Most people who come to me have already decided what they want their website built in. They’ve asked around, had a recommendation from a friend, colleague, or family member, or used something before on another project. What they often can’t tell you is why.
Because I market myself as a WordPress developer, most people come to me for WordPress already. Others are referrals, past clients, or friends of friends who just know I’m someone they can call. Sometimes they’ve got an existing Squarespace or Wix site that’s giving them grief. Sometimes they’ve seen Wix or Squarespace advertised and assumed that’s what they should ask for.
Either way, the platform usually gets picked before the reasons are clear. So here’s the why: why I build on open platforms like WordPress and Astro, and not on closed ones like Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify.
The short version
There are two kinds of website platform: open and closed, or owned and rented.
With an open platform like WordPress or Astro, you own the website. You have the full code, you can change anything, and you can take it anywhere.
With a closed platform like Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify, you’re renting. The site lives on their system, you can only change what they let you change, and you can’t take it with you if you leave.
For a small site that isn’t focused on growth, renting is fine. For a business website you want to build on for years, owning is usually the better deal. That’s the whole argument in a sentence.
If that’s enough for you, great. If you want to know why owning matters in practice, keep reading.
Rent versus own
A closed platform is like renting a flat where you’re not allowed to renovate or make major changes. It’s comfortable, someone else handles the maintenance, and for a while that’s lovely.
Then you want to knock two rooms together or do a major refurb, and you can’t. Not because it’s hard, but because it isn’t your flat. You’re limited to what the landlord allows.
An open platform is your own place. If you want to change something you can, or you can pay someone like me to do it for you. Nothing is off limits because you don’t need anyone’s permission.
But what about WordPress’s own ecosystem?
It’s a fair point. WordPress has its own trends, and its own vendor lock-in through paid plugins and subscriptions. It would be hypocritical of me not to address that.
Page builders and paid plugins
Page builders are the obvious example. Plugins like Divi and Beaver Builder have been around for a while, Elementor is the most popular one now, and a lot of developers have started talking about Bricks as their favourite. Each one turns up with a slick interface, builds a following, and becomes the thing everyone uses. Build your site in one and it’s tied to that tool, and you’re at the whim of its developers. You could say the same about WordPress core itself: it’s free, but you’re still working the way its developers think is right.
And there are real downsides. If you build a page in Elementor, you can’t move it to another builder, or to the standard editor, without redoing it, unless someone writes a tool to convert it. That’s a genuine form of lock-in, inside WordPress.
So what’s the difference? You still have the full source code, and the whole site is yours, which means you always have a choice.
Take a paid plugin. You’re usually buying the files plus a licence for that version, with six to twelve months of support. Once you have the files, you can keep running that version for as long as you like. If the company behind it folds, and a few page builders have, or it changes its business model, your site carries on, because you hold the files. On a closed platform they can switch a feature off and remove it from their systems, and you’re left with nothing, because you never had the files in the first place.
I’m not a fan of page builders myself, mostly because there’s no standard. I’m not keen on the default WordPress editor, Gutenberg, either, even though it’s the official way to build sites now. But because WordPress is open, nothing is forced on you. There’s always more than one way to do it.
My own preference is Advanced Custom Fields with the Roots Sage theme, because it suits how I like to build and how my clients like to edit. Someone else will choose differently, and that’s the point: the choice is yours.
On a rented platform you don’t get that choice. If they rebuild the editor, which happens more often than you’d think, and your site no longer works the way it did, or you lose a feature you relied on, you’re stuck with no other option.
You can always build it yourself
Those paid plugins I mentioned often bundle in a lot of extra features you’ll never use, which only adds weight to your site. But you’re never forced to use them. If a plugin does ten things and you only need one, you, or someone like me, can build just that one thing instead. There’s no rule that says you have to use the official plugin for something, or any plugin at all.
On a closed platform you don’t get that option. A lot of what you need on Shopify, for example, comes as paid apps from their App Store, often for things you could build yourself, except the platform is locked down enough to make that awkward. Even proper custom work happens on their terms, in their own templating language, Liquid, or their React framework, Hydrogen, on their hosting. Build an app that asks for certain permissions and it goes through Shopify’s review before it’s allowed near a store.
So on both sides the convenient option usually costs money. The difference is whether you’re allowed to go around it. On an open platform you always are, because you’re not tied to whether the platform has the feature, sells it, or will let you build your own.
You’re building on rented ground
This is the part that worries me most for a business.
Think about phone apps. A good mobile-friendly website can do most of what an app does, short of the deep native features. But the moment you’re in the App Store, you’re on Apple’s platform. You pay an annual fee just to publish, your app can be rejected, and if Apple decides to build something similar, yours can be made redundant overnight.
The same logic applies to any platform you build your business on. Shopify, Vinted, a marketplace, a social network: if they decide they don’t want your business any more, they can find a reason, and you’re stuck. You don’t own the relationship with your customers, they do.
When your site is yours, that off switch isn’t in someone else’s hands.
AI is widening the gap
This one is new, and it matters more every month.
The most useful AI tools now can read and change real code directly. Point them at a WordPress or Astro site and they can genuinely help build, fix, and improve it, because the code is open and they can see all of it.
You can already see it happening. Search Webflow on LinkedIn at the moment and a lot of what you’ll find is people moving to more open platforms. The closed tools will catch up and add their own AI features eventually, but there’s a ceiling to how far that can go.
Here’s why. Even if a closed platform gives you an AI interface, through their documentation, an , or an server, it can only ever reach the parts they choose to expose. They’re never going to hand over the full source code. So whatever they offer, you’re working with a slice of the system, and you’re on the back foot.
An open platform has no such ceiling. You can download the WordPress core, run it on your own server, and let an AI work across every line of it. Add a third-party plugin and it can read all of that too. Astro is the same. You’re not boxed in by the tools the platform decided to give you, so there’s almost nothing you can’t change or build.
So as automation gets more capable, open sites get faster and cheaper to improve, and closed sites stay capped at whatever the platform allows. That gap is only going to grow.
Being honest about the limits
I’m not going to pretend open platforms make you completely independent. They don’t.
You still rely on payment providers
If you sell online with WooCommerce, WordPress isn’t touching the card payments. That goes through Stripe, Paddle, or another gateway, and they can freeze or close an account too. Card processing isn’t something a small business can realistically run itself, so that dependency is hard to avoid.
So it’s not all or nothing. It would be good to have more open options for things like payments, but we work with what exists. What you can control is where your site and your content live, and that is worth holding onto.
I rent hosting too
A WordPress site runs on a server, and you can own that server outright if you want, right down to a machine you’ve bought and sat in your own office. You can’t do that with Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify at all.
I’ll be straight though: for most of the sites I manage, I rent the hosting. Running a server reliably is a different job from building a website. It’s a DevOps skillset, it isn’t where my strengths are, and it isn’t what I enjoy. I’d rather leave server maintenance and tuning to people who do it full time and focus on the website itself, which is the part I’m good at. Even the servers I do run are a , which is still someone else’s computer when you get down to it.
The difference is that renting hosting doesn’t lock you in. If you’re on a care plan, your database and files are backed up off-site with full copies. If a host ever went down or let us down, we update the , move the files to another provider, and you’re back up. The host is a managed service, not a lock-in, and switching is a few clicks and a couple of config changes, not a rebuild.
That’s the real difference. Leaving a closed platform means rebuilding from scratch. Moving a WordPress site between hosts is routine, and I keep that in mind. If a provider ever stops living up to what I expect, I can move a site without any trouble.
So, which should you choose?
Honestly, it depends on what you need the site to do.
When renting is the right call
I’m not against renting. If an off-the-shelf platform does what you need, that’s a good outcome, and honestly you probably don’t need a developer like me. With a bit of time and patience you could set up a Shopify or Squarespace site yourself and use the tools they give you.
Shopify in particular makes it genuinely easy for a non-technical owner to set up a shop. If you’re selling fairly standard products and don’t need anything unusual, it’s hard to beat: a monthly fee, no website to maintain, and the only thing you really manage is the shop itself.
These platforms do a great job for maybe 80% of the people who use them. That’s exactly why they’re so popular, and plenty of people are right to use them.
Who owning is for
The other 20% hit a wall. The tool won’t do the thing you actually need, or it’s locked behind a higher plan, or you slowly realise you’re shaping your business around the software instead of the other way round. If you’ve already looked at Shopify or Squarespace and felt they’re not quite enough for what you’ve got in mind, that feeling is the signal.
That’s the point where owning is worth it. You get far more flexibility, with more responsibility to match. WordPress asks more of you: good managed hosting usually costs a bit more, and you’re closer to the engine even with someone like me looking after it.
It’s also the work I most want to do. I’d rather build for someone who wants control and direction, who has a growth mindset, and who’s creating something that’s genuinely theirs and can scale with the business, than drop another shop into a template.
Closed platforms make you a tenant. Open platforms make you the landlord. So if you’ve been quoted a Wix, Squarespace, or Shopify site, you’re welcome to go that way, and sometimes it’s exactly right. But if it’s a business you want to grow and shape on your own terms, it’s worth knowing what you’re giving up before you sign up.
Happy to talk it through if you’re weighing it up. No sales pitch, just an honest view of the trade-offs.