For a business whose customers arrive through Google or AI assistants, and which wants to own its website, choose a custom build. For a hobby, a launch page, or a business that needs something online today with no budget, choose Wix.
Wix is a hosted drag-and-drop builder with a free tier and paid plans. It is the fastest route to a live page that exists, and for many small businesses that is the whole requirement. Unconventional Group's custom builds start at $3,000 one-time for a ten-to-fifteen-page site that is designed, written, engineered for search and AI visibility, and handed over outright with a $50-a-year running cost.
Side by side
| Custom build (Unconventional Group) | Wix | |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | Domain, code, hosting and design in your name; every login handed over at launch. | You own your content and domain. The site runs on Wix and cannot be exported as a working site. |
| Up-front cost | From $3,000 one-time (10–15 pages). Two-Day Website from $5,000 with SEO and AEO passes included. | Free tier with Wix branding on a Wix subdomain; paid plans for a custom domain. |
| Running cost | $50 a year (domain and hosting). Optional Basic support $149/month or Growth $349/month. | Subscription for the life of the site, priced by plan; apps and premium features add to it. |
| Who writes the copy | Unconventional Group, from your intake brief and your facts. | You. Wix offers AI-generated draft text; it does not know your business. |
| SEO / AEO structure | One page per query family, structured data with published prices, llms.txt, twelve named AI crawlers allowed, redirect map on migration. | Basic SEO settings, sitemap, redirects, some automatic markup. No llms.txt; limited control of structured data and robots.txt. |
| Mobile performance | Built mobile-first at 375px; LCP, CLS and INP budgeted against a mid-tier Android phone. | Responsive templates; performance varies with the template and installed apps. |
| Speed to live | About two weeks typically; Two-Day Website live by the end of day two when its conditions are met. | Same day. |
| What happens when you leave | Nothing; the site is already yours. | The site goes offline when the plan lapses; free-tier sites stay on the Wix subdomain with Wix ads. |
When Wix is the better choice
Wix wins when speed and zero budget are the constraints and the website is not the sales channel. A new business validating an idea, a community group, a tradesperson whose work is all word of mouth, a one-page landing page for a single event: none of these justify a $3,000 build, and Wix will have them online this afternoon.
It also wins when the owner genuinely enjoys building and maintaining their own site and has the time to do it. A site the owner will actually update beats a site nobody touches after launch.
When a custom build is the better choice
A custom build wins when the site has a job to do in search and in AI answers, and when the business will still be running the site in five years.
The first reason is structural. Search engines and AI assistants reward a site where each page states plainly what it is, where no two pages compete for the same question, where the structured data agrees with the visible page, and where the business's own facts are stated in a file the assistants can read. A builder exposes some of these as settings and none of them as decisions. Deciding that "furnace repair in Spruce Grove" is its own page, writing it so the first sentence answers the question, and making sure the phone number in the markup matches the footer is engineering and writing work. It is the work the $3,000 buys.
The second reason is ownership. When a Wix subscription ends, the site ends. A custom build is delivered as code, with hosting and domain in the client's name, and it keeps running for $50 a year whether or not the client ever speaks to Unconventional Group again. Larger builds move above the floor for page count beyond fifteen, integrations, content volume, and migration with URLs preserved, and the number is fixed in writing before work starts.
On results
Neither a builder nor a custom build guarantees traffic, and no honest vendor will promise it. Unconventional Group's claim is that clients typically see movement in 14 to 90 days, measured against a baseline captured before the work starts. That is a typical-results claim, not a guarantee. What a custom build does guarantee is that the inputs those results depend on are in place, and that you own them.
