Section 1
Start with the job, not the tool
Most platform decisions are made backwards. An operator sees a beautiful template, a friend's recommendation, or a low monthly price, and reverse-engineers a justification. Six months later the site cannot connect to the CRM, the blog is painful to update, and the only person who can edit anything is a freelancer who has stopped replying. The first-principles question is not which platform is best. It is what job the website does in your business. For a service business, that job is almost always the same: convert attention into booked calls, and publish content that earns that attention. Every platform should be scored against that job, not against feature checklists. A platform that makes publishing slow or integration brittle is failing at the job no matter how good the templates look. For a deeper look at this, see [When to Rebrand: A Decision Framework for Service Business Owners](/blog/when-to-rebrand-service-business).
Section 2
The five questions that decide the platform
Before comparing tools, answer these five questions in writing. First, ownership: will you control the domain, hosting, and content if your designer disappears tomorrow? Second, content volume: are you publishing two pages a year or two articles a week? Third, integrations: which forms, booking tools, and CRM does the site need to talk to? Fourth, maintenance: do you have anyone who can apply updates, or do you need a managed platform? Fifth, total cost: what does the site cost over three years including plugins, hosting, and the people who touch it? W3Techs (2026) reports WordPress alone powers roughly 42% of all websites, but popularity is not fit. The table below maps common service-business situations to platform types.
Section 3
Total cost of ownership: the number nobody quotes you
The subscription price is the smallest number in the equation. A $23-per-month Webflow plan or a $16 Squarespace plan tells you almost nothing about what the site costs to run. The real total includes design and build, premium plugins or apps, hosting upgrades as traffic grows, the hours your team spends fighting the editor, and the cost of every redesign triggered by outgrowing the platform. The HTTP Archive's 2024 Web Almanac found 51% of websites now run on a CMS, and the pattern across that data is consistent: platforms get cheap by deferring costs to later. A useful exercise is pricing year three, not month one. If you cannot sketch what the site costs in year three, including one platform migration, you have not finished the evaluation. If you are turning this into practice, [How to Choose a CRM for a Small Service Team (Without Overbuying)](/blog/crm-selection-small-service-teams) maps the adjacent system.
Section 4
Where operators get burned: ownership and lock-in
The most expensive platform mistakes are not technical, they are contractual. Operators routinely discover the agency registered the domain in its own name, the hosting account belongs to a freelancer, or the page builder exports nothing usable. Proprietary builders like Wix and Squarespace do not let you take the site with you; you can leave, but you start over. That is an acceptable trade if you go in with open eyes and a small site. It is a disaster if your business depends on 200 ranking pages. Before signing anything, confirm in writing that the domain registrar account, hosting account, analytics property, and CMS admin are owned by your business. This is the standard we enforce in every ConvertOS build at BGA: the client owns every asset from day one.