagination, and it is usually the page builder rather than WordPress itself.