Guide · Platforms
Wix, Squarespace,
WordPress or custom.
We detected the platform behind every website we could open across the GTA. 11,606 of 34,180 are WordPress, 1,477 are on free or entry-level builders, and 69 are still served by software that has been discontinued for years. Here is how to choose, and when the choice barely matters.
Published 2026-09-08 · Formory Group
What the GTA actually runs.
WordPress dominates at 34% of identified sites, and it dominates for a mundane reason: it is what agencies build on, so it is what businesses inherit. Wix and Squarespace follow, mostly among businesses that built the site themselves. The long tail includes 69 sites running software abandoned years ago — the digital equivalent of a shop sign that has not been repainted since 2009.
The honest case for each.
Wix and Squarespace are genuinely good if you are going to maintain the site yourself and your needs are simple. The editor is usable by a non-technical owner, hosting is included, and nothing will break because a plugin updated. The ceiling is real but a lot of businesses never reach it.
WordPress makes sense when you need something specific that a builder cannot do, or when you have someone maintaining it. Unmaintained, it is the worst option on this list: an abandoned WordPress install is a security problem as well as a stale page, and most of the 3,000 out-of-date sites we found are on it.
Custom or static — what we build — makes sense when speed and reliability matter and the content changes through a person rather than an admin panel. There is nothing to hack and nothing to update. The trade is that you cannot restructure the site yourself at midnight, which for most owners is not a trade at all.
The cost nobody quotes.
Compare over three years, not at purchase. A builder at $30 a month is $1,080 over three years with no build cost. A WordPress site at $2,000 plus $50 a month hosting and maintenance is $3,800. A custom site plus care runs similar. What decides it is not the sticker price but whether anyone is looking after the thing — the 3,000 stale sites in our data were all cheaper at purchase than they turned out to be.
When the platform genuinely does not matter.
If the site is one page saying what you do, where you work and how to reach you, it can be built on anything and will perform the same. Platform arguments are mostly a proxy for a different question: who is going to change this page when your prices change? Answer that first and the platform usually picks itself.
Questions
The usual questions.
Is WordPress bad for SEO?
No. It is neutral. A well-built WordPress site and a well-built static site rank the same. Where WordPress loses is speed under load and the accumulation of plugins nobody removed.
Can I move off Wix later?
You can rebuild elsewhere, but you cannot export the site itself — the content comes across by hand. That is worth knowing at the start rather than at the point of leaving.
What do you build on?
Static pages served from a CDN, with the content generated from structured sources. It is why our pages load in well under a second and why there is no admin panel to compromise.
Now check your own
You have read the numbers.
Where does your site stand?
Type your address and we will open your site the way a visitor would, then tell you plainly what is wrong with it — including when the answer is nothing. Ten seconds, no email, nothing stored.
Think yours needs
rebuilding?
Send us the address and what you do. We will look at what is there and tell you whether a rebuild is worth the money, or whether the problem is somewhere else entirely.