Short answer. If you are starting out, will build it yourself and need something live this month, use Wix or Squarespace and stop reading. If you want twenty or more pages targeting individual services and areas, and you intend to keep adding to it, WordPress or a static build is the better foundation. The platform matters far less than whether anybody writes the pages.
We build static sites, so treat this as a comparison with a declared interest. We have tried to be fair to the alternatives, including where they beat us.
The four realistic options
| Wix / Squarespace | WordPress | Static build | Software add-on | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Build it yourself | Yes, comfortably | Possible, rarely well | No | Yes |
| Ongoing maintenance | None, handled for you | Constant | Minimal | None |
| Speed on a phone | Moderate | Depends entirely on the build | Fastest | Moderate |
| Suits 20+ pages | Awkwardly | Yes | Yes | No |
| Security exposure | Low | The main target for automated attacks | Very low | Low |
| Can you take it with you | Content only | Yes | Yes | No |
When Wix or Squarespace is genuinely the right answer
You have been trading for six months. Referrals are filling the diary. You need something that exists, looks tidy on a phone and lets somebody check you are real. You have a weekend and no budget.
In that situation a builder is the correct choice and paying an agency would be a waste of money. It is quick, it will not break, it will not get hacked, and it removes the excuse for not having a site at all. The honest limitation is what happens when you want fifteen pages and want them to rank. That is where these platforms become an argument with the tool rather than an act of writing.
Where WordPress earns its reputation, and where it does not
WordPress runs an enormous share of the web because it can be almost anything. For an electrician wanting many pages, a blog and total control of structure, it is a perfectly good foundation and always will be.
The problem is not the software, it is the neglect. A typical trades WordPress site carries a purchased theme and a dozen plugins, each of which is a separate piece of software written by someone else that needs updating. Leave it for a year and you have an out of date installation on the most heavily probed platform on the internet. Most of the "my website got hacked" stories in the trade start here, and they end with a site the owner had forgotten they were responsible for.
If you go this route, budget for maintenance from day one. An unmaintained WordPress site is more expensive than a maintained one, just later and less predictably.
Static sites, and the honest tradeoff
A static site is built once into plain files and served directly. There is no database, no admin login on the public internet and no weekly plugin updates, which removes almost the entire attack surface and most of the maintenance. It is also the fastest way to serve a page on a phone, which matters when a good share of electrical enquiries start with somebody standing in a dark hallway.
The tradeoff is real and worth stating. You cannot log in and drag a new section around. Structural changes go through whoever builds it. If you want to write your own blog posts weekly and redesign pages on a whim, that is a genuine argument for WordPress instead.
The add-on your software sells you
Several job management platforms sell a website for a small monthly fee. Tradify's Instant Website is £10 a month, for example. These do exactly what they promise: they take your details and put them on a template.
As a placeholder that is fine. As a way of being found it is not, because it cannot carry a page per service, a page per area, or the structure that makes either of those work. And you cannot take it with you.
The question that actually decides it
Not which platform. Who is going to write the pages. A twenty-page site on any platform beats a five-page site on the best platform, and the reason most electricians end up with five pages is that nobody was ever going to write the other fifteen.
Answer that first. If the answer is you, pick the easiest tool and start. If the answer is nobody, that is the thing to buy, and the platform becomes a detail.