Here's the version of this comparison nobody selling you something will give you: Wix is a good product, plenty of web designers do excellent work, and either one can end in a website that wins you jobs. The question isn't which option is secretly terrible. It's what each one actually costs — in dollars and in your own time — and who ends up responsible for the part that matters, which is turning a visitor into an estimate request.
Take a siding contractor as the test case, because siding shows the stakes clearly. A whole-house residing job is one of the biggest curb-appeal purchases a homeowner ever makes, and they research it for months — vinyl versus fiber cement, repair versus full wrap, contractor versus contractor — before anyone gets a call. Whatever you choose has to hold up under that kind of quiet vetting.
What you actually get with Wix
Wix's paid plans run roughly $20 to $40 a month depending on tier, and for that you get genuinely capable software: templates, hosting, a drag-and-drop editor, forms. The tooling is not the problem.
The problem is what the plan doesn't include, which is everything that makes a contractor site work. Somebody has to write a page for vinyl and a separate one for fiber cement, because a homeowner three months into research is searching for the material, not for "siding company." Somebody has to organize your project photos into before-and-afters a buyer can browse by house style and color. Somebody has to decide what the quote form asks, where financing gets mentioned, and what a visitor sees first on a phone.
On Wix, that somebody is you. And the arithmetic most owners discover is that the subscription was never the real price — the real price is the string of Saturdays it takes to do this properly, billed at whatever your weekend is worth, competing against the estimates you should be writing. That's why so many DIY contractor sites are a homepage, a phone number, and a gallery labeled "coming soon." Not because the owner couldn't finish it. Because finishing it was a second job.
If you're proud of the site after honestly finishing that work, you did fine. Most owners never get there, and a half-finished site quietly costs jobs every week it sits.
What you actually get with a web designer
Hiring it out fixes the time problem and introduces two new ones: the invoice and the aftermath.
The invoice first. Freelancers commonly land between $2,000 and $5,000; agencies typically quote $5,000 to $15,000 for a contractor site. Contractors tend to get priced against their job values — the designer knows what one siding job is worth, and the quote reflects it. Sometimes the work justifies it. A good designer who's built for contractors before will produce something you couldn't have made yourself.
The aftermath is the part the proposal glosses over. A designed site is delivered once. Your business doesn't hold still: crews change, you add a service, you get thirty new project photos, you want a storm-damage page up the week hail hits. Every one of those is now an hourly change request or an email into a queue. Two years later, the beautiful custom site is describing the business you had at launch, and updating it costs enough that you keep putting it off. There's also a quieter failure mode worth asking any designer about directly: who owns the hosting, the domain, and the files if you part ways.
None of this means don't hire a designer. It means the sticker price is the entry fee, not the total.
The third option both comparisons leave out
The Wix-vs-designer framing assumes those are the only two shapes: software you operate, or a project you commission. There's a third — a subscription where the finished result is what you're paying for, month to month.
That's the model we run. Our siding websites come built for the long research cycle that trade actually has — material pages, whole-house galleries, financing displayed where a five-figure buyer needs it, a storm-damage section for the insurance work — written and assembled for you, live in 7 days, $250 a month with no upfront build fee. Changes are included, so the site keeps matching the business instead of freezing at launch. You can see exactly how it works, and if you want the full cost math on all three paths side by side, we've written the numbers up honestly in our contractor website cost breakdown.
The fair caveat, since this whole post is an honesty exercise: a subscription only makes sense if you'd rather pay a flat monthly amount than either do the work or fund a big build. Owners who genuinely enjoy tinkering with their own site exist, and Wix serves them well.
How to decide in one evening
Skip the feature charts. Answer three questions:
Where will the work come from? Not the software — the pages, the words, the photo curation, the follow-through. If the answer is "me, eventually," be honest about your track record with "eventually."
What happens in year two? A website is not a purchase, it's an ongoing claim that your business is current and professional. Whichever option you pick, name the person who updates it and what each update costs.
What does it need to produce? If the site just needs to exist so you don't look fake, the cheapest path that gets it finished wins. If it needs to produce estimate requests from homeowners mid-research, judge every option by whether someone accountable is building toward that — and what it costs you per month, in dollars or in weekends, to keep it true.
Wix sells you the tools. A designer sells you a build. Make whoever you pick prove they're solving the part that pays you back.