Compare
A speed test for all of them, and where each one makes sense. Find the best match for your marketing goals.
PageSpeed data: August 2026 crawl
Pick one above to set it beside Itec, or scroll the table sideways for all seven.
| WordPress | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Criterion | DIY & AI buildersWix, Squarespace, Framer, Lovable | Rented websitesBundled into an industry marketing package | WebflowVisual builder on a hosted platform | HeadlessNext.js or Astro front end, with Sanity, Contentful or Storyblok | Full-service agencyBrand, marketing, and site in one contract | Off-the-shelf WordPressDivi, Elementor, marketplace themes | Itec WordPressPerformance-built |
| Typical mobile PageSpeed scoreMedian, out of 100. Same test for every platform | Wix61 Squarespace28 | No platform-wide data | Webflow62 | Next.js52 Astro70 | Depends on the platform they pick, usually one of the other columns | WordPress44 Elementor40 Divi40 | Published per site on our Results page.See the scores |
| Who builds it | You, from a template or a prompt | The vendor's templates, generated from your answers | A designer, usually | A development team | Their team, through an account manager | A freelancer or small agency, from a theme | The person you talk to |
| Design freedom | Within the template, or whatever the model produces | Their templates; changes by request | High, within Webflow's model | Unlimited | Unlimited | Within the theme and builder | Unlimited, performance-first |
| Technical SEO toolingMeta, sitemaps, redirects, schema, canonicals | Built in but limited; usually generic in AI tools | Platform defaults; little control | Built in, decent | Hand-built per site; nothing comes free | Depends on the platform | Plugin ecosystem; good tools exist | Built in and validated per site |
| AccessibilityWCAG 2.1 AA | Partial; templates vary, overlays common, AI output rarely checked | Platform defaults; rarely verified | Possible, rarely done by default | Possible, if specified | Possible, if specified | Rarely; depends on theme and plugins | Built in and tested before launch |
| If you leave | Wix and Squarespace: you take your content and rebuild. AI tools: the code exports; making it maintainable is a developer's job. | The site goes dark. You keep the domain if it's in your name, and whatever content you saved. | Static export only; CMS, forms and interactions stay behind. | The code is yours, spread across several vendor accounts; needs a developer who knows the stack. | Depends on the platform and the contract. Ask before you sign. | The site moves. Needs compatible hosting and your own licenses for the theme and paid plugins. | The site moves, with a documented handoff. Needs compatible hosting and your own licenses for the builder and paid plugins. |
| Ongoing updates and maintenance | Platform updates included, outside your control; AI-built code is yours to fix | Included while you pay | Hosting included; changes by you or your designer | A developer, on a developer's rate, for every change, plus three or four vendor subscriptions | Their retainer | Your problem; plugin and theme updates break things | We make the updates and keep it healthy: monthly plan, edits billed as used |
| CostTo start / later | $Plan upgrades for bookings or e-commerce, paid apps, AI usage tiers, and a rebuild when you outgrow it | $, often freeRent that never ends, add-ons (ads management as a % of spend), sometimes a minimum term, and a rebuild from zero if you leave | $$–$$$ plus a designerPlan tiers by CMS size and traffic, paid add-ons, and the designer for most changes | $$$$–$$$$$Separate bills for the CMS, hosting and usage, plus developer rates for every change | $$$$–$$$$$A retainer that bundles marketing, often with a minimum term | $–$$Annual theme and plugin renewals, hosting upgrades, and repairs when updates break things | $$$, fixed priceMonth-to-month plan at published prices, premium licenses included; edits billed hourly, rates in your proposal |
| Best for | Solo operators, side projects, first sites, hobby sites | Owners who don’t need much control and are fine with a template used across their industry | Brands where design and animation come first, ahead of speed / CRO | Large content operations with in-house developers | Companies that want one vendor for marketing and site | Budget builds with no performance requirement | Companies with a marketing team or agency who need the site to perform and stay performing |
$ under $1k$$ $1–5k$$$ $5–25k$$$$ $25–75k$$$$$ $75k+Build or first-year cost
Mobile PageSpeed: median Lighthouse performance score of sites on each platform, from the HTTP Archive Technology Report, August 2026 crawl (homepages, tested on an emulated mid-range phone over throttled 4G). Itec: Lighthouse mobile scores of the builds on our Results page, tested October 2026. PageSpeed is a controlled lab test; Google ranks on Core Web Vitals field data, which depends on your visitors as much as your site. The lab scores are published per site on Results, and the field data for each site as soon as it has enough traffic to report.
What the numbers mean
Every number in that row comes from the same test: Google's Lighthouse, run by HTTP Archive on the homepage of every site in its crawl, on the same emulated phone and connection. The rules are the same for every platform. What differs is who's doing the building.
Wix and Webflow land around 60 because the platform controls the hosting, the templates, and what you're allowed to add. You can't make a Wix site very slow, but you can't make it very fast either. Squarespace sits at 28, which shows that a closed platform isn't a guarantee either.
Astro has the highest median, 70. It has no visual editor, so most of the people using it are developers who chose it for speed. We also tested an Astro site generated by a templated site-builder service: it scored 10, with a 35 MB page. Same framework, different builder. Developer tools don't guarantee speed on their own either: Next.js, the most common headless front end, has a median of 52.
WordPress sits at 44 because WordPress is used by everyone: over 40% of the web, on every tier of hosting, with any theme and any number of plugins. Sites built on Elementor and Divi, the two most common page builders, have a median of 40.
So the row shows what a typical site on each platform scores, and none of them reaches 70. It tells you nothing about a specific site, which is why our column shows the scores of actual builds instead of a platform average. They're on the Results page, and you can re-run them yourself.
Lab test on an emulated mid-range phone over throttled 4G. Same test for every platform.
Verdicts based on context
Right call when the site is small, the budget is small, and nobody will be marketing it hard, or when you need a prototype or a landing page you'll replace. AI tools are the fastest way to get something on a screen, and Wix holds up reasonably well because the platform limits what you can add. Neither is built for what comes after: measurable performance, accessibility, and a site a second person can maintain. If a quick site is the whole requirement, you don't need us.
Right call if you don’t need much customization and you’re fine with a template or process that’s also used by many others in your industry. The site comes bundled with the marketing services, which is why it costs little or nothing up front. The trade-off is that you’re renting: if you stop paying, the site goes with the subscription, and the value you’ve built stays with the vendor.
Right call when the look and motion of the site matter most. The visual editor and animation tools are excellent, and the hosting is solid. Where it falls short is growth: the CMS and SEO tools are thinner than WordPress’s, so a blog or content program that publishes at volume runs into its limits sooner. Heavy animation also costs speed, and leaving Webflow means rebuilding.
Right call for large content operations with developers on staff. The performance ceiling is as high as it gets. What it isn't good at yet: keeping routine updates cheap (every change goes through a developer), giving you SEO tooling you didn't build yourself, and running on fewer than three vendor subscriptions. The architecture doesn't guarantee speed either; the median Next.js site scores 52 on mobile.
Right call if you want one vendor for strategy, content, campaigns, and the site. You pay for the coordination, and the site is usually built on one of the columns above by whoever they have available. Ask which one.
Right call when the budget is the only constraint and performance isn't a requirement. You get flexibility and a site that can move, at a low build cost. The bill comes later, in renewals, repairs, and scores that drift down as plugins accumulate.
Right call if you already have a marketing team or agency, or you're hiring one, and you need the site to perform, pass accessibility, and stay that way. We don't do strategy or campaigns. We make sure the site can carry them, and we show you the numbers.
Vendor questions
Take these to whoever you're talking to. The answers sort the options faster than any feature list.
Paste each one into Google PageSpeed Insights and open the Mobile tab. If there's a Core Web Vitals section at the top, that's data from real visitors, and it's part of how Google ranks pages. The score below it is a lab test of the same things. Mobile is the one that matters: it's the harder test, and it's the version of your site Google looks at.
Listen for “a working site, with documentation”: what hosting it needs, which licenses to buy, and how it's built. Not “a download of the HTML.” You own it means little if the site can't run anywhere else.
Ask for a name, not a department.
A proprietary platform lasts as long as the company behind it keeps paying for it. Ask how long it's been running, when it was last rebuilt, and what happens to your site if the company is sold or shuts the platform down. “We're constantly improving it” isn't an answer. Ask for the road map, and for what happens at the end of it.
Ask for the monthly cost, renewals, and the rate for changes, in writing. Anything not written down becomes a surprise later.
Migration
Most of our development work is migration. Every move is the same two jobs: your content, carried over and improved on the way, and a rebuild underneath it. In every case, the redirect map is the part that protects your search rankings, and it's the part most migrations skip.
Content stays. Theme and page builder go. Plugins are audited and most are removed. URLs usually stay the same, which makes this the lowest-risk migration in the list.
Upgrade your WPYour domain comes over if it's in your name, and your content if the vendor releases it. Check both before you give notice. Everything else is rebuilt, and every URL gets a redirect.
Get a real websiteContent exports through the CMS; the design can be exported as static code but doesn't survive as a working site. Rebuilt from your Figma files if you have them.
Build for growthContent comes out of the CMS cleanly. Templates are rebuilt. The win is that routine updates stop costing developer rates.
Simplify your stackContent and images come over. Design doesn't; it's rebuilt, usually better. URL structure changes, so every page needs a redirect.
Scale and customizeThe code exports, but usually isn't worth keeping because it's stand-alone. Treat it as the brief for the real build. Little to redirect; these sites rarely have rankings yet.
Make it production-readyNot a migration, but the most common starting point we see: a finished Figma design from your designer or agency that needs to become an optimized site.
Design to WordPressCommon Questions
Almost every vendor says you own your site. In practice that ranges from “you can take a working site to any developer” to “you can download the HTML after your contract ends.” A copy of the HTML is a snapshot, not a website: no content management, no forms, no way to edit it, and nothing to run it on. Rebuilding everything around it costs about as much as starting over.
A practical test: could another developer keep your site running next month without the original vendor? That takes five things being yours, or transferable to you:
Rented sites often give you the domain at most, and sometimes not even that, if the vendor registered it. Closed platforms like Wix and Squarespace give you the domain and, with some effort, your content. A WordPress site, ours included, can give you all five, with practical conditions: it needs compatible hosting, its paid licenses have to be renewed in your name, and whoever takes over needs to know how it’s built. While you’re on a Growth Plan, the licenses are included. If you leave, you get a documented site and a list of what to license.
Two things to check in any contract: whether “ownership” only starts after a minimum term, and whether content the vendor wrote is released to you if you leave.
No. A vendor who says otherwise is describing half of a website.
A site has two layers, and they age differently. The content (pages, posts, offers, SEO) can be kept current every month, and that work compounds. The foundation (the code, the content system, the templates, the design system underneath) ages whether or not anyone touches the content. Publishing a new article every week doesn’t update the code that renders it.
The foundation ages because the standards it was built against keep moving. In 2024 Google replaced one of its three Core Web Vitals with a metric that older sites were never built or tested for. Accessibility standards added new requirements in 2023. AI search engines now read sites in ways nobody designed for five years ago. Browsers, devices, and security requirements move on the same schedule. Monthly maintenance absorbs a lot of that, which is why a maintained site lasts years longer than a neglected one. It can’t absorb all of it.
So the life cycle isn’t “redesign every four years and start from zero,” and it isn’t “improve every month forever.” It’s maintain continuously, and rebuild the foundation when the standards have moved far enough that patching costs more than rebuilding, typically every four to six years for a well-kept site. Done properly, a rebuild resets nothing: the content, URLs, and rankings carry over, because the redirect map is part of the job. Sites that lose rankings in a redesign lose them to a bad migration, not to the rebuild itself.
One more thing to check when a vendor promises a site that “compounds”: who owns the foundation doing the compounding. On a rented platform the code belongs to the vendor and ages on their schedule, and whatever value you’ve built stays with them if you leave.
On average, yes: the median WordPress site scores 44 on mobile PageSpeed. A site built from a marketplace theme with a mass-market page builder on shared hosting will usually land there or below. A site built without those things, on controlled hosting, with a performance budget, usually doesn’t. The difference is the build, not the platform. That’s why we publish per-site scores rather than quoting an average.
If your team is design-led and content changes are mostly visual, Webflow is a reasonable choice, and we’ll say so. We don’t build on it because you can’t leave with a working site, and because the performance advantage it has over average WordPress disappears against a measured WordPress build.
Headless is the right architecture for a content operation with in-house developers. For most companies, every content change becoming a developer ticket is a cost that outweighs the performance ceiling, which a well-built WordPress site reaches anyway.
Good for getting a first version on screen in an afternoon. Not yet good for what comes after: the output is usually inaccessible, unmeasured, thin on structured data, and hard for anyone but the original prompter to maintain. We use AI in our own production, for audits, testing, and first-pass implementation. The difference is that a person finishes and verifies every build. If you’ve already got an AI-built site that’s starting to matter, that’s a migration we do.
We don’t use marketplace themes or the mass-market page builders in the table. The build is a custom, performance-first setup that we maintain across every site we run. That’s as specific as we get publicly; we’ll walk through it on a call.
Most of our development work is migration. Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, rented sites, and off-the-shelf WordPress all move to a measured build, with redirects mapped so nothing is lost in search. The right time to do it is before a marketing push, not after it stalls.
Tell us what you're on now and who handles your marketing. We'll tell you whether a move makes sense, including when it doesn't.
We respond within one business day.