Squarespace or custom: interior designers

For most new or small interior design studios, Squarespace is the right website builder. It costs little, it is hosted for you, and it shows good photographs well. A custom site pays off when the studio's work has outgrown what a template can show.

What is the difference between a website builder and a custom site?

A website builder is a hosted service where you choose a template, edit your pages in the browser, and pay the company a monthly fee for hosting, security and updates. Squarespace, Wix and the website in Houzz Pro all work this way.

A custom site is designed for one studio and built as code. The layout, the order in which the photographs load and the structure of every project page are decided for that studio alone.

In practice the difference is who decides. On a builder, the platform decides how pages are put together and you choose within its options. On a custom site, the studio decides, and someone has to build the site and look after it.

Which option fits which studio?

Find the row that describes your studio today.

What do the builders cost?

List prices in US dollars, checked 12 October 2026. They change often.

• Squarespace starts at $19 a month on a yearly plan, or $25 paid monthly, according to Squarespace's pricing page¹. The Core plan, at $29 a month on a yearly plan, adds code injection and the advanced code block. A developer needs those to add anything the templates do not offer.
• Houzz Pro lists the custom website only in its Teams plan, "starting at $399/mo", on Houzz Pro's pricing page². The Design plan at $99 a month and the Pro plan at $199 a month do not list it.
• Wix has a free plan. You need a paid plan to connect your own domain and remove the Wix branding.

A custom site costs more at the start. With us it is a fixed price agreed before any work begins, followed by a monthly plan after launch.

When should you stay on Squarespace?

Stay when the site already does its job. Open it on your own phone, on mobile data, and check four things:

• The first photograph appears quickly and looks sharp.
• Every project names its place and scope and has a few sentences of text.
• The enquiry form is short and easy to fill in on a phone.
• The people who enquire are the clients you want.

If all four hold, a new platform will not bring you more or better enquiries. Better photographs will do more, and we explain how to photograph and order a project for the web. If the form is the weak point, read about the interior designer website that books consultations.

Squarespace is also the right choice when nobody in the studio has time to look after a website. The platform handles hosting, security and updates, and that is worth a lot to a studio of two or three people.

When is a custom site worth it?

A custom site is worth it when the website has become the weak point in how the studio is seen. Usually the work is already published, clients come from more than one city, and someone who was given your name looks you up and finds a site that shows less than the projects.

Three things are hard to get on a builder and straightforward on a custom build:

• Speed with full-size photography. You decide which picture loads first and how large each image is on each screen.
• Project pages with real structure. Place, year, scope, credits and text that search engines and AI answers can quote. This is the basis of generative engine optimization, which is about being named in answers from ChatGPT and similar tools.
• A layout that belongs to the studio. Its own type, grid and pace, set for its projects instead of for every customer of a template.

A custom build does not make a site fast or findable by itself. Across twenty leading interior studio websites, the median time to the first large picture on a phone was 5.9 seconds, and only one of nineteen showed it in under two. Fifteen of the twenty had no main heading on the home page, the line that tells search engines what a page is about (measured 11 and 12 Oct 2026, PageSpeed, simulated phone).

These studios can afford any platform they want, so the result depends on how carefully the site is built. We explain why photographs slow a page down, and how to fix it, in Core Web Vitals for image-heavy portfolio sites.

What does moving from a builder to a custom site involve?

Most of a move is careful housekeeping. You keep your domain. Every old page address is sent on to its new one, so links in press articles and search results keep working. Each project is rewritten with its place, year and scope, and the photographs are exported again from the originals at full quality.

We build in three sizes: The Page, The Site and The House. After launch, Care covers hosting, updates and a watch on speed, and Growth adds work on search and AI answers every month. The first call takes 10 minutes and is mainly about whether a move makes sense for your studio at all.

If your studio is new, or your site already passes the four checks above, stay on Squarespace. If your work has outgrown the template, our page on web design for interior designers shows how we would build the next site.